We have to acknowledge the hideous costs of many human achievements that we value, including this reflective sense itself, and recognise that there is no redemptive Hegelian history or universal Leibnizian cost-benefit analysis to show that it will come out well enough in the end.
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity
The question often comes up, “How did you and Flame meet?”
Maybe people only ask you how you’re doing
’cause that’s easier than letting on how little they could care
But I think it’s a pretty interesting story. I’ve given a lot of answers, and I wanted to come up a canonical response.
The simplest answer is that we met through a mutual friend, but I think the long story is worth the words, riddled with risks, unlikely turns, and not a little magic.
I’m back, after a trip that couldn’t hardly have been better. See the evidence. Kiev particularly deserves more visits, if you like coffee on every corner and sushi in every restaurant.
During the trip, I read India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, a diverse collection of Indian short stories, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a disturbingly misleading manual on getting rich quick.
After an NYT article (from Science Times) I read just before starting the trip, I’m trying to keep a “research journal”, and putting aside my topically organized notepads for a nicely-bound chronology. I can’t tell yet if it’s worth the change.
Flame is writing witty, daily posts on the Travelers Network for our travels this summer:
http://travelersnetwork.org/sifi
The quality of the posts is only beat by the excellent places themselves.
Sometimes I think I should have stuck to being a software developer– it would have meant less time at the computer. I’m looking forward to summer being over, when things should get a little less hectic.
I recently put together a presentation of my current researchy projects for my new advisor, Upmanu Lall. I discovered that no one at Columbia does what I want to do (most recently: Fisheries and Complexity), but Upmanu has an encyclopedic knowledge of new techniques and is super supportive to let me pursue my own projects. Here’s the presentation, for anyone interested:
The biggest piece this leaves out is a cool iPad app startup that I’m working half-time for to support Flame’s impending master’s program (Climate and Society at the Earth Institute!) and our summer travels (see below).
My uncle Bill from New Mexico visited NYC for the first time last weekend, reminding me of all the reasons I love my father’s side of the family. I don’t often keep in touch with them– on the whole, an open, troubled, intelligent, down-to-earth clan– but that is something I need to remedy.
My non-research plans for the summer have coalesced into a strategic odyssey across half the globe. It’s strategic because I can get financial help for three of the four main stops, and the two others are enroute to them. It will be an odyssey since each main stop is only for a week. Here’s the plan:
Anyone want an apartment in NYC at Columbia-subsidized rates for those dates?
I just went to Ireland for spring break (I flew back on St. Paddy’s day)! It was the most relaxingly enjoyable trip I’ve had in years. If you want to read about it, see http://travelersnetwork.org/luckybreak. I had a pile of posts to write– about a zine of spirituality, psychology, and politics I want to start, and a rant about positive psychology– but this has been on my table longest:
People often mistake me as being from another country, and I always blush. Who wants to be from the great monster of imperialism, unhindered capitalism, waste, and environmental myopia? There are a lot of reasons to not be proud of the actions of my country– its government and the collective effects of its people– but I’ve realized that there are core traits of American culture that are wonderful and I hold deeply. Surely many come from privilege, but there they are. Not all American’s live by these values, but they strike me as quintessentially American, and I am proud to share them.
These are only a small share of the values I hold, and without doubt community, sharing, love, travel, and play all are very important to me. But for some reason, they don’t seem as American, and who would want to just be an American?
I’m reading “The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World” (Owen Flanagan) for my program’s bookclub. The book rolls around what strikes me as a fruitful intersection of pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy (“neurophilosophy” and “eudaimonics”), and I don’t want to critique the value of this project. But the book presents itself as a rigorous philosophical inquiry, and this I struggled with. The author is a naturalist (“The world is material; we are social animals; meaning is to be found in human ‘spaces'”), which would be fine if he didn’t make such a shoddy attempt to argue against other philosophies.
I’m a agnostic mysticist– I believe that the material world is a consequence of a non-material existence from which consciousness derives. But I’m interested in other philosophies on their own terms, and open to discovering that the mystic world is an illusion. But neither mysticism nor naturalism seem capable of proving the other wrong, so intelligent people become comfortable with the unresolvability.
From his naturalist stance, Owen points out that people’s first aim is to survive, and have basic needs met. With this, they feel a drive toward the good, true, and beautiful. Here, “meaningful human lives… involve being moral, having true friends, and having opportunities to express our talents, to find meaningful work, to create and live among beautiful things, and to live cooperatively in social environments where we trust each other”. But in the rich world, most of us (or at least most of us educated, white males), we have all those things. We are happy. So then, do we strive for contentment or nirvana?
I claim that at this point, people turn to, and develop, a philosophy. This helps them decide how to employ happiness and navigate meaning, and a philosophy is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, many of them then imagine that “a philosophy” is “the philosophy”– that is, the right one– and strive refine their philosophy to try to make it that right one, and then argue for it and against others. This path is useful to a point, and there is great progress that can be made refining one’s philosophy. But if there is a path toward “true philosophy”, I don’t think this is it. As much as the modern approach to philosophy involves refining “a philosophy”, it is psychologically fruitful. When it attempts to exclude other philosophies, it is a source of unhappiness and bigotry.
If these practices constitute philosophy, and we would rightly all call ourselves philosophers, then we need a new word for the work of Plato and other ancient philosophers. I call this line of inquiry “philosophology”. Plato asked, “What does it mean to be a philosopher?” That is, what ties all of these philosophies together and what distinguishes them? How do we shape a philosophy, and how are we shaped by it? What are they reaching toward, and how is it attempted to be grasped?
These are not quite psychological questions, though they aren’t too far from them. They are questions about the nature of meaning and existence, the relationship between human and universe, and the potential for right action– but instead of philosophies, which are about answering these questions, philosophology asks questions about those answers and the questions that resulted in them. It recognizes that all of these questions have many and ambiguous answers, and takes that as a natural state worth studying. I believe that if there is a path to truer philosophy, it must be from this basis.
No day is typical. The last two Fridays represented the proto-climaxes of weeks of curating after months of research, with a Prezi on Complexity and a Update on Melt-Flooding. This Friday was an opportunity to skype to Paris to discuss paper topics with our professor of Global Governance. I said “institutional change”, and she said, “Cross-scale dynamics”.
Then to a sustainability career fair. The African Wildlife Foundation and the EPA’s oversight branch recognized the potential for software skillz plus sustainable development knowledge. Or they just had nicer folk at their tables.
After Information Theory (English text has 1.34 bits of information per letter; learning how to compress data from arbitrary discrete distributions to “fair bits”; wondering if it could be used to make continuous distributions Gaussian), a wonderful dinner with Prodigal. We went to the oldest tavern in NYC, from 1793, with the largest collection of whiskies. And apparently I really do like Rye liquor– the 21 y.o. Vintage Rye was delicious. For mixed drinks, give me something girly and sweet, with a cherry if possible, but in liquor I guess I run manlier.
I’m TAing a class called “Progressive Alternatives”, an exploration of the situation of the left, and an attempt to definite its future goals. If anyone would like to be involved in the wiki/discussion board, get in touch.
One student asked, “What does it mean to be Progressive?”, positing that it has something to do with progress. I’m half-crossposting my response.
I think one answer is more than we can hope for, but I don’t think that progressivism has much to do with progress. Progressivism is a catchy title, and sounds like an appropriate opposite to conservativism, but they aren’t opposites anyway. Several socially conservative values are liberal, and the right’s approach to economics seems to have almost nothing to do with conserving anything. Both sides want political change, and both the left and right would recognize things they like and dislike about different kinds of progress.
There seem to be two approaches to this problem. One holds that the left has a vision of a better society, based on personal empowerment. That society would be flexible and changing, but it wouldn’t necessarily be characterized by aggregate progress. Sachs seems to take the other approach: the left has underlying values– of justice and stewardship mostly, I think.
There are plenty of pitfalls here: associating progressivism too closely with current politics, trying to delineate the camps too starkly, or building out different axes that plot the space. Does anyone have a statement that they think pegs either left’s ends or its values?
My progressivism is closely tied to ecocentrism, and the recognition we have responsibilities to the whole continuum of life, including other species, other places, and other times.
One of the books originally planned for the course on this topic was “Left & Right” by Norberto Bobbio. I haven’t read it, but I’m curious if anyone has and can report the answer.