Rational Philosophy

Britney Spears accepts the award for Best Pop Video for “Piece of Me” at the MTV Video Music Awards. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

On Sunday evening, my 15-year old daughter, typically guileless, made a bid to watch MTV’s video music awards. “No way,” was the answer, “You have school tomorrow.” (She’s in tenth grade, and supposed to be making a strong start in a new school.) “But we watched it last year,” she replied, “Remember we saw Britney Spears…”

This sent me to the computer because I knew I’d blogged about Britney’s woeful performance at last year’s VMAs. With the help of the blog and my wife’s clam-like mind we recalled that we’d TiVo’d Britney’s debacle instead of watching it live. All of which is to say that my daughter went to bed on time and that this is a blog post about comebacks.

Charles Austin - Atlanta Olympic Gold

I’m back from the time vortex of school vacation. It feels strange to be blogging again. Having been out of the mix for a few weeks, I’m afraid that I’ve lost something or that some essential capacity has become stunted. The “me” of then seems more capable than the “me” of now. I feel a little bit like I imagine Charles Austin feels. Austin won the gold medal for the high jump at the Atlanta Olympics. When we couldn’t watch the VMAs last night (alas, our TiVo attempt this year resulted in two and a half hours of silent gray screen; don’t ask me how that happened) we watched a TiVo’d Austin trying to break the world high jump record for a 40-year old on the David Letterman show. We were all rooting for him as his shirt tipped the bar off its stays. “Tuck your shirt in!” I shouted at the screen.

Britney apparently made a successful return to popstardom on Sunday night, winning three awards. And while I cared momentarily about Austin’s high jump attempt, the objective distance I have about Britney’s success or failure as a pop star (I could care less) allows me to burrow in to the philosophical aspects of success and redemption.

Put simply, in and of itself it ultimately doesn’t matter whether we succeed or fail, whether we make a successful comeback or not. If Austin had broken the high jump record for a 40-year old, someone eventually would have outjumped him, or not. Austin will eventually pass on and those who know him will pass on. Britney will stop making music videos. And this blog post will get archived off to tape, never to be read again.

Ambitions, successes, failures, comebacks are all idealized narratives that we create or consume to accompany events that fill time. They exist in conceptual space, but not as real objects. The most obvious example of a counter-narrative is this: If someone prevails in a competition, others must lose. Letterman asked Austin about his three Olympic bids — gold in one, and what about the other two? “Not so good.” Not so good for Austin, but great for the guys who won golds in those competitions, and not so good for the other competitors the time Austin won.

This perspective can have a very freeing impact. Today I can sit down and write what I want to write because ultimately it won’t matter what I write. And even today right now it doesn’t matter.

Socrates - The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

But inner and outer narratives often keep us going. More so it seems in modern life we care about the narrative of life and experience life less in itself and more in the abstract. Which brings us back to Socrates, and, for once, it brings me strangely into apparent opposition with Socrates, who said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

However, onto this I would like to paste the narrative that Socrates had in mind the kind of reflection that brings us deeper into reality rather than further from it…

Billionaires stubbing out smoking, brains logging on to solve problems, and mirrors as healing devices.

“I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself.”

- Terence

Roman comic dramatist (185 BC - 159 BC)

Businessman, philanthropist, and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been joined by Bill and Melinda Gates in his $500M anti-smoking campaign fund. This may not seem like a whole lot of money when compared to the billions that cigarette companies make selling cigarettes around the world, but it dwarfs the WHO estimate of $20M per year currently being spent to combat smoking in low to middle income countries. The fund is expected to save hundreds of millions of lives over the next couple of generations. Yet another reason to shake our heads over the spending priorities of our elected administration (such as the decision to airlift $12B cash into Iraq without keeping track of where it all went…)

Pinky Dinky Doo

Not yet a potential target of big tobacco, my four-year old son fortunately wouldn’t know the Marlboro man if he rode in on his horse. One of my son’s favorite shows of the moment is Noggin’s Pinky Dinky Doo (parents take note — no ads on Noggin!!) Pinky, the show’s heroine, engages her little brother, Tyler, with stories related to a problem he’s encountering. At some point in every story, Pinky’s fictional self “thinks big” in order to solve a problem. Thinking big means thinking laterally, or outside the box. Very entertaining. And now I read that there’s a whole network of Pinkies (not to be confused with pinkoes) who can sign up to compete to solve problems and win cash prizes. “InnoCentive,” reports the Times, has “solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.” Cool.

And all of this relates to mirrors how? I’m getting there.

It’s a little all over the place and fluffy, but Natalie Angiers piece on mirrors has some interesting moments. (I scurried off to research her claims about mirror images, thinking she’d got something wrong, but for the moment I have to admit she’s right and I’m feeling a little chagrined.) Here are the pertinent nuggets:

1. Scientists have been “applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.” Wow!

2. “Subjects … in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. … people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion. ‘When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,’ Dr. Bodenhausen said. ‘A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.’ Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection.”

So if I imagine for a moment that I’m Pinky Dinky Doo and that Mike Bloomberg is offering a prize for the person who can come up with a device that would help people quit smoking, I’d say that he should use some of the fund to distribute hand mirrors to smokers or their loved ones so that they can watch themselves puffing away day and night and hacking up gunk first thing in the morning. Just an idea.

(I would say that he should send a big old mirror to George Bush, but the researchers have also found that not all conscious animals recognize themselves in their reflection. “‘Tellingly,’ said Diana Reiss, a professor of psychology at Hunter College who has studied mirror self-recognition in elephants and dolphins, ‘animals raised in [or preferring?] isolation do not seem to show mirror self-recognition.’”)

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“Art is science made clear.”

- Jean Cocteau

“your head gonna make a dead end on your street”

- Velvet Underground (White Light / White Heat)

Yesterday’s post left me with a disquieting murmur in the back of my mind. ‘Too easy,’ it muttered. And here comes Jean Cocteau to remind me that art is science made clear.

Can we criticize the New Yorker and Barry Blitt on social or political (or sociopolitical) terms for portraying the Obamas as a Muslim and a terrorist in the White House? No. Can we criticize them on artistic terms? Perhaps…

Decrying Blitt’s cartoon as tasteless and offensive doesn’t mean it’s not satirically funny; instead, it lends the cartoon a couple of the stock credentials of satirical humor.

To understand the failure of the cartoon one must look to Cocteau: ‘art is science made clear,’ he insists. Considering the New Yorker’s high standards, does the cartoon make clear the science it satirizes?

Yes, and  no.

Yes, it parodies the ridiculous public fears and scurrilous Foxian paranoia about the Obamas as anti-American sleepers.  The New Yorker satisfactorily defends each subversive element of the cartoon (the Muslim garb, the gun belt, the burning flag) as a reinforcement of its plain and simple satirical intent — to explode the damp squib of right wing racism.

But… and here Cocteau helps enormously, it isn’t necessarily funny, because, despite all of these well placed clues, it isn’t made clear.

The New Yorker is a liberal magazine. I love to read it.  I’ve often said that I could be happy reading the New Yorker and nothing else.  (Not strictly true, but it has some damn fine writing.) It’s also, despite the wry, dry, sprightly daggers of its prose, an essentially sensitive publication. It skewers the bad guys. While for the good guys it reserves a blunted point.

I worked so hard yesterday to repress this awareness. I wanted to laud the New Yorker and Barry Blitt. But as I scrolled through the New Yorker cover cartoons seeking out examples of the same kind of abrasive satire I knew deep down that I wouldn’t find anything quite like the Obama cover.

We see Ahmadinejad being being enticed to a game of footsy in the bathroom stall, Bush as a housemaid standing over a cigar-smoking Cheney, the neocons up to their necks in a muddy flood… Jubilant snickers at the expense of the bad guys.

But with the Obama cartoon, those at whom we would snicker are absent.  If we laugh at the cartoon, we don’t laugh with the Obamas and we can’t laugh at them.  The objects of our laughter, the conservative commentators and our narrow-minded neighbors, don’t even make the frame.  They’re nowhere but in the dim recess of the cartoonist’s mind’s eye.  Considered from this perspective, the cartoon veers toward the tragic. The victims take center stage.  But clearly the cartoon cannot be tragic if the supposed victims don’t know it. The Obama’s expressions betray satisfaction and mischievous glee.

If the New Yorker in its cover cartoon had, as does the Onion in its copy, a history of satirical lampoon with no holds barred, the cartoon would make more sense; its art would be science made clear. But given the absence of this history, the cartoon’s immediate psychological impact tends to muddy its message.

Not that any of this matters in practical terms. The tiny fraction of the population who even read the New Yorker and would pay any attention to what it has to say aren’t inclined to think that the Obamas might be terrorists, no matter what cartoon it runs on the cover.

A couple more for Barry Blitt, with sympathy and respect…

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”

- Jean Cocteau

“Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown,”

- Lou Reed

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The New Yorker has a long history of offending people with its notoriously tasteless and offensive output of low-brow hackery. Obama spokesman Bill Burton rightly dismisses the magazine’s latest outrageous cover cartoon: “The New Yorker may think… that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” Burton says, before he draws a fiery breath, “but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

We agree, indeed. What else would we do, applaud the New Yorker for tackling head-on the kinds of issues that all other publications skirt?

Satire has no place in an enlightened society. After all, to appreciate satire one must simultaneously understand the direct impact of the satirical object as well as its indirect object. Surely we shouldn’t be expected to hold opposing or divergent concepts in our minds at one time, that’s just barbaric! This is one nation under god, godamnit!

I sympathize with Barack Obama or Bill Burton, or whoever it was who most felt the affront of the New Yorker’s tasteless and offensive campaign. Getting to be president is a sensitive business and one must protect one’s thin skin if one is going to successfully attain the office.

Republican opposer — John McCain — no stranger himself to satire, limped nimbly to Obama’s support, declaring: “New York can go take a hike! Oh, wait a minute, there aren’t any decent hiking trails around New York. Come to think of it, the only place you can even safely fire your gun in New York is from the roof of a New York City housing project, and who would want to set foot in one of those places…”

(McCain may be old but his mind wanders beautifully.)

So, when you get your hands of a copy of the current New Yorker, be sure to set it on fire and toss it into the grate as quickly as you can. At least, tear off the cover and set fire to that… we’ll decide later what to do with the rest of it.

But before you toss the cover, take a quick look at the cartoon: See how Blitt has cunningly distorted Obama’s face so that it seems confident, unperturbed, wily even. What a scam, what a ruse.

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On human potential, personal development, and the philosophy of growth.

“Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.”
- Miguel de Cervantes

“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”
- Frank Herbert

US science fiction novelist (1920 - 1986)

Without reading too much into the respective literary ouevres of these two authors, we may not be surprised that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, observer and recorder of human failings and doomed repetitions, takes an essentially pessimistic view of human nature, while Frank Herbert, a creator of alternative realities, perceives unlimited boundaries for knowledge and achievement. (Herbert spoke with enthusiasm about the positive power of science fiction to point to possibilities, including potholes or chasms that we should avoid.)

Biographers describe Cervantes the young man as brash and idealistic. He fits Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s model of a person with a “fixed mind-set.”   “If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow”, in this week’s NY Times, discusses Dweck’s theory of fixed versus flexible mind-sets. In Dweck’s own words: “People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed tend to push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

Dweck believes that society’s obsession with natural ability thwarts our capacity for growth.

Don Quixote’s imaginary battles against windmills and flocks of sheep speak to me of his creator’s struggle with the idea of fixed potential. That Quixote’s engagements, won or lost, are illusory magnifies the futility of these attempts to conquer fabricated enemies and prove himself worthy of his love. As he grew up, Cervantes’ family moved from town to town, never settling. It’s easy to imagine Cervantes the brash, idealistic, talented young man wanting to achieve something real, but unable to stand long enough on firm ground to be sure of what was real, each move to a new place confirming the isolated and unchangeable nature of his self.

Contrast this with the assertion of Frank Herbert’s son that his father didn’t finish college because he took only to the courses that interested him, forgoing required classes. Herbert worked at writing for many years before achieving success, relying on his wife’s income to support them. He submitted his landmark science fiction work — Dune — to 20 publishers before it was picked up for publication by a smallish press.

Obviously, even within Dweck’s postulate, talented people can achieve success (Cervantes may be a prime example), but she claims that people can achieve more success if they maintain a flexible mind-set. (She cites several mighty examples from the business world — John F. Welch Jr. of General Electric, for his emphasis on teamwork over individual genius; Louis V. Gerstner Jr. of I.B.M., who praised ‘the thousands of I.B.M.’ers who never gave up on their company’; and Anne M. Mulcahy of Xerox, who turned an eye to morale and staff development even as she made tough cuts.)

If you’re reading this and thinking “jeez that sucks, I’m one of those people with a fixed mind-set;” I’d hold out a little branch of hope, attached to a big old tree of potential. To begin the conversion from a fixed mind-set to a flexible mind-set we need only accept the concept of self doubt. What if we aren’t born fully formed and unchangeable? What if we accept that growth is possible but takes work…

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On exciting brain research, insightful psychological studies, and the latest shocker from the ill-thunk war on terror.

Quotes of the day:

“I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,”

Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, in reference to the Guantánamo interrogation training chart repurposed from 1950s Chinese torture methods that elicited false confessions.

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

H. L. Mencken US editor (1880 - 1956)

Using structural and functional brain imaging, scientists now have unprecedented insight into the mechanisms of thought. Writing in the Public Library of Science, Liza Gross cites the ‘form follows function’ edict of architect Louis Sullivan, which itself echoed Aristotle’s essential philosophy of form, in describing the findings of Patric Hagmann, Olaf Sporns, and their colleagues. Hagmann and Sporns found that a dense set of core neural pathways acts as an interconnection hub to the brain’s cerebral cortex the home of higher cognitive thinking and self awareness. The elegant, symmetrical spread of pathways — like the branches of a tree extending from the trunk — correlates to the brain’s seamless processing of information on different levels and in different ways. (Gross’s use of computer technology analogies I find unhelpful. The brain is not like a computer, after all, a computer is, somewhat, like the brain.) Interestingly, the hubs correspond to a recently reported neural system that shows increased activity levels when we are at rest.

Psychologists seem to have uncovered where we aim some of that resting activity — self rationalization. (”The duality of virtue: Deconstructing the moral hypocrite.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in press. “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Psychological Science, 2007.) The researchers devised cunning experiments to lure subjects into choosing an easy chore over a hard one while maintaining that they’d been acting fairly in leaving the harder chore for someone else. In the abstract, the subjects understood that choosing the easy chore wasn’t fair, but in practice most of them chose it anyway. But the true genius in the research came when the researchers asked the subjects to hold a sequence of numbers in their heads while they judged the fairness of their choice. All of a sudden they judged their actions just as harshly as anyone else would.

So, what kept them from admitting their unfairness wasn’t a failure to recognize it, it was a failure to admit to it. And the act of hypocrisy required considerable brain cycles.

Interrogation experts should take note. If you want to extract an honest answer, break out the Sodoku puzzles rather than the water buckets and manacles.

Since form follows function, it is no surprise that the form of the administration’s war on terror has evolved into a horrifying, amorphous mess. The New York Times reveals that the interrogation chart used as a training device for interrogators back in 2002 derived from a 1957 article entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist working for the Air Force, had put together the chart to document interviews with American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators falsely confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities (Chinese Torture Techniques - See page 4 of Biderman’s original report).

So, let’s see if I have this straight: In 1957, Biderman set out what Chinese interrogators did to obtain false confessions.  The army then used this to help them train the next generation of American soldiers so that they could avoid providing false confessions. And a few generations later the DOD used the same material to train interrogators on how to extract (false) confessions…

The only change made to the chart used at Guantánamo? The trainers dropped the original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

No, that wouldn’t look good at all would it, using “communist” coercive methods.

Here’s the opening sentence of Biderman’s 1957 report: “The United States Air Force has expended considerable effort to get a full, accurate and meaningful account of what happened to its personnel who were captured in Korea.”

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On Hillary Clinton’s unerring sense of footinmouthity.

Capitalizing on the tragedy of her inability to be sensitive, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated her supreme political aptitude for footinmouthity. Stricken with a malignant brain tumor she is not, but Hillary needs no excuse to usurp Teddy Kennedy’s tragedy and achieve her outrageous best. Is it her fault that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of the year of his foreshortened primary bid? Of course it isn’t. Then why are people so bent out of shape that she would attempt to make political capital out of it…?

Jeez. Anyone would think you’d never seen a man shot before.

And now, with rumors that her fellow liability, Bill, is agitating for her to be Obama’s VP, one wonders how she’ll outdo Dick Cheney (remember him?) who managed to shoot his old friend in the head with a shotgun…

Well, I’d written a good part of a post about seasons, gas prices, and global warming before I pressed the wrong button combination and lost it.

It started with some reflection on the cost of getting around in the city: I take my son to pre-school on the subway in preference to driving him, because we like the train and because I like the idea that I’m not contributing to global warming and pollution. But this morning as I walked in the Spring sunshine I realized that it costs me $4 for a round trip on the subway, while the cost of driving him to school would only be about 54 cents. That sucks. Shouldn’t we make public transportation more economically attractive than driving to encourage people to use it?

I then lamented the defeat of mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan. I then got into the ineffectiveness of government in dealing with problems like global warming. President Bush is an extreme example. After eight years the best he could do was to make some feel good statements encouraging a voluntary reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. But governments in general seem to be ill-matched to the situation.

Part of the problem seems to be that we’re not really very good at dealing with long term threats. Evolution has wired us to focus on the here and now in a very vivid and immediate way. We can conceptualize and prepare for what may happen today or tomorrow, but the further out the problems get, the less able we are to act in ways that recognize them and respond to them effectively.

I then had started to write about the changing seasons and the way that this affects our conceptual view of the world. I was thinking about referencing lyrics from a record I was just listening to (The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely, on which a track begins with the words “Autumn came around like a drifter to an on ramp…”). It was as I was trying to develop this idea that I pressed the fatal combination of buttons and erased the post.

But now I feel engaged by the idea of ‘the lost blog,’ or, more generally, the lost anything.

The idea of ‘no longer being’ can be juxtaposed with the idea of constant renewal. The changing cycle of the seasons reinforces our concept of the world as a place where things come around again. In the Fall the trees shed their leaves as we enter the long dead winter, but in Spring the natural world appears to be reborn. We integrate this and similar ideas of regeneration into our conceptual view of the world. (The cycle of day and night, of waking and sleeping reinforces this concept.)

It is no surprise then that many cultures and religions have conceptualized life and death as a cycle. Reincarnation, life after death. Renewal of life reflects our regular impression of the world, and it salves the pain of total loss.

But things do get lost. My original post is gone. Even if I were able to recall it word for word and write it out again, it would be something subtly different from the original post.

In reality, existence never repeats itself. The present moment is unique and new. The earth never quite rotates about the same sun, which is ever so slowly burning away and cooling. The child born today is born into a world different from the world his or her parents were born into.

This is not true of the conceptual world, in which concepts remain firm and fast and reproducible over and over, where the concept of a square remains always the concept of a square, where a logical analysis remains always logical.

As we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the world, more aware of our effect on the environment, more cognizant of the way we can improve the long term lot of humankind and a whole host of other species, we face the challenge of shedding our concept of reality and existence as something that forever renews, of life as a short term that will be repeated in the long term.

We have both the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this new conceptual world-view and the capabilities to act on it for the good of the world and for the good of humanity.

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

In a 1929 interview, Albert Einstein apparently said: “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge.”

In order to have an opinion on Einstein’s statement, we first need to decide what he means by “more important.” Einstein was speaking of his own process. He had been asked whether intuition or inspiration accounted for his theories. Certainly, when devising a new theory, imagination plays a very significant role, and without it a new theory can’t emerge.

Einstein’s contribution to science was creative. For him, then, imagination was more important that knowledge.

As my wife and I visited our newborn son in the ICU today we talked about the role of the nursing staff. So much of what they do is routine — they learn how to care for the newborns and follow the instructions they’ve been given. But the difference between a competent nurse and a nurse who contributes something important is the degree to which she is engaged with the baby and his parents.

The competent nurse follows the correct procedures, attends to her tasks with care and dedication. The engaged nurse does this too, but also sees things, listens, and reacts.

Artist Mark Rothko said this about art: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

Rothko could have been speaking about nursing. One looks at Rothko’s paintings and one could be forgiven for asking what they are about. But does this mean that they aren’t about something?

Rothko’s children are suing to have his remains unearthed and moved to a Jewish cemetery. I don’t know how Rothko would feel about this. Judged as a creative act, one imagines that he would find it rather obvious. Judged as an action in the world, one imagines he would find it somewhat depressing.

Another child of a famous person — Max Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley the notorious British Nazi — has been in trouble for exploring his imaginative world in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes in London. Apparently, shades of Nazism can be detected in the role-play. Mosley is the chief of the Formula One motor racing federation and has been asked to resign.

The thread that I’m trying to mine is the concept of engagement. A nurse engaged with her role as caregiver. A scientist engaged with his role as a pursuer of new ideas. A painter engaged with the direct communication of otherwise uncommunicable ideas. And a man engaged with his legacy and its demons.

But what does any of this have to do with Bacon? Stanley Fish writes about deconstruction and Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon predicted that rational thought would eventually win out; that we would one day have a consistent , complete understanding of the world we live in, but that we would go through tough times to get there. He predicted that language would get in the way. That the terms we use to talk about and define things would become recursively problematic.

Rothko sought to eliminate words. Bacon recognized their challenges. Einstein sought to subjugate knowledge.

There is a reason, I think, for such struggle. Rothko, Bacon and Einstein all felt painfully the distinction between ideas and reality. We experience reality, and we conceive of ideas.

Ideas can be consistent and whole and concrete. Reality must be felt and experienced and can never be pinned down. Einstein eluded language, Rothko avoided it, Mosley seeks to bend it, and Bacon wanted to wrestle with it, but found it stronger than him. Language, I would argue, can be accurate and complete when it expresses ideas, but not when it seeks to represent the world and our experience of it.

On the universal criticality of April Fools Day.

The susceptible age of four seemed to me too young for our son to be introduced to the joys and miseries of April Fools Day. My wife thought otherwise. And so it was that this morning he gusted into our dreams bright and early with a panoply of pranks all aimed at making himself happy at our expense.

April Fools Day is clearly the oldest and most significant holiday of any season, predating any other religious or secular holidays, and resonating so deeply with the very fundamental core of our existence, nay the existence of anything, that it hardly bears talking about. That being said, one still doesn’t need to share its rituals with a four year old.

For those who may not have found time to research the long history of April Fools Day, or who have delved back only so far as to the time of Chaucer and his Nun’s Priest Tale (c. 1400) or to the French and Dutch references dating back to the 16th century, I’ll touch on the foundational aspects of the holiday.

The celebration of a prank is a reference to the creation of something out of nothing. The prankster begins with a fiction, something untrue or fabricated, and ends up with an event of significance — the fooling of someone. This ritual sequence evokes the appearance of something out of nothing, which in turn recalls the origin of existence as we know it. What scientists now call the Higgs Boson — the superheavy particle the appearance of which they believe precipitated the big bang — used to be referred to as the Grande Bufon or, roughly translated, the “Large Idiot.” (This was, of course, in pre-scientific times.)

Archimedes, or the Greek’s geek, as he was known, was fascinated by the idea of the biggest prank of all time, and spent much of his middle and later life trying to perfect a trick on humankind that would last well beyond his death. He finally succeeded by calculating more accurately than any before him the irrational number Pi that relates the radius of a circle to its circumference. Archimedes would have been thrilled to know that even today, thousands of years later, schoolboys and schoolgirls the world over still tie their brains in knots trying to recall Pi to a large number of decimal places.

It was Archimedes, too, who jumped out of his bathtub shouting “Eureka!” This was not because he’d had an epiphany about the displacement of water, which is the commonly held myth, but because he’d figured out how to fool the king into thinking that he’d made him a suit out of golden thread. Hence Archimedes subsequent naked romp through the streets to the king’s palace. Archimedes was a true prankster.

Sadly today very few people think about the original significance of April Fools Day. It’s been turned into a circus of silly jokes and goofy tricks. I see this as a reflection of the times we live in. We spend too much time chasing material possessions, success, love, wealth, redeemable coupons, and not enough time focused on the essential void of meaning that underscores existence. If only we could all take this day to prank one another with a heartfelt sense of life’s irony and insignificance the world would be a better place.

 

 

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