Past Ruminations...

August 1-8, 2002
  

Institutions, idolatry, and disillusionment. We tend to idolize at least some of our institutions, all of which are constructs, and at any given time some are worth keeping, some not. Most are human creations meant to help us deal with particular issues or problems. For secular people none transcend their impermanence. Even Christians should realize that only a few are destined to last throughout the current span of human history.

What got me thinking along these lines is some reading I have been doing about the death of privacy. While we would all agree that the death knell seems to be tolling for our personal privacy, some writers have been pointing out that it also tolls for our institutions as well as for you and me.

There is an old aphorism, "familiarity breeds contempt", implying that to get too close to most things takes away the mystery and leads to disillusionment or indifference. There are some things we just don't need to know about other people. However, as institutional privacy is also lost, we come to learn things about our institutions that shakes some, or at times, all of our confidence in them. Part of this problem is related to our former idolatry; we held them too high on a pedestal in the first place. Part of it is related to our need to believe in things and they looked like good candidates. However, as we expose the warts and other faults of our institutions, laying their secrets bare while laying waste to their privacy, we tend to go overboard when we pull them off their pedestal. Those that could do little wrong, now are beyond contempt.

There are good reasons for this. You can't get disillusioned about anything you didn't first have illusions about in the first place. It is part and parcel of the definitions. We tend to see the illusions surrounding the institution, rather than the reality, which privacy helped to maintain. Naked institutions, like naked women, hold no illusions.

Some see this as good. No illusions means more accountability, however sometimes it is impossible to meet the resulting demands, since our former illusions still inhabit our current requirements. As no woman no matter how beautiful, can long maintain the scrutiny of constant nakedness, no institution can either. We will find faults. We will pick and poke and complain and grow contemptuous. We will expect too much and see too little.

So, maybe privacy is necessary, at least to a certain degree, for institutions, as it is for us. For without mystery, we are only left with the cold glare of a too intense examination, under which nothing bears up well and most things are destroyed.

Some things we do need to know, but some things we just don't. Knowing what is what is the rub.

Loss of equilibrium. My wife has a irregular recurring condition in her inner ear where she loses her equilibrium and gets nauseous and finds even sitting up difficult. It usually passes with the help of a little Meclazine but since it hit her today, it started me thinking about the significance of equilibrium in our lives, both physically, as in my wife's case, and emotionally, which really undergirds my previous discussions about chaos.

When we lose our equilibrium we have problems navigating, whether it is the next 20 feet or the social situation currently demanding our attention. I think we all can understand the need for balance when moving about physically, but we also need a sense of balance when moving about socially. One definition of equilibrium in the American Heritage Dictionary is "Mental or emotional balance; poise." Poise. That's it, the ability to maintain our composure in adverse circumstances or when under stress. Something we all need in order to successfully navigate the social landscape.

I, along with most geeks and nerds, will admit to a lack of poise. It has been woefully deficient over my lifetime, though not for lack of desire or trying. However, my poise has grown in recent years, partially from natural maturity and partially from a concerted effort combined with the grace of God. I just don't lose my composure as easily as I used to.

So, when all of you non-geeks and non-nerds out there interact with us, remember that our apparent congenital lack of poise is not necessarily our choice or from a lack of our efforts. Give us the benefit of the doubt. Have a good day and be nice to a geek or nerd today or sometime this week.

Chaos revisited. Chaos exerted itself again yesterday, but this time technological chaos. My new rebuilt server won't install its OS properly and my current project is fighting me on every turn. Previously that would have put me into a "blue funk" (state of panic or great fear, or a state of dejection or depression.). Now with my greater acceptance of chaos in my life I just put the problems aside and continued on, gerry rigging a temporary solution. This manageable chaos thing has its good side inside the technological geek world too. Now if I can just get that little voice to stop yelling, "You've got to fix it; you've got to fix it." and be a little more quiet and reasonable, I will be even more productive

LOTR. The Lord of the Rings DVD was released today and I picked up my reserved copy. We will probably be inundated over the next few weeks with LOTR promotions and advertisements, which will somewhat diminish its uniqueness by its ubiquity. No matter. With great enjoyment I watched the movie again last night. I also watched some of the extras on the DVD, including a preview of the upcoming release of The Two Towers in December.

The story has lost none of its power and the production held up well to my repeated backtracking and reviewing. The producer for the next release wondered how the world would receive the next installment, since they had leaped such lavish praise on the first effort. Barrie Osborne argued that The Two Towers has such a larger scope, sense of grandeur, and technical accomplishments compare to the Fellowship release, that he is afraid they will get into a can you top that problem. All I can say is that it is a nice problem to have.

As George Lucas works through the final installment of his Star Wars saga, it becomes obvious how significant Tolkien's achievement was. While Lucas had a great idea, his universe lacks the emotional depth and consistency of Tolkien. This is not to disparage Lucas or any other creative effort. Instead I am trying to give Tolkien his due. It has taken the movies of Peter Jackson for me to see the incredible depth of Tolkien's story telling. As a writer myself, I am challenged to the core by his completeness and the consistency of his characters. While they grow with each event, they remain consistently themselves, completely recognizable even when different. I would say that there is an utter realness to them that makes the almost unbelievable believable.

Geeks. The common image of geeks is of an intelligent and  technically competent, though socially backward individual. I think I have hit upon the source of the geek problem. Since I am partially a geek (really a nerd, which is a geek with a semblance of a life) I offer this insight to other geeks (an nerds) out there.

I think the problem is the uncontrollability and irrationality of most social situations, especially when related to family, or in the case of male-female relationship, potential family. Blaise Pascal, a 17th century French and Christian philosopher, once said, "The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing." I would add that families also have their reasons and sometimes reason has nothing to do with it.

You seek geeks (and nerds to a lesser degree) flower in technological arenas where they can extend a sense of control over the environment around them. Early geeks waxed poetic about their first computer program that got the big hulking mainframe to do what they said and to do it EXACTLY as instructed. If for some reason it didn't work, there was a logical reason, either a mistake by the geek (fixable) or due to a bug in the system (something you can work around). Everything was reducible to an understandable set of parameters. People and social relationships are not.

People and relationships don't respond consistently or reliably from a programmable frame of reference. As living systems, they exhibit serious chaotic tendencies that surpass the most complex chaos theories imaginable. They have limited predictability and as result, what worked last time might not work this time or may even produce a seriously negative result. As a result, people and relationships require you be comfortable with chaos, to accept a very large standard deviation. They require you to lose a great deal of your control over the situations. It is so much easer to retreat back to the worlds you understand and, more importantly, can manage, the worlds of technology.

Part of the growth in my life and what keeps me from real geekdom, is my growing acceptance of a manageable level of chaos in my life. Notice I said manageable. Recent brain studies have noted that men and women's brains are radically different. Men have a much more difficult time processing multiple inputs and being comfortable with apparent informational chaos. So, part of some men's tendency to geekdom is biological, and to some extent all men have some geeky characteristics. Hey, tools of all sorts, which most men love, are means of exerting control, of reducing variables, of helping us to focus on the solvable or controllable within the chaos before us.

This growth in my life was brought home to me this weekend by a family problem (don't we all have them?). Like the man that I am I attempted to exert a little control over the chaos. Notice I said "a little". Gone are the days when I try to absolutely control the situations around me. I am now leaving that to God, since it is way beyond, light millennia beyond my abilities. Now I just try to bring a little order to my small area of chaos and I do it with a much larger tolerance for failure, or to state it positively and somewhat geekily, with an acceptance of a larger standard deviation than previously allowed.

That brings me to America, which in some ways is the land of the geeks. How much of the disconnect between us and the rest of the world, both Europe and Asia, can be traced to our incipient geekiness? I wonder.

Weekends. I am not sure how weekends are viewed in the rest of the world, but here in the U.S. they are very important. Many people gear their lives around the weekend, considering most of the workweek to be what you sacrifice to get to the weekend. Some people who work a four day, 40 hour week (10 hour days), really place see their three day weekends as weekly mini-vacations.

We have all sorts of little sayings that remind us of the weekend's significance, and one of the most important is TGIF, which used to mean "thank God it's Friday" but has been secularized to "thank goodness it's Friday" though I am I not sure who goodness is. I chuckle at the way secularists are forced into personifications that are essentially pagan or animistic in an effort to avoid God, primarily the Judeo-Christian God, but that is a discussion for another time.

Weekends are seen as recovery time, chances for most of us to recapture some of what we feel we have lost in the drain and strain of the workaday world. I will admit to falling into this pattern from time to time, but I am essentially against it. One of the essentials of being self-employed, at least for me, is that work is as you do it and it can be done any time you have the time or inclination. While it is true that client deadlines make demands, you are fully capable of taking off when needed and working late or early to get the job done. What this means in a practical sense is that I don't really have weekends in the traditional sense. There is many a Saturday and Sunday I will work for 4-8 hours each day.

I am not unique, since in our service oriented society, many people have to work on Saturday and Sunday. While the rest of us are shopping or going to the ballpark or movies or library or museum, someone has to be at those places working so we can be doing our "weekend" stuff.

Since the weekend is such a given in our society, it is interesting to note how many weekend "have-nots" we seem to have. I wonder what percentage of the population they make up? Do they feel left out or second class because they don't get traditional weekends? Who knows? One thing I do know, weekends or at least Sundays off, are a gift to all of us in the West from our Judeo-Christian heritage, which enforced the concept of a Sabbath rest. While it doesn't mean the same thing any more, the idea of free time in which society doesn't make any demands on me has stuck around and grown with every passing year. Did we gain anything of significance when we jettisoned the Sabbath for the secular idol of free time or have we lost something important? It is a difficult question to answer, since even most Christians have bought into the idea of free time and abandoned the idea of the Sabbath. However, it is an important question, which needs addressing.

Heat. We are having a very hot summer. Things have been scorching since the beginning of July with only a few days of respite. Since I work inside, I am in air-conditioned luxury, and the only time I notice the problem is when I go out to get the mail or have to a make sure my dog gets his necessities. For all you who live in the western United States, who say mid 90's is not so bad, just remember we have the temperature with 30-90% humidity. Right now it is 99° F / 37° C with only 32% humidity, so the Heat Index is only 102° F / 39° C. I have seen it as high as 115° this summer.

Even so, I am often amazed at how easy I have it, sitting here working away in 74° comfort, with cold drinks and snacks at my beck and call. Historically speaking, and as an Ancient History graduate of UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County) I tend to contextualize everything historically, this comfort I live in is a recent innovation. It comes from my ability to isolate myself from the effects of my natural surroundings, especially as relating to heat. For most of man's existence we could only control the cold around us. We did that by dressing warmly or by building a fire, then a few centuries ago fueling a stove, and in recent years, turning on the furnace, but we have always been able to to mitigate the cold. However, through all that time we were at the mercy of the heat. We looked for shade, to get out of the direct sunlight and maybe we went into caves or into the basement of buildings built of stone, or moved to our homes near the sea or other water in the summer in an effort to get cooler. But it is only in the last 100 years that we have been able to really cool ourselves with air conditioning and it is only in the last 40 (one generation) that it has become common in most homes.

We now have air conditioning down to fine art, even having portable personal coolers that can blow cool air right where you are. Fewer and fewer cars are sold without air conditioning any more and some have digital climate controls so that you dial up your favorite temperature, even in your car. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. We like being in control of our lives.

I think this modern sense of being able to control our environment down to the exact degree we desire helps explain our reaction to September 11th. We are a people who are used to exerting so much control over the things that distress us, and we had no control over what happened that day. I think that is among the reasons why we honor the people of United flight 93 and their efforts. They tried to take control of their situation. They did not succeed, but they made the attempt and in doing so they probably prevented a worse disaster.

I have been thinking a lot on this idea of control lately, so don't be surprised to see it filter throughout my writing in the days and weeks to come.

Smokescreens and clarity. In the debate over the outcome of the Florida electoral process that put President Bush into office, Al Gore and the Democrats have always argued that the common people were behind them in the contest and Bush and the Republicans were the party of power, wealth, and manipulation. Ann Coulter, the best selling author of Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, has shown that argument to propagandic fabrication in her recent column.

Both candidates created election recount funds to support their efforts. The interesting thing is that Al Gore's primary contributions came from just 38 individuals, who contributed $2.1 million of the fund's $3.3 million total. My own research turned up an article by Holly Bailey for opensecrets.org, in which she noted

All told, roughly 80 percent of the 1,258 donors to the vice president’s recount fund gave less than $200, but only $56,216 of the fund’s $3.3 million in contributions came from those small donations. A Center analysis shows that 281 people contributed $200 or more to the Gore fund. Only 38 donors gave $20,000 or more, accounting for $2.1 million of the total.

George Bush, on the other hand, refused any donation above $5,000 and still raised $13.8 million. I could not find compilations on total givers for Bush, but I did check three states in the opensecrets.org database: Maryland (a small eastern state that primarily Democratic and went for Gore), Alabama (a southern state that went for Bush), and California (the largest state that went for Gore and is currently Democratic). The smallest gift posted was $500 and I don't know if that was the minimum reported or the minimum received, so my figures only cover gifts above $500 since that is the limit of my information. The average gifts for the three states were $1673, $1,613, and $1,784 with a total of 415 givers. Note the closely grouped averages per state. As a composite the three states averaged to $1739. Using that figure as a workable number it means George Bush had almost 8,000 givers as compared to Al Gore's 1,258 or 6.4 times the number of supporters.

It appears that Democratic claims made at the time were somewhat disingenuous. Apparently President Bush had dramatically wider support than Al Gore did, who primarily depended on a small number of well-heeled special interests. See Ann Coulter's article for more information about some of those 'common people'.

As facts come to light after the rhetoric of the events has slipped into memory, it is sad to see how much of that rhetoric turns out to be mere propaganda without substance or truth. This appears to be a favorite tactic of the post 50's Democratic party, especially during the Clinton era and the time since. When examined, the populist, common man image of the Democrats is only a myth, window dressing for campaign slogans and voting pushes. As a wise man once said, "Follow the money." However, you may not like what you see when you get there.