A question that’s been kicking around my head for the past few days. This is just the start of a rough outline.
Determining what is excellent:
Judgment based on history. The “time will tell” adage. What is good and beautiful is sieved by history and reveals itself over time. This is also the base for the quantitative approach that Charles Murray takes in “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.
What if social networking and media apps such as Twitter improve our collective sense of empathy?
When I joined Twitter I followed two types people, personal friends and complete strangers. The friends were neighbors or colleagues whom I met regularly in person. Sometimes I met them at school, others I met through other electronic media such as blogs. The complete strangers were celebrities, people whom I had heard of or read about.
I made the mistake of watching Hell’s Kitchen last night and the image and sound of Gordon Ramsey swearing for half-an-hour is now etched in my mind. It’s amazing they can put that amount of blasphemy on the air. Of course they bleep it out but that doesn’t fool anyone, not even children.
What made me remember the experience, aside from having a strange Ramsey-like figure haunting my dreams last night, was the shamelessness of the affective appeals to the audience.
Via Geomblog I found an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about intelligence gathering, the Enron scandal, and our human habits of thought. Gladwell frames the problem using the language of puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles depend on missing data. If only there was a bit more information then the puzzle could be solved. Mysteries depend on the interpretation of information. Getting more information is rarely enough to solve a mystery, too many ambiguities remain for tidy conclusions to be reached.
Another arrow in the quiver against education fell today. It arrived in Information Ethics, during a discussion of affective psychological development. We were climbing the ladders of development from meeting physical needs, to power, to adult approval, peer approval, self approval, on up to self-understanding and integration. But we stumbled, every last one of us involved in education, at competition with others. How can we operate at a level of mutuality and reciprocity when the academic environment keeps forcing us to be competitive?
I watched the movie [Crumb]() many years ago. I was mostly interested in the biography of the creative artist instead of Crumb’s work in particular. Crumb clearly had problems and a twisted family life that scarred him and his siblings. The link between suffering, depression, and art is long and twisted. Two books, The Wound and the Bow by Edward Wilson and Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison, are worth considering.
Reading about conservatism and personality is like watching a slow motion car crash. You wish it could be stopped or would just end, but instead it goes on endlessly.
More evidence of this appears in a recent series of essays by Sara Robinson at Orcinus, Dave Neiwert’s blog hangout. Neiwert has been a longtime observer of far right wing political groups and an astute commenter on rightwing eliminationist rhetoric. Robinson’s series is a summary of the psychology of authoritarianism in part 1, some personal stories about people who escaped authoritarian cultures in part 2, and suggestions for reaching out to authoritarians to ‘bring them over the wall’ in part 3.
I made a mistake tonight. I turned on the radio to listen to the news about the foiled terrorist attack discovered in the United Kingdom. Over and over again the news anchors, the commentators, and even the police used the word ‘unimaginable’ to describe the plot. The root of all this hyperventilating seems to have come from this quote:
Paul Stephenson, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said: “We are confident that we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction and commit mass murder.
I was sitting this afternoon in the coffee shop at Borders. There were about a dozen other people sitting in the shop with me, some of them talking on cell phones, reading, or just drinking coffee and talking to each other. I was reading Integral Psychology by Ken Wilber.
Wilber is an interesting read. His basic method and goal is to integrate the perennial philosophies of the pre-modern world with the psychological advances of the modern world.
Among the many writing projects that I’ve considered pursuing was a series of essays based on gerunds, in English these are nouns formed by adding -ing to the end of verbs. Some examples are falling, reflecting, refracting, wishing, pondering. For example, the essay on falling might have made connections between falling in love, the idea of losing control, the power of gravity, etc. This post isn’t that essay, instead it’s about reflecting, the gerund du jour.