An Offering

Photo by mknobil Creative Commons 2.0

A friend was talking the other day about the Internet and putting stuff online. He remarked that it makes all the difference if one proceeds as if placing an offering on an altar. I love seeing new pictures when Mark Knobil posts them, oh and the pictures posted by all my contacts. Everyday postings at social networking site and blog posts enrich my day. The fact of the matter is that there are some very talented people, but they're rare. Talent isn't descriptive enough because what makes some blog writers so worthwhile is depth of scholarship.

Keguro Macharia is home in Kenya and writing about it. Kegurao is a scholar. Gukira is one of my must-read blogs. He has introduced to me cultural studies, and more particularly an outsider's view of American culture. That's a picture that's hard for me as an American to get clear focus. So after studying long in the USA it's great to read his posts from home.

In thinking about American politics and religion the last few days, I've got far more questions than answers. Sarah Palin has made things interesting to me because so many of my questions are not ones easily answered.

At a social network I haunt a question in two parts was asked: First, Was Gandhi an anarchist? Second, How does the rule of law fit into Gandhian theories? I enjoy ongoing social discussions both for great questions like that, and for the contexts surrounding such questions. I don't have informed views on either part of the question. What I have is just a bit of collected knowledge about Gandhi, enough so that I can make some sense of articles posted online. Searching around I found an essay in The Hindu by Anil Nauriya Gandhi on Secular law and state.

Nauriya's essay about Gandhi brought to mind a best selling book in the 1960's, The Secular City by Harvey Cox. I read the book in the early 1970's and still have the paperback. Skimming over the book I was impressed how relevant it seemed to the questions about religion and politics Palin's vice presidential candidacy has brought to the fore in my mind.

Many of my African friends are quite religious and I've found myself describing myself as a "secular humanist." One of my friends is a devote Evangelical Christian and Kenyan. He studied for a while at University in the USA. And I appreciate that even while we "talk" by typing he gets there's a slight twinkle in my eye and wry smile when I say that. Secular Humanism for many on the political right is assumed to be a part of "the axis of evil." My good Christian friend has sophisticated views about his religious faith, so there's a ease to our arguments that's very often lacking with fellow Americans. In the Introduction to The Secular City Cox wrote:

Pluralism and tolerance are the children of secularzation.

There are many in America in 2008 who would respond to this assertion saying pluralism and tolerance are bastards. They insist that Americans is a Christian nation and as such our enemies are easy to find--Those bastards!

My Evangelical friend in Kenya makes a distinction between seculariztion and secularism. He certainly is quite eager for pluralism and tolerance in Kenya. A headline in yesterday's LA Progressive reads: Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean” (hat tip: The Editors). On reading the headline the sarcastic voice in my head sputtered, "Yeah, and those are her good points!" Many love Palin precisely because she's so good hacking red meat. Sarah Palin's selection is widely viewed as a sop to the Evangelical Christian base of Republican Party politics. I wonder what is it that make "mean" so appealing to this base?

We in the West believe strongly in self-interest, or more broadly that people act in terms of their self-interest. Richard A. Epstein, a libertarian scholar, observes:

That self-interest can manifest itself in one of two ways when dealing with strangers; through either aggression or cooperation.

Palin represents the aggressive choice, but that still leaves the question why aggression seems so overwhelmingly thought the right choice among so many Evangelicial Christians in the USA.

One of the reasons to link to the Amazon page on The Secular City is there are two reader reviews, a two-star and a five-star. The author of the two-star review is Gary Scott. The review is well crafted with his thesis statement right at the start: "Basic liberal Christian apology." With mainstream attention on rightist Christian politics, it's tempting to take "liberal Christian" as an oxymoron. But Barak Obama's abiding Christian faith reminds us not to be too hasty.

When we think about it, it's easy to come up with plenty of examples of liberal Christians. "Liberal" as a "brand" has become unpopular lately, and the term "progressive" seems more current. I'm afraid either label doesn't really do justice. In part because to most religious convictions are personal, and the partisan politics in the secular realm. The Christian right form a deliberate political movement, distinct from progressive Christian movements in the USA in the close alliance with and even forming the base for the Republican Party.

Theologian Walter Wink has written about the "myth of redemptive violence." Wink provides as one of the sources of the myth of redemptive violence in the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish. Wink writes:

Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible world; it is theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society.

That sounds close to the world view I hear often expressed by the religious right in America today. It also seems in accord with George Lakoff's "strict father" frame of conservatives. With the centrality of the war in Iraq to Palin and McCain's campaign, Winks connection to the Enuma Elish and their world view is ironic.

I still want to look more closely at Pentecostalism and its relationship to the religious right, but that will have to wait for another time. For today what I wanted to establish was an idea that Christianity does not necessarily equate to Republican Party politics. In addition that secularlization is not inherrently opposed to religion, nor are religious people necessarily opposed to secularlization.

Contradictory Ideas

Church doctrines which prohibit woman from assuming authority in church affairs has a long and nuanced history. I can't claim any expertise about this history. But I've made the observation that one of the things which sets Pentecostalism apart from other manifestations of Evangelical Christianity in the USA and elsewhere, as well of course many mainline denominations, especially the Roman Catholic Church, is a willingness to allow women to lead.

Evangelicals in the USA often align themselves with cultural conservatism, and “traditional values.” The virtues of the the 19th Century “cult of true womanhood” were listed as: piety, purity, submission and domesticity. Back in the 1980's a long effort to enshrine equal protection for women in the USA Constitution was rebuffed. Many women opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because they believed that equality was a diminution of their special rights. There is so much data confirming inequality of women in almost every aspect of our lives in the USA, it's hard to imagine the opposition to equal rights. The ideology which dictated separate spheres which Barbara Welter and other historians have documented provides a way to understand this view.

Ivan Illich wrote a controversial book called Gender. In it Illich argued that industrial society imposes certain unisex assumptions. Labor is seen as a commodity, for example it can be “off-shored” in a global economy. In some sense one worker is as good as another and both women and men are made for the same work. Colleagues cautioned him early on in his study that “in the present crisis of feminism, talk about women is not for men.” I feel trepidation about this discussion for that reason. But it seems useful to state another reason colleagues sought to dissuade him in his study. Illich writes:

I came to see that most of my interlocutors felt uneasy because my reasoning interfered with their dreams: with the feminist dream of a genderless economy without compulsory sex roles; with the leftist dream of a political economy whose subjects would be equally human.

Illich's book provides a critique of industrial society, putting that aside, the idea of a genderless society with equality for all is a powerful and pervasive metaphor. Speaker after speaker at the Democratic National Convention spoke about the demand for women's equality and in particular called for “equal pay for equal work.”

Illich observes:

Up to now, no goodwill and no struggle, no legislation and no technique, have reduced the sexist exploitation characteristic of industrial society.

Whether conservative or liberal, who could miss this? I temperamentally prejudiced against Sarah Palin's politics. But my impulse to cry "Hypocrite!" at her uneasy synthesis of reactionary calls to a mythic past with the demands of industrial labor where work is neither women's or men's work, is tempered by questions whether a genderless society can ever be truly non-sexist.

After listening to Palin's acceptance speech last night, it seems to me that she is primarily reactionary. The distance she places between her Pentecostal upbringing and then placing herself within the Evangelical non-denominational camp of American Christianity points to a contradiction in the systems of metaphors she uses to navigate through life. But the question remains whether Mike Davis is right about Pentecostalism not being a reactionary movement? So I want to explore that question further.

Political Metaphor

That illustration has little to do with anything I'm about to write. It's a Wordle of my Delicious tags. Wordle is a cool toy, and surely this tag cloud says something about me, I'm just not sure what.

As I write the TV is quiet in the background, tuned to the Republican National Convention. My Dad is upstairs watching, and quiet as it is, I wince occasionally. As the speakers are quick to point out the issue is not so much Democrats and Republicans but different ways of imagining ourselves. George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist with a theory about how we make sense of the world through metaphors. Lakoff has much more to say about metaphors beyond politics, but he's well known for talking about metaphors in the American political context.

Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust is a compact, yet thorough exposition of his ideas on the subject. Lakoff contends that whether liberal or conservative Americans view the nation in terms of a family metaphor. Lakoff contrasts a conservative conception of this metaphor as "a strict father" model against the liberal "nurturant parent" model. In popular press this way of looking at American politics is rendered as "The daddy party and the mommy party." In the last presidential election cycle Frances Moore Lappe wrote an essay urging progressives to be wary of this framing. I think France Moore Lappe is brilliant and her points about the downsides of the liberal model within the nation as a family metaphor quite sound. But I'm less persuaded that we can quickly change the metaphors we live by; that, it seems to me, is a slow process.

The religious controversies within Christianity often revolve around the place of women in society. In my last post I pointed out that Mike Davis observes the dominance of women in the Pentecostal movement in the developing world. Indeed, the prominence of women within the movement here in the USA is a source of much dispute with other streams in the Evangelical movement. Many in the movement believe that women are prohibited from exercising authority over men in the Church. Actually this is the pervasive doctrine among most Christian denominations, not just the Evangelical movement.

From my agnostic perspective, it seems to me that Christian's often raise the argument of "Biblical orthodoxy" when in fact the orthodoxy they actually refer conforms to their world view which is rooted in sets of interlocking ideas having little to do with the Bible. So I hardly predict that the theological disputes between Evangelicals will impair Sarah Palin's appeal to Evangelical Christian voters.

The funny thing about thinking in metaphors is how impossible or unlikely different metaphors used by others seem. Our metaphors point what particulars out of the flux of events to attend. The old parable The Blind Men and the Elephant captures well how metaphors shape our views:

"When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?'

"Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, 'Sire, an elephant is like a pot.' And the men who had observed the ear replied, 'An elephant is like a winnowing basket.' Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.

People are aware of the hazard and the importance of multiple views, even if we fail to be cautious. And we are able to hold multiple contradictory views at the same time. So while our world views are sets of interlocking the fit is often quite loose.

Gender roles changed with the rapid industrialization of the Industrial Revolution. Among upper and middle class women in Great Britain and the USA a separation of spheres which historian Barbara Welter called The Cult of True Womanhood developed in response to the Industrial Revolution. And what we tend to think of as Victorian values in the USA are closely related to this development. Welter wrote:

The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forbears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one cast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women's magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same - a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had - to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.

The four virtues of women in this construction are: Piety, Purity, Submission, and Domesticity.

In many ways the entry of so many women into the industrial labor force has upended this conception of womanhood. Sarah Palin's nasty speech accepting her nomination as vice presidential candidate highlighted the contradiction between the her reactionary politics and her ambition. Even her masterful rhetoric portraying John McCain as a strict father worthy of authority highlights it. McCain has had four recurrences of his cancer, his health is an issue. She cannot simply run as a help-mate, but must also show herself capable of the presidency.

The contradiction is not one felt only by women and men with conservative politics, it's a contradiction which dogs liberal women and men too. There is so much great writing on the about sexism and Feminism, that it's daunting to engage in the subject. I'm sure I'll screw up as I try. Yet these issues, often discussed in the press as "the culture wars" are too important not to address and to try for better understandings. So I prattle on in my next post.

Religion and American Politics

Screen shot of Lonnie Frisbee captured from YouTube video from a Katherine Kuhlman broadcast uploaded by wam957.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate for the Republican ticket. Palin was raised as a member of an Assemblies of God church, a Pentecostal denomination. Palin described herself as a non-denominational Christian in a Time Magazine interview. I'll certainly take her word on that. It's not at all surprising to imagine that she doesn't want to get into the contentious area of Fundamentalist Christianity, preferring a claim to broad unity. Certainly Pentecostals consider themselves Evangelical Christians, but there are real fissures especially in regards to ideas about the place of women in the scheme of things.

I'm not religious. I am a baptized and confirmed Christian, which has some theological significance. But in my adult life my views can accurately be called agnostic. I want to be quick to say that I'm not hostile to religion, at least in any deliberate and overt way. Indeed my religious training in the Episcopal Church permeates my views in many ways, often surprising me. Another part of my growing up was becoming a Jesus Freak while in high school in 1970.

Once a secular Jewish friends reacted to my saying that I wasn't a Christian: "You can no more chose not to be Christian than I can chose not to be a Jew." I have to give him that point. What he was talking about is something bigger than just ourselves. In fact, he added that by virtue of growing up in a small Pennsylvania town where almost everyone called themselves Christian, that even he couldn't chose not to be Christian. This is a far different idea from what many Christians think, but there is something to the idea.

Following along with this weak meaning, America is a very religious country, a very Christian country. Oh, but what diversity! And this diversity is built into the fabric of the American Experience. It goes back much further, but take for example my own family's denomination, The Episcopal Church in The United States of America. That's a long name with a story. The Anglican Church was The Church of England. The American Revolution caused a bit of a problem for members here, they worked the problems out and suffice it to say The Episcopal in The United States of America is not The Church of England. But part of the blame or credit for the diversity of Christian expression in the USA has to go to The Church of England. They never were able to send enough priests and Americans got used to not having Church authorities tell them what to do. So even the Anglicans were restless, not to mention all the break away religions that found a home in this bastion of empire.

Punctuated over time there have been several periods of intense religious interest, often referred to as Great Awakenings. Great Awakenings are "great" because they're on a national scale. But these periods of awakening owe a great deal to more modest and local movements whose influence isn't always more broadly felt, only sometimes are. Pentecostalism in the USA is relatively recent, with it's beginnings in the early part of the 20th Century. Few mid 20th Century predicted how big it would grow, but it surely has.

Pentecostalism is a rapidly growing religious movement in the developing world. Mike Davis in his book Planet of Slums points to Pentecostalism as an important religious movement in the masses of rural people moving into the mega cities of the 21st Century. In an interview with Davis at BLDGBLOG he makes the point:

I think many people on the left have made the mistake of assuming that Pentecostalism is a reactionary force – and it’s not. It’s actually a hugely important phenomenon of the postmodern city, and of the culture of the urban poor in Latin American and Africa.

Pentecostalism is less identified as an urban phenomena in the USA, nevertheless the self-organizing movement of poor people which Davis describes holds in the American experience. As does Davis's observation that it is "overwhelmingly, a religion of women." The Wikipedia article on Pentacostalism provides a short overview.

Sarah Palin is clearly an ambitious Republican politician and very much politically right. Sarah Palin's preference is to be called a non-denominational Christian rather than Pentecostal leads to a branch more gentrified and tamed than the broader movement. The Evangelical Movement has been gentrified, or associated with middle and upper class interests through millionaire media giants like Pat Robertson and James Dobson along with the rise of suburban mega-churches. Evangelical Christianity has become tightly entwined with Republican Party politics.

I do not think that the very politically right wing connection with populist Christianity is inevitable. I certainly don't think it reasonable to paint with a broad brush Evangelical Christians as a lunatic fringe. Although on that second part my thinking is that humanity in general suffers from our crazy beliefs. People stand on the threshold of destruction of life on our blue planet. How can we be so crazy? To some extent the political spectrum reflects personality and temperament, but all of us question how come we're so crazy and try to invent ways out of it.

The flash points in American politics can often be traced to views about reproduction. The arrangements we make for our children shape society in powerful ways. Palin's connection with Penetcostalism is interesting to me because women are so important in Pentecostalism. Their role is a fundamental difference and area of great contention among the other myriad of religious points of view in the Evangelical Movement.

I chose the picture of Lonnie Frisbee to illustrate this post first to remember that Christianity can be a counter cultural force. Second to show that the roots of the Christian right in the USA are more diverse than religious agnostics like me like to imagine. Sarah Palin's selection as the Republican vice presidential candidate brings many interesting issues into the spotlight which I hope to explore in future posts.

Blog Day

Here's the deal with Blog Day:

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.
With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

Am I prepared? Heck no! But I was forewarned because I read Erik Hersman's White African blog and remembered that today is Blog Day seeing his post 5 Great African Blogs for BlogDay 2008.

These are my five picks:

White African
My heart's in Accra
Composing
Busoga Shining Light Association
Kampala Junior Team

I love blogs. I spend an hour or two everyday reading blogs. It is true that some of the blogs I read are American political blogs with big audiences. I'm something of a political junkie, but wouldn't really call any of those blogs favorites. Almost everyday I read something a blog that touches me deeply, such that I can't help but to feel affection for the bloggers. It's hard to pick favorites when there's a personal stake in it. Of course Blog Day really isn't about favorites anyway, but about discovery and broadening our social stake among people everywhere.

Probably anyone reading this blog already knows Ethan Zuckerman's My heart's in Accra. If not link there now. Zuckerman perhaps more than any other blogger embodies the ethos of Blog Day, the value we can gain from expanding from our narrow comfort zones from where everyone is more or less like us to discover and listen to others.

I'm not very technically savvy and was late to discover the Internet. It was all very cool when I did, except geek talk just seemed impossible to understand. Among the many virtues of the Zuckerman's blog is he's a geek who knows how to say interesting things about technology in ways ordinary people can understand.

There are too many great posts to choose from. A recent one WE Magazine provides a great introduction, especially if you're able to watch a video interview on your connection. There's a transcript at the same link so people with slower connections can read the interview.

I think it somewhat an advantage that I got online later than most. I'm old enough that electronic games weren't part of my growing up. In fact, I can remember the fascination transistor radios had when they were new. ATM machines still have a bit of a "what will they think of next" feel to me. So the possibilities the Internet opened up were quite startling to me. Zuckerman wisely warns about cyber-Utopianism, I think I caught a dose of that. But just surfing around and seeing some of the craziness provides an antidote of sorts. Nevertheless, the Internet changes things, and the exciting thing is that we get to decide even in small ways what sorts of difference will make a difference.

About the same time that I discovered Zuckerman's blog, I found Phil Jones. Phil has several blogs and other Internet sites he maintains. He links to them under the heading Synaesmedia at his blog Composing. Phil's posts are mostly links, sometimes with a short comment. Occasionally he writes longer essays, but always has something important to contribute.

Phil demurred at my calling him a "public intellectual" pointing out that most of his time and effort is engaged in his day job as a coder engaged in supply chain management. Still I've learned more from Phil about how the differences a world of people connected with communications technologies make than anyone else. I also love that he's a Brit living in Brazil. So I get look at Brazil I otherwise wouldn't.

At the end of the WE Magazine the interviewer asked him if he could have three wishes what they'd be? One of Zuckerman's wishes was this:

I think maybe my second wish was that everyone had someone who was emotionally relevant to them who lived in a very different place.

I've been corresponding over the Internet with my friend Nathan Magumba almost ever since I got online. We've never met in person, but we're good friends by now. Nathan has long been strived to be of service to his community. He founded a community based organization called the Busoga Shining Light Association. For a while I tried to convince him of the value of blogging. That didn't take, but recently without any prodding on my part took the plunge and started blogging. Check out Busoga Shining Light Association. One of the reasons I'm excited is now that he's talking online, it makes it easier for me to talk about our common interests too.

It is quite possible for people we meet online to be emotionally relevant. I haven't known Kayiwa Fred so long as I've known Nathan. Kayiwa is in Kampala and Nathan in Iganga. They've never met, except for the Internet. I think Kayiwa was really surprised when he found out from Nathan how long we'd been friends. While attending college Kayiwa is actively involved with youth football (soccer). Like Nathan Kayiwa really wants to find ways to contribute to his community in uplifting ways. He's discovered social media, even while like me finds it hard to understand most of the time. Still check out Kayiwa's blog Kampala Junior Team. From the links on the sidebar you can find other online ways to make connections.

A friend of Kayiwa's in Wales has started The KJT International Supporters Club. Kampala is a different place, and Snowdonia is different too. I've never been to Uganda. Now since I have good friends there I hope to be able to travel there one day. Many years ago when I was 17 I did travel to Wales. Zuckerman's first wish in that WE Magaizne interview is that people would have a chance to experience a place radically different from what their own like he was able when at just 20 he went to study in Ghana. He says:

And it really changed how I view the world in a very positive way.

Perhaps Wales wasn't so radically different from Western Pennsylvania as Kampala might be. Still it seemed far away to me then. Perhaps what travel changes most is to open up our imaginations to how complex and beautiful living is. We live in natural communities and in communities of people. Being in a different place makes it impossible to take our communities for granted--makes it hard anyway to. Travel is a very important form of education. The Internet makes travel more possible than ever before; if we make our stories available and if we are willing to listen to the stories of others. Ethan Zuckerman is right to think that makes all the difference.

We Can Solve It

We Can Solve It

What I should be doing is writing to my friend Kayiwa Fred in Uganda. Kayiwa saw that I had mentioned that I was having a hard time locating his blog One Reaching Another and messaged me with the link in Google Chat. At the time the blog I was looking for was about a youth football league he's instrumental in called Kampala Junior Team. Actually both blogs are in my blog reader. I also had subscribed to an earlier experiment and never removed it from the list. Somehow when went to that outdated URL from my blogreader it blinded me to the presence of his current blogs. A friend of mine calls the tendency for men not to see what is right in front of their eyes, Male Pattern Blindness.

I should be writing him because he asked some specific geek-like questions. I'm no geek, and have told him as much. But his questions are such that I will learn a bit as I try to form some answers. Earlier in the evening I did a bit of research, and it's going to take a bit of work. Maybe I'll write him tomorrow. Ha, but at least I linked to his blogs which is something I've been meaning to do for a while. Hey, maybe I'll even update my blogroll one of these days.

I was looking for a specific post the other day at The African Uptimist and was shocked and embarrassed to see this blog on his blogroll. It's much easier for me to operate under the assumption that nobody reads this blog. The fact is that hardly anyone does, and that hardly makes a big difference. African blogs are of great interest to me and I value the bloggers who take the time to write them. It's about time that I contribute too. The wonderful thing about blogging is it's about connecting and community building.

My friend Pingting has quite gently told me I would do well to edit: less is more. Mercy, I'm afraid I've never gotten beyond the free writing style. As a result, only after a mountain of words do I get around to explaining the link at the top of the post. The link is to a video of highlights of a speech that Al Gore made in Washington on Thursday about energy. I like the determined optimism of We Can Solve It referring to the energy crisis and global warming, but it's hard for me to muster feeling really optimistic. Geez, when I went to YouTube less than 800 people had watched the video. Everybody knows that global climate change is a really big deal, but most of us seem confused that there's much we can do about it. An out of town friend called me up this evening. He likes to talk politics and the first thing out of his mouth was about Gore's speech. Then he asked about T. Boone Pickens. I've developed an aversion to Texas oilmen lately. My stomach also churns thinking of billionaires who think that water is the new oil. So I was happy the conversation turned from politics to the big news that my friends have rescued an unwanted pet.

My avoidance of the issue of carbon-based energy really is pathological. The word is out: "We're addicted to oil." So avoidance fits the pattern all addicts play in denial. When it comes to addictions, I suppose a good dose of resolve and some optimism are necessary. The first step is to admit there's a problem and we'd probably never get on the road to the first step without them. Ah, but right the first step in AA is not only admitting that our lives are in a mess, it's also admitting powerlessness over alcohol. Using AA as a metaphor, the road to recovery from addiction involves re-contextualizing the system of us and oil. And there's some higher power involved there too. Hum, not sure where this leads, except to say I strongly suspect that solving the addiction to oil will require much more than optimism and resolve.

Elizabeth Kolbert seems mighty clear-eyed from this oil junkie's perspective. At least she's well on the way to understanding the how dire the consequences of carbon-based energy really is. Her writing at The New Yorker on the subject is the best I've read in the press. It can be depressing reading nonetheless, but her recent piece The Island in the Wind was encouraging. Gore proposes that within a decade all electricity in the USA should be produced from energy sources other than carbon-based ones. That seems wildly optimistic, and yet Kolbert's report about the Danish island of Samso shows that's more possible than I imagine.

One of the bits in her piece was about the 2,000-Watt Society. It's a vision that stated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ten years ago, but I'd never heard of it before. Kolbert writes:

One way to think about the 2,000-Watt Society is in terms of light bulbs. Let’s say you turn on twenty lamps, each with a hundred-watt bulb. Together, the lamps will draw two thousand watts of power. Left on for a day, they will consume forty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy; left on for a year, they will consume seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours. A person living a two-thousand-watt life would consume in all his activities—working, eating, travelling—the same amount of energy as those twenty bulbs, or seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours annually.

People in the "developed" world have got to get on this diet in short order, and for carbon-based energy addicts like me that means big changes.

I opened this post citing my laziness about not writing to a friend in Uganda. I am lazy. The more important part to me is my friends. Over the years via the Internet I've developed friendships with a few people in Uganda. These friendships mean a lot to me. The negative effects of global warming will impact everyone. But the cruel injustice is that already poor people will be very disproportionately affected. Having friends means I cannot slough that off. Most of my friends in Uganda consume much less than the 2000 Watts. As we in the West move to reduce our energy consumption for a sustainable future, the many in the rest of the world need more energy. We all need to invent ways of living within limits, and these inventions maybe implemented locally but must have a global focus.

I've got some things to say about injustice and responsibility, but I'll spare you until another day.

Layers

Bloggers make a lot more sense when they blog a lot. I don't make sense, but suspect it would be worthwhile for me to start blogging more often. I do post fairly frequently within a social network called Ned. For many reasons it's hard to take stuff from one context and place it in another. Blogs seem to have a fairly inclusive context and social networks more exclusive. So it's a matter of finding the right pattern of correspondence. I suppose I won't find what's the right sort of stuff to put here unless I start putting stuff here again.

The many blog posts I read, and the conversations generated by them contribute much to my day. Among the bloggers I love reading is Phil Jones and his several blogs. Ethan Zuckerman has generated a great conversation about homophily; i.e. birds of a feather flock together, on the Internet. It's quite a stretch to say that Phil thinks like I do. Phil Jones is a computer scientist, I am so not. Then again, a recent post of his Why Geeks are doomed in a Suit world raises some points in one context that I'd been thinking recently about in another context.

Phil begins his post pointing to a critique by Joel Spolsky of Java-oriented Computer science education. Spolsky thinks that some culling of students from CS studies is necessary, not only for the future of Computer Science, but also for the happiness of would be computer scientists. Some people will never be happy in the field. I knew that for myself never even having to venture into a demanding CS class.

If you know about computer programming, I urge you to read Phil Jones. I don't know anything about it, but this caught my attention:

The Geek's job is to make the abstraction levels fit together. Of course the only way to achieve this is with an understanding of both the higher and the lower levels : simultaneously. And the easy shifting from one to another.

Via 3Quarks Daily a fantastic blog where I get a steady fix for my xenophilia jones, there was a link to an artcle by Paul Ehrlich in Seed. Cultural Evolution has the snippet at 3Quarks along with the smart comments there, and Cultural Evolution: Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do? is the link to the whole article.

I have enormous respect for Paul Ehrlich as a scientist and public intellectual. But this article seems so wrong and sloppy in so many ways. That alone probably wouldn't have bothered me much except for Ehrlich thinking that the article describes good science towards answering his question: Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do? I emphatically don't think what he describes is good science. That puts me in a peculiar position, on one hand is Ehrlich, an esteemed scientist and on the other is me, some blogger in a basement. Who will you believe?

Oh boy, where to start. Well, Phil's observation about making abstraction levels fit together very succinctly gets to the nub of my disagreement with Ehrlich's study. Ehrlich is interested in the question of whether human culture evolves via natural selection. Ehrlich begins:

If we wish to understand and predict culture change generally, viewing culture as an evolving trait in analogy with genetic evolution is a very useful place to start.

This seems very reasonable to me. But as Ehrlich proceeds, it seems obvious that he's not very careful about the in analogy part. In analogy seems a very particular level of abstraction. It's one thing to say, "Her hair is as soft as a mink's coat." and quite another to begin collecting her hair to make a mink coat.

Ehrlich's article proceeds to tell the story of some of the ways that cultural evolution has gone off the rails into absurdity by following too closely on Darwin's heals. I suppose that's necessary to assure us that he had no intention of falling into the same pits. He asserts:

There are clear patterns in cultural evolution, which are just as prevalent as those in genetic evolution.

Then he proposes that what's necessary is a simple hypothesis which can be tested. Rather implicit in what comes next is that Ehrlich has forgotten entirely the in analogy part; that is, his hypothesis presumes that natural selection works as the engine driving cultural evolution. My head is beginning to spin because I'm not sure what culture means to Ehrlich, for example on what scale, i.e. French culture as distinct from US culture. I'm also not sure at all what exactly culture is analogous to in genetic evolution. Is it analogous to the phenotype of an organism, to a species, to an ecological system, or what? Apparently I'm dense, because there is no attempt on Ehrlich's part to make this part of the analogy clear. Is it obvious? If it is, then surely the analogy must be that culture is a kind of species. Without thinking too much about it, that analogy will break down for many purposes. In any case at this point in the article a warning is flashing in my head: Abstraction level confusion!

Here is the hypothesis that Ehrlich came up with along with Simon Levin:

We believed that the evolution of technological norms would generally be more rapid than that of ethical norms.

It concerns me that "technological norms" along with "ethical norms" seem hard to rigorously state. What exactly are they? Can you look up a list of those somewhere? But the main problem is there is no attempt to connect what "technological norms" and "ethical norms" might be in cultural evolution in analogy to genetic evolution. What are they like? Perhaps organs of an individual of a particular species?

Ehrlich then describes his false starts in looking for data that might be used to test their hypothesis. He writes:

Unfortunately, ethnographies are written more like novels than scientific studies, and it is impossible to be certain of all the crops grown and the counts of deities.

My first thought was that was just a gratuitous zinger directed towards anthropologists--They're not real scientist! Unfortunate that Ehrlich seems not to wonder why he encounters stories, and finds it justified merely to judge them unfortunate. Where there are stories it's a sure signal of relevance. The judge inquires: "Quilty or Not Quilty?" It's no good to reply: "Your honor, I have long hair."

Ehrlich was determined to ignore all complications, and locates some data about the canoes of Oceania. With that data Ehrlich has a colleague analysis it into functional traits and symbolic traits. I'm wondering what are canoes to culture in analogy to genetic evolution? What do symbolic decoration on canoes tell us about "ethical norms" and how would we know? I have several more questions, but it appears that Ehrlich is content just to have these two invented categories of canoe traits to test his hypothesis.

The conclusion after studying changes in canoes over time is the decorations change much more frequently than the functional traits; ergo

The original Ehrlich-Levin hypothesis was rejected.

Even at this point I would have been happy with the piece if Ehrlich had stopped to wonder even a little how two famous ecologists could have muddled things so thoroughly. But no, Ehrlich concludes:

We directly tested a theory of cultural evolution. Our work has helped to uncover a piece of the larger, more complex process of culture change and has shown that it is reasonable to think of that change as evolution.

How has this research shown that it is "reasonable to think of that change as evolution?"

At every stage of this inquiry it seems to me that Ehrlich has paid little attention to levels of abstraction. And then having produced a muddled mess shouts "Proof!" It seems nuts to me, really nuts.

It's too bad that Phil's bosses don't appreciate where he's coming from. He does a good service in pointing to a reason why. I'm lucky I'm not a geek;-) It is quite upsetting to read an article by an eminent scientist discussing inquires into the nature of things with another very eminent scientist, enlisting colleagues from a prestigious University in a terribly flawed study and that along the line nobody said this is BS.

I flunked out my first go round in college. Logic was one of those culling courses Spolsky refers to, and I got culled, twice. So I'm not so sure about my abilities in handling abstractions. What I am sure is I expected better from Paul Ehrlich!