Getting Personal

Over the next few months I am going to be making a most dramatic move. After about twenty-seven years in the big city on the East Coast I am moving to a much smaller town down South quite close to Asheville. One of the main reasons is economic. For those who might not know, from the time I was born until about two years ago ( I will be fifty in October), I was involved with a family business which shall remain nameless for the purposes of this piece. Unbeknownst to me, around the time of my father's death, many complications surrounding the condition and financial well being of this business emerged such that it was necessary to essentially sell it off to a large company that specializes in saving businesses in trouble.

Most unfortunately, a condition of that transfer was that I would no longer be in employment, even though I was one of the only people associated with the business who was there from the very beginning and at one time or another had done just about every job that had been associated with the business, including assembly line work in the factory, shipping, bookkeeping in the office, opening a couple of new accounts on the road, and attending industry conventions.

For a period of about thirty years I also wrote a regular arts and culture column that was associated with the business and interviewed a number of prominent figures including Jacques Barzun, James Ellroy, political activists, musicians of all kinds, and other kinds of artists. Many of the major artistic events of the later 1980s and through the 1990s were ones I reviewed or covered in some way. This newspaper was an opportunity for me to keep in touch with was going on culturally and gave me institutional support for my journalistic duties.  The newspaper was canceled sometime in 2011. Speaking of the company as a whole, from what I understand, the company will go on but in an altered form and with a largely new group of people constituting it's staff and personnel.

For about fifteen years I had no knowledge of some of the problems present in the business as I had no authority in managing or running operations. My knowledge was restricted to matters such as how the product was selling (and it did have a steady and loyal following) and some changes in product design. An enormous amount of information was unknown to me, leaving me with the impression that things stood on far sturdier ground when the ground had actually been something like a sinking quicksand. Only over time was everything presented to me. There is a quite universal human interest in safeguarding people from bad news of any kind, or to avoid conflict. Also because I have not lived in the physical location of operations of the company itself for a few decades, I was not a part of the daily culture of the work environment and cannot in any way comment on the nature of that.  One of the things about journalism of course is that you can send in articles from a destination far from the physical office and this was practically as true in the pre-internet days. And most of my musical projects were on the East Coast as well, for a time in the 90s, in Europe as well.

In 2015 I sold my home and tried to live life as a renter which, to put it in a most understated fashion, has not been easy, the rental market being quite overcrowded, volatile and unstable. From 1999 to 2015 I had lived in a two bedroom home in the greatest location in a thriving city. I was able to do my musical work anytime of the day or night, as I lived over a garage and thus shielded all my neighbors from the sound. For two decades I enjoyed this setup, thinking it would not end.

Currently I have found a place where I can do my musical and writing projects at far less cost and in relative peace and that place happens to be in another geography of these United States. If you must know I will be living alone as I have done for some thirty years. A lot of my decision making is based on the fact that I am not planning - for the short term anyway - to live with anybody.  My traveling 1970s museum will be coming with me though it is much smaller than many would think.  Most importantly of all, I will finally be reunited with the magnificent Steinway on which I leaned to play back in the late 1970s and early 80s and which, for various reasons I was separated from due to my decision to live on the East Coast and the inability to find a home to accommodate a grand. Happily, my mother preserved and saved the piano for me, keeping it in top condition. I have played pianos  in Lincoln Center, and other places around the world and when I say this piano is one of the greatest I have ever touched I would not be in any sense exaggerating.

One of the first items of business for the new year, aside from finally creating a digital software score for my collaborative trombone and piano concertino with Sanifu Al Hall Jr.  I am very excited to do a double concerto with Hall. He is an extraordinary musician with not only full knowledge of music itself but also aspects of musical production, technology, and engineering. And of course the trombone is an instrument that can always use more utilization and the combination with piano, strings, brass and a popular rhythm section is a good idea.

But as that double concertino is already written my next quite big project is to write a second piano concerto for myself, a second concerto for improvised piano and orchestra. The last one I wrote was in 1997. I feel it is time for another one. I have already begun collecting themes for it. It will have many styles in it, a lot of which will be quite romantic as well and rhythmic, with lots of room for good old fashioned improvising over the all important changes. But more on that at another date.

The point of all of this biographical summary is for me to reflect on the nature of radical change in ones' life. I have been meaning to write a philosophically inclined post on the subject for close to a year now and I am taking this "life event" as an opportunity do put a few thoughts down on the nature of change.

Now one of the things we are constantly told in the contemporary or current epoch is that change is the only constant in life. One recurring meme (the word meme being of the more unfortunate of the new jargon that infests our life, whether it is imported from the humanities or the sciences) is this slogan, common in advertising, "it's what you do." Never before has there been such slavish conformity as during our current internet age.

One of the most profoundly anti-democratic events of the past thirty years is the fact that we replaced an entire way of life, based on things like telephones, retail stores to which we travelled to buy the things of life, and all the tiniest habits that we could call physical and three dimensional, with our current internet/computer based life. When being normative in my description I have called it the age of politicization and moralization (that is, a world of moral and emotional disapproval or praise of all human action and a division of the world into parties based on whether it is a like or a dislike). If I were being more descriptive I would call it the Age Of Simultaneity, an age whose main feature is that you can call up in seconds visual documentations or copies of every piece of visual or audible culture humans created for much of the twentieth century up to the present.

I call this decision anti-democratic because not once were the millions or billions of people really asked to reflect on whether any of this was a good idea, nor were they given an option to opt out. A few engineering geniuses simply decided we should live like this, mainly because it reflected their tastes or sensibilities, or specialized knowledge. There were no public forums of significance, except to announce what it was and how it was supposed to work, which by definition is not any kind of forum, and certainly no public deliberations about the pros and cons.

There was much serious critique among intellectuals, by Sven Birkerts, Jaron Lanier, and others, but this was never a public forum involving real-life decision making. We all sort of woke up one day and found we had to live this entirely new kind of life wherein we have to walk around looking at these portable objects all day, since it is has been decreed that these little objects are to be used for everything we do. I must say that though democracy is many times the right way to go, it is not always the best policy. That something is done in an anti-democratic fashion is not necessarily a case against the thing done. It seems to me, however, that when it comes to matters mandatory for social and private life,  a little democracy might be in order.

One of the reasons for this enormous cultural revolution is that the form the revolution took was in keeping with some of the oldest intuitions of most of the world, particular religious traditions: that the world and all people in it are at bottom one and the physical manifestations of separation are unreal, backwards and exclusive and are to be overcome if we are to progress. In that sense the internet is a mass market, literalist form of the oldest perennial philosophy.

The problem with this of course is that we can't really know for sure if we are all one: it is just a mystical feeling that a lot of people have always had. Of course a scientist or mystic can prove to us that is the case, and in this sense we are one; physicist and mystic seem to converge on this. When I question the proposition of oneness what I mean is that we can't know for sure how we are supposed to live in consequence of the fact.  Moreover, life consists of both oneness and separateness: our physical embodiment after all,  siamese twins notwithstanding, is singular (and this is important even if physicality is one sense illusory in the sense certain religions assert).

We also can't be sure that the destruction of separation or distance of time and space is either necessary, salutary or vindicatory. And the ability to reproduce or recall every record of all the stuff humans have created in the past in an instant in the present raises many more issues than mere copyright. There are questions not only of monetization of course, which might be the most urgent, but also sanity, and possible limits in human psychology. If one is to invoke incipient AI, there is the additional question of the "Turing Test", labor competition, joblessness on a mass scale, and all the rest of it.

It is, in my mind anyway, highly more likely that we aren't one in a literal sense or can't achieve oneness, at least without a fight - the kind of fight that might make such achievement pyrrhic: our differences are significant and profound, maybe inevitable and permanent. Maybe humans need to be as separate from one another, if only to keep the peace, as together with one another.  And there is the crucial issue of necessary difference. But it is important to note that we never had the debate or discussion of whether it was ever a good idea to have everything in one place as we now do. And as I said, if we were to have the debate, the bias would have always been towards anything that smacks of unity or togetherness, especially since so much of the evil of previous ages appears to us chiefly as a matter of  false or malicious separation, a violation of our essential and underlying unity.

There was much talk, back in the anxiety filled 1990s, when talk of togetherness and community was just getting started, of how the once much needed "differentiation of spheres" had gone too far, resulting in the fragmentation and isolation of spheres and loss of some kind of integrated unity. It appears, however, that ever since we have gone as far as we can in the opposite direction. The values of opacity, of privacy, of exclusion and differentiation have been under the greatest assault. And we have to live with the result.

I digressed into all of this reflection upon technological change because the past two years have been years of wrenching change for me personally, all of it unforeseen and unbidden. (I will not get into public or political change which as we all know is as dramatic, volatile and unstable as you can get). That is, I want to make clear not only that not all change is the same but that change has differing and different meanings depending upon one's stage in life, one's numerical age, one's temperament, one's abilities, customs and a whole host of other quite individualized things. You simply can't make  the word change into a synonym for a kind of normative account of progress.

 I think the day as a society we begin to start from and with the individual, and the individualized profile, will be the day we begin to make collective decisions that allow for real diversity. Given current trends, concerned as they are with conceptualizing human life in terms of large groupings, that day appears far off. We could create a world that works for both the shy and anxious as well as the outgoing and domineering, while reigning in the negative side effects of anybody who goes to the farthest extreme, all the while with compassionate understanding of what are the inevitable temperament and leanings.

Music for me is one of the greatest of the arts, but all the arts share a family resemblance. One of the things I love about music is its abstraction. But that is but one of several possibilities, I think any art form, however troubling the content, especially if the content is troubling, if, to name a prominent example, it is representational about people in less than desirable circumstances, is a means for humans to create a big school for themselves. Art is really this big school, and in this sense no difference whatsoever than what used to go by the name of religion, where, by absorbing or experiencing the art object, you can reflect in a neutral space, a partially disinterested space, and try to figure things out. Whether you see art as a means for increasing knowledge or, in Andrei Tarkovsky's more rigorous, but possibly superior formulation, you see art as increasing preparedness for death and salvation of the soul, such differences of emphasis matter less than the sameness of all art in its almost religious necessity. Art and life are one in that art is an expression of what is going on in our life. Art and life are separate in that art is a time out from life and thus, a meditation upon life.

Well I have said enough I think for this post. Time to write some more music.

More Childhood Memories From the 1970s: the mysteries of human character

My dad in 1977!

I have been thinking about the word moderate and moderation, in reference to the title of my blog. I have also been thinking about writing down some more events from my childhood and adolescence.

It has been far too long - I believe a couple of years in fact - since I wrote in prose form concerning personal matters. There is so much from my childhood and adolescence to pick and, if possible, explore that there is always the question of what my "sensory system" (as one of the ways in which I describe my peculiar temperament) will recall out of the steaming flux.
http://automotivemileposts.com/thunderbirdmileposts70s.html

One of my fondest memories of being with my father is the opportunity to ride around the city of Tampa in a wide bodied red Thunderbird convertible, with sort of bucket seats, a little shag on the floor and a white vinyl top. My favorite part of the convertible was the 8 TRACK and I would create my own mix tapes with music that obsessed me and which I tried in earnest to study and absorb. As one example of a mix tape, one would open with a Bach Bradenburg Concerto, continue with Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder, then a selection of Billy Cobham's Stratus album and finish with some solo piano of Bud Powell. The selections and order reflected my musical interests. And then there were the commercially preset releases of EARTH WIND AND FIRE, Chuck Mangione, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan and Randy Newman.

 I even loved how the songs would be interrupted abruptly with that violating, screeching sound, because of some technological limitation that couldn't accommodate  pieces of music over a certain duration. Rather than being frustrated with this clearly awful design for music production or distribution, I would laugh about it for its very absurdity, though others around me would not laugh and usually just complain about it ruining the proper flow of the music. I think it is very possible that these ruinous interruptions, disrespectful of the musical artists, to say the least, had an unconscious influence on my own collage styled sense of nonlinear historical and musical time in my own compositions. I think I knew I had an odd sense of humor at this early stage of life.

These were some  unsurpassed happy moments from my childhood.



But there were things far less happy in my childhood and they do somehow connect with the T-BIRD. Another notable thing about the car was the curious man who sold it to my father.  This man was initially a colorful, or "flashy" character to me. He was a used car salesman and the price for this Thunderbird was as low as was possible in those days.

But when he was not working he would come over to the family house, sometimes unannounced and in a state of visible intoxication, swearing graphically and asking rude questions about political or religious matters. My mother always had a very kind way of setting him on his way, usually by calling his wife and asking for her to come get him, yet again.

Mr. Anderson was sort of a figure out of a Michael Ritchie movie. I am thinking of Bruce Dern's Big Bob Freelander character in SMILE. He even wore similar powder blue leisure styled dacron suits, but with wild Quiana prints all over the elephant collared shirts underneath the suits, and the gold chains. Unlike the Big Bob Freelander character, Anderson could be mean, perhaps even sinister.

The last thing I heard about this salesman Mr. Anderson was that he was so incensed and offended by a particular episode of the Phil Donahue Show that he took a semi-automatic rifle and shot out the t.v. set. Immediately after he called the local affiliate and complained that Phil Donahue was an unAmerican communist and that he considered an act of treason for any television station to bring such a host in to the rooms of ordinary and decent Americans.

Shortly after this incident his wife filed for divorce and both people left Tampa, leaving nothing but a For Sale Sign hanging over his used car lot. I really liked Mr. Anderson until I heard about him shooting up that t.v. set. From my point of view he was that flashy salesman who sold my father a really cool car, or something to that effect. It was in the light of new information that I had to reconsider who or what this man really was. This revisionist information was a kind of external sensation - involving destroyed televisions, abused wives, screaming and yelling and the like.

There was something simply wild about Anderson. His form of right-wing excess was and is so common in this country. It was around me all of the time and I grew so completely used to it. It was the most shocking thing in the world to come back East and meet people who were not rabid like that in their passions.  I had no idea there was this moderation because I saw so little of it. People who seemed urbane and laid back. It was not their Liberalism, if that is the correct formulation, that made them different. It was the fact that they did not make a federal case out of everything, or if if they did, it seemed under some kind of rational control. I craved that in my life, as a stay against the instability and volatility I encountered so often in Florida. Today when I read news about this or that extremist conservative movement or politician I am often reminded about these days. Perhaps I was seeing the birth of today's world.

A lot of understanding people really comes from aesthetic signs from the outside. This is what Oscar Wilde really meant when he said that it is only the superficial people who do not judge by appearances. Appearances might include modes of dress, eye movements. body language, speech of course, and patterns of outward behavior over a period of time.

It takes an enormous amount of volatility in feeling, reaction, however you choose to label it and with whatever psychological jargon of the moment, to take a gun and shoot at your t.v. set. Lest you think this was the sole province of a macho male like Mr. Anderson, the girls and women I met in Tampa had a similar volatility, usually about different things and expressed in different styles. If you got any of the religious ones started on a subject dear to their heart: the evils of Abortion for example, (being a common one), you would get screamed at about the issue as if your very own survival depended on whether you believed whatever the party line was.

I remember in particular one woman ranting for an entire hour about the evils of a man who dared to be bare chested in public on the side of a road, and how this man was a symptom of all that was rotten and evil in America. This was during some kind of field trip in the de rigueur wide bodied Buick station wagon with that damned wood panelling on the side. Now the car moved so fast that I don't remember seeing the man at all but I had to hear about him and what he symbolized for the hour. And the woman doing the ranting was the Liberal person in town: she was the head of a high school drama department!

And as I have written about in these personal series before, the behavior of children in some of my Floridian milieu was simply anti-scocial. Or maybe simply a-social. I really couldn't say. One kid threw me overboard in a canoe, causing me to come near death from drowning, only to be rescued by one of the counselors.

Another kid would grab and grope at the intimate anatomy of any girl who happened to be in the vicinity, sometimes in the most vile and aggressive of fashions. He would cause pain and then laugh about it, exposing a mouth with a couple of missing teeth and the worst case of acne you'd ever see and then grab at the crotch of his LEVIS Toughskins. My one attempt to correct him - by essentially beating him up so that he would cease his predations, the only time I ever hit anybody - got me suspended!  Amazingly the school took his side. I did hurt the kid and he had to be taken home that day and well, it practically went to Juvenile Court, or so that was the threat.

I saw kids physically attack their own parents and teachers, throw tantrums of all kinds. Indecent exposure was common, and in a most public fashion, particular with a couple of kids who were severely mentally disturbed. (One myth or cultural assumption of the"free schools" at that time was that you should just throw all sorts of kids in one room together to teach them, under some notion of radical egalitarianism).

One time a man beat his own son in front of me and some neighborhood kids in his trailer park home and we would all sort of watch, only too happy that we were not his children and outside the scope of his wrath. Oddly we never thought to report it or intervene. There was talk that he was taken away by the city and locked up for a very long time and that trailer was vacated.


Coming home, the home of my own mother and father, was always a kind of shelter from the outside world, since my home seemed relatively calm and supportive by contrast. For these I am eternally grateful to my parents, yet I did realize  much later that my own parents had little in common and lived for thirty years in conditions of undiscussed and silent unhappiness in their marriage. And regularly the outside world would intrude and it was never pretty, from religiously fundamentalist relatives, people peddling miracle cures and snake oil of all kinds and many other things that I couldn't begin to five a coherent description but involved lots of matching jumpsuits or jogging suits and sales of dubious motivational self-help books for one cause or another, whether religious or secular.

From the earliest age I had no idea of or illusion about natural, human innocence or any notion of the kind. Human evil and untrustworthiness seemed as much integral to the human animal as any highly touted and advertised kindness.

And the fare at the movie theaters worked in harmony with how life appeared in "reality":


As a result, to this very day, I look askance at human emotion. I recognize that it is often more valuable than thinking, and it sets human souls and spirits upward unto the heights of joy. I could not be a musician or at least the kind that I am without my feelings. Yet emotion just as often sends people crashing downward in a manner that brings everybody in the surrounding environment down with them. I think that many people have the deepest need to impose their beliefs, in essence how they alone experience the world, unto others, utterly blind to the profound differences between us as if by the act of such imposition they will feel less alone or convert others to their system. Having unusual and nonconformist feelings I learned long ago to never hope for such things. Oh I will talk your ear off about my interests, passions, etc. but I don't ever really mean to impose or convert. If there is agreement or harmony I take that as a pleasant surprise or happy accident, in the fashionable formulation of the moment. I am reminded of the George Ramsay quote about which I learned from psychologist Steven Reiss:

"The same difference of feeling and dullness of imagination explain what has often been observed: that one half of mankind pass their lives in wondering at the pursuit of others. Not being able to feel or to fancy the pleasure derived from sources other than their own, they consider the rest of the world as little better than fools, who follow empty baubles. They hug themselves as the only wise, while in truth they are only narrow-minded."

It seems that if people remembered this more than they do the world would vastly improve overnight. It is all part of this myth of consensus, and "getting to yes" and all of that earnest cheerleading that infects everything from TED talks, to current science, to, hell, how we even understand works of art. But that takes us a little further afield for my current purposes and will have to wait for a more appropriate time and place.

Taking Differences Seriously: An Introduction

"We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know." Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, Essays: First Series
In contrast and in contradiction to my previous post on Ronald Dworkin, I turn here from abstract and objective principles to personal and subjective values.

It is a commonplace view that the world or universe, at least the human social world, is a holistic totality. That everything is connected to everything else, and that there is thus a center from which to comprehend and  conform to an objective Truth appears a majoritarian proposition. This view has perhaps always been a predominant one in both secular and religious worlds; people even enlist hard science to support such a view.

I should like to introduce a contrary account.

It is abundantly clear that there are gripping and dramatic divisions which daily and increasingly fray, indeed practically dismember, our current society.  Whether it is conceived of as a polarization or cultural alienation, the really central question is whether such divisions reflect a contest between objective truths and falsehoods or,  conversely, subjective value.  Are such divisions the expression of equal and competing values, values that are incommensurable, to use Isaiah Berlin's carefully chosen word?

In many respects this might be thought of as the age of Psychology. Whatever differences experts and professionals may have over difference itself (the valence and extent of difference, whether individual temperament matters the most, or, conversely, large, group identity matters most), anybody - whatever their background - who has lived in a family, or dealt with coworkers, or simply observed the variety of motivations that create individual variations in human behavior, can attest to the power and intractability of such differences. The psychologist Steven Reiss has a theory of at least 16 different motivational values that, when found in various combinations, combine to make every one of us truly unique (and even invent some hypothetical individuals who have yet to be born!) In his two books, Who Am I, and The Normal Personality, he has put forth a scientific account of these variations in individuality. I believe Steven Reiss' project to be a great advance over theories of single and unified psychological health. (For example, the superiority of intimacy or social justice, to name two currently privileged values).

In past ages there have been many theories of group interests. On the political Left, to name the most prominent taxonomy of group identities, accounts of dominant and subordinate class identities, or accounts of  shared struggles owing to membership of a gender or ethnicity that have a certain history and experience have been put forth to explain a great deal of human behavior. Steven Reiss notes that when differences are discussed at all it is almost always large scale group differences that are being discussed rather than the harder to notice individual differences between any two people.

One of the virtues of the filmmaker Ozu was that his entire art was an exploration of the power of such differences. Though the setting of his films is an ostensibly unified one, at least on the surface, there is nevertheless immense drama in his films as, given the cultural unanimity, the underlying individual difference stands in relief, mainly because of the subtle comic or dramatic misunderstandings among his characters. Ozu's films are case histories of the power of temperament in the world.

One of the advantages of a contemporary post-industrial and post-agricultural society is, for all of the sins of such a society, it enables people to understand and realize their individuality in way that would have been impossible in heavily traditional societies marked by only duty or rank.

As we come to to see things in more intimate and psychological terms might we also understand large scale collective phenomena as a manifestation of individual psychology writ large? What if the conflicts that most inflame passions are not conflicts between a side that has it right and a side that has it wrong but, rather, conflicts that reflect subjective and tragic differences in values that admit of no central and objective solution? We can even take the most sensitive of examples to see this. What if, in the abortion debate, the anti-abortion side is not merely or only pathological misogynists, but rather people for whom sexuality is a most precious affair and family and childrearing are concerns to be placed above all others? Conversely, the pro-choice side takes the freedom of choice of individual female, and human lives very seriously, and thus sees a multiplicity of meanings and uses for sexuality. The abortion debate is between two opposing views of sexuality itself  - views that cannot be objectively morally evaluated precisely because they are so very different.


The painful truth is that sometimes there is no holistic totality in which we can inhabit to make the perfect choice, from an objective perspective.  This is what Isaiah Berlin meant in using the word incommensurable.


Sometimes whole epochs are in the grip of a single standard of human character. Ever since the presidency of Bill Clinton we are enthralled by a certain kind of magical and charismatic "people person". President Obama is constantly measured against this standard and found wanting. I never thought I would live in a world in which a journalist would publically ask the president if he "had juice".  It is not only the lack of respect and tact that had entered the public sphere that surprised me, doubtless the culmination of an excessively casual, rock n'roll influence upon all areas of life. It is the assumption that a leader must possess certain fixed psychological traits to be deemed a competent leader. The question concerned the juice, as if it were a masculinist magical elixir to deal with an intractable and hostile congress. It is like something from an old Firesign Theatre comedy skit. Yet this was a serious question. But, of course, the problem is not with Obama but with the belief in the juice itself. This is a belief that all problems can be solved and overcome and the failure to do so must always already be a failing of individual character rather than, say, the structural limits of an impossibly complex society. Who is to say how long this ideal of the "I feel your pain" people-person will last? Doubtless some time in the future it will be eclipsed by something else: the socially awkward loner who finds the cure for cancer, for example. And in the reign of a newfangled sensibility in the far future a figure like Clinton might seem corny and inauthentic. We might one day regard the current mode of expected behavior like that of opening up like a cheap suitcase.

Every currently fashionable philosophical orientation seems to me in error. The newfound interest in "Virtue" ethics blinds us to the inevitability of tragic choice; where choices aren't clearly right or wrong, or the product of character defects, but the result of innate limits. Utilitarian philosophy holds that pleasure and pain, and good and evil can be quantified as if a science by comprehending the whole "big picture": it is a view that intentionally disregards the innate biases and preferences of individual persons. Yet bias and preference is not always a bad thing. As Stephen Asma argues in his book Against Fairness, knee jerk fairness is ultimately a view that seeks to always disparage favoritism and bias when, in reality, there are many realms of life where bias is essential, preeminent among them, the prominence a parent's child holds for the parent over a stranger's child in another neighborhood or country. To say nothing of the notion of monogamy, superior artistry, and all other sorts of defensible favoritism.http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/16249

A utilitarian aims to know some general good for all while forgetting that there is really no such thing as an average person and that we must experience the world always from a biased and particular point of view. One cannot have it all, and one must choose  how to spend one's time. When the difference in choice is translated into a question over what is the objective moral law,  you get political disagreement.

Psychological disposition is powerful: think of the debate between an extroverted and introverted sibling inside a family about whether to go out to a party. When we move from light issues to the heaviest of issues, the causes of the conflicts in both might have similar roots, psychologically speaking.The extroverted sister wants to go out on the town and be the life of the party and the introverted sister or brother wants to stay inside and have peace and quiet. People become religious fundamentalists or liberal secularists and vote accordingly, not for objective moral principles, but because their choice serves their respective needs for freedom, order, loyalty, security, risk taking, and a whole host of other values.

Life is quite a bit like that Neil Simon light comedy The Odd Couple. Oscar Madison is not unclean and dirty, just very relaxed and loose.  Felix Madison is not anal retentive and uptight, as Oscar Madison might see it, just neat and precise. They each might pathologize the other but both men's habits and temperaments have something to be said for them. Objective truths are quite beside the point. It seems to me that many of the intractable and perennial debates in human life are extensions or collective manifestations of such individual and subjective differences. It is hard to realize that the minor issues of personality conflict in a light popular comedy are at the root - however hidden - of some of the most serious debates in public life. The difficulty in admitting the psychological root is that we always, already assume an Archimedean objectivity to be attainable, thus implying that psychology is a moot point.

Many of the conflicts inside families are in fact conflicts over competing and equally valid values. An intellectually inclined parent will be dismayed over a son turning out to be a jock or vice versa. I have often thought that the whole drama that we call The Sixties turned not only on a clash over objective moral truths like war and social justice but on differing generational styles and sensibilities. For the Left that drama was story of progress and liberation over outmoded and ethically compromised and flawed older generations. For the Right the drama was a tragic story about the growth of decay and slipping of standards. Both points of view ignore subjective, psychological difference however; they think they are in possession of the Truth. If the so-called Greatest Generation was about achievement, sacrifice and work, the Boomer generation was more about exploration, leisure, and work-life balance.  Steven Reiss uses the phrase "I don't get it and neither do you" to describe this sort of conflict between conflicting values.

 As I have remarked before, our culture is one that fails to see the beauty or truth in the quotidian. We also tend to see beauty in that which unites us rather than that which divides us. As an antidote we need illustrations of the power of individual difference and we need illustrations of live not lived in extremis. Thus my invoking of Yasujiro Ozu.http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/silence-is-golden-to-ozu

Imagine trying to "prove" the superiority of either Mozart of Beethoven over the other. They are both very different, even when working in similar style and often identical forms, and yet the quality of both is equally outstanding.

It is easy to see the power of individual difference in aesthetic preference; it is far harder to see the power of individual difference in forming political or religious beliefs. The usual image we have in mind when understanding or conceiving of conflict is the image of a person struggling to directly master or overpower another person. The more common, though less discussed picture is the conflict between two over a third, almost always a value that is in question i.e. how much to eat and what kind of food, questions of taste and so on. The reason for the conflict is that there is a choice that must be made between two equally valid courses: both cannot be pursued simultaneously, and one must be discarded.

Since practically every human being, however introverted or passive, aims to remake their environment in order to suit their values and tastes, all sorts of conflicts inevitably ensue, all the more so when the larger society has at least a partial commitment to maintaining the freedom to pursue and indulge a plurality of choices.

Usually experts try to recommend that in solving conflicts we emphasize our similarities. Yet I would suggest the opposite. We should bring up bad news and elephants in the room first. The more we are conscious of individual difference and, moreover, conscious that the causes of individual difference are not rooted in objective moral stances but rather in the partial, subjective emphases of the interlocutors or combatants, the more possibility there is of preventing conflict and domination.

The real secret to solving many of our seemingly intractable divides is to imagine and inhabit points of view utterly foreign to ourselves. Afterwards we can then return to our rather different or even opposed point of view - not to "give in" to the other side, but to hold our usual values a bit more provisionally. Fallibilism is one philosophic word for this move. This would look rather similar to what I imagine therapists do in so-called "couples' counseling".

The greatest and surest way to imagine or inhabit alien points of view is through works of art.

As historian Carlo Ginburg famously wrote:"The historian's task is just the opposite of what most of us were taught to believe. He must destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they came from societies very different from our own. The more we discover about these people's 'mental universe,' the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them." I am merely suggesting that we apply this principle to any two or more people inhabiting the same time and space and in the same culture.

Birthday Meditations

“Even if we distance ourselves from some of our thoughts and impulses, and regard them from outside, the process of trying to place ourselves in the world leads eventually to thoughts that we cannot think of as merely “ours”. If we think at all, we must think of ourselves, individually and collectively, as submitting to the order of reasons rather than creating it.” Thomas Nagel, The Last Word

Each of us has an internal state that has gone by many different names and been addressed in radically disparate ways. Some will speak of the soul or spirit, others simply talk of consciousness, possibly the dimmest among us will speak merely of a self-organizing organism, or even only neural circuitry. This interiority is a sacred bedrock. It is inviolable.  It is not only that this state is supremely individual unique - being full of colors, shades, tones, subtleties, nuances, indirection - but it is an opaque one. No amount of quantification or measurement will ever capture the limits of this state, so full and deep is its mysteries, so vast is its contents and horizon, to paraphrase the great Heraclitus ("the obscure").

Yet as we face the world, in and with our interiority, we face what is, in part, a profoundly external world, a world at times so external as to be quite alien and apart, however unified we might feel or claim to be with this external reality. There is a real separation here. A great deal of this external world consist of plethora of stimuli - literally "coming at us", of course in the form of solid objects as well as more fluid colors and lights, but above all in separate life forms, from humble vegetation, to complex animals, and, above all, other fellow humans who are as akin to us as they are opposite to us.

I must say that my chief problem as a human being, for my first forty years on this marvelous planet, has been in the negotiation and relationship between the inner and outer worlds. It is not a question of boundaries but rather of feelings. Simply put, I rarely match the external world in terms of likes, dislikes, or what I feel to be important on the inside. Moreover, the sheer density of stimulation from this external world can at times be most overwhelming. One solution I came across was my discovery of the truth of pluralism. I realized, upon leaving my thirties, that others can achieve the deepest pleasures from things with which I have had only negative experiences and, of course, in reverse. That is, my own internal states, though important and sacred to me, are of little or no use in terms of other's values. I began to read the world around me in the terms that others created. I began to step outside of myself and try and see others as having equal, sometimes greater, yet very different claims. This is not quite the same as sympathy or empathy; it is a "meta" belief wherein my awareness of other's values allows me to put aside my own values and essentially ask others where their happiness comes from. I cannot live there, for that would be to lose myself, but I certainly must visit and visit regularly.

A large measure of human culture and art, and I should include practical philosophy as well as politics and economics, is concerned with how we are to negotiate the boundary of the inner and the outer, how we are to understand it, if and when we are to fight or love it, if we are to transform it, overturn it or defend the status quo and on what grounds and so on.

Sometime during the past decade I became familiar with the thought and scholarship of one George Kateb. He is really one of the few philosopher/academics who, as odd as it is to say in what is essentially an aporetic tradition, seems to give more correct answers to some important questions. He works in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau and thus could be called a kind of individualist, and yet - and this is most important - he rejects all appeals to conservatism and tradition. Kateb's individualism is of a most responsible kind. He is sui generis: he rejects communitarian and utilitarian infringements upon individual conscience and liberty, while at the same time he upholds the strongest sense of social responsibility. It is the rare thinker or intellectual who can do both and moreover offer a theory of both.



His most recent book is called Human Dignity and it is a beautiful work of prose, easily one of the best works of non-fiction in the past decade. I should like to use my forty-fifth birthday to do briefly review it. However, I am not sure review is quite the word since I really only have time, space, and, more importantly, energies to summarize in a brief note and offer examples from this work.

George Kateb's aim in the entire book is to defend and define what it is in us or about us that makes us human - in the spiritual and non-reductive sense of that label - and to describe, if only in part, what about our humanity makes us special on this planet. This last project will doubtless not always endear Kateb to anti-"speciesist" egalitarians, yet I feel that Kateb is onto something most important when I think of that fact that no other living creature composes a Beethoven's Ninth, enters couples' counseling, or negotiates at Camp David. One lengthy passage reveals the quality and character of Kateb's prose:

"A uniquely human trait, self-consciousness is potentially but not actually possessed by all human beings, whereas consciousness is actually possessed by all the living who function. To be a self-conscious person is to be conscious of oneself as a self, as a person who can think about many things, but also about himself or herself. A person can arrive at a self-conception. But the process is not automatic, and cultural conditions - say, tribal life or village life - may discourage it or be so rigorous in in suppression of the sense of self that many people would find it strange to imagine what it means to have a self-conception. They know themselves through a group, and the group knows itself through its differences from other groups. Without a self-conception, we are tends to take the place of I am, in most of the transactions of life. Some choices might be left free, and particular members of a group might stand out because they perform exceptional deeds. In larger hierarchical societies where human rights are not recognized, self-consciousness is actually consciousness of oneself as a member of this class or caste rather than that one. Such consciousness is quite compatible with individual egotism, but the ego is defined by reference to membership. One cannot imagine oneself separately from membership. But in a society in which people have a sense of individual human rights and the state recognizes and respects those rights, a particular self-consciousness will develop; the ego will grow in a certain direction. One feels special not because one has what others lack, or has a rank higher than others, but because one has has what everyone is entitled to have, just by being human." 

Readers should note that this is an argument reminiscent of Kateb in his Patriotism and Other Mistakes, in which he regards patriotism itself as immoral, in part for its violation of the individual in the name of group pride and identity. It is this part of Kateb that places him at odds with both the Left and Right on our current political spectrum. His belief in unearned human dignity makes him automatically opposed to all conservatism and libertarianism because if we have innate unearned human dignity then we are entitled to certain things without having to appeal for them at best or beg for them at worst as in, say, health care or food (to say nothing of nutrition). His remarks about group identity might put him at odds with a Left that wants to speak on behalf of suppressed or repressed group identities as groups rather than as lone individuals. But Kateb is ultimately making an ontological argument as is clear from this passage:

"Human life at any time and all through time is ultimately incomprehensible. this incomprehensibility is testimony to human stature, perverse as that may sound. Human stature is not so great as to have the capacity to take the measure of human stature. Humanity is too much to be encompassed; it is indefinitely large in its actuality, past and present, and unpredictable in the future. In contrast objective knowledge of nature, which has no inwardness is easier on the talented mind despite formidable obstacles, than understanding human life which is governed by human inwardness."

Starting from the tradition of Emerson, with its respect for infinite mystery and finite intellect  it comes as no surprise that Kateb is skeptical and at times hostile to attempts to make scientific explanations of who we are as the only acceptable explanations. Kateb is not hostile to science as such, but rather to all forms of tyranny: an attitude of regarding us as mere matter or, however more noble, as just a natural object or life form among others on this planet - in a word, anti-humanism - is an attitude that has similar problems in intellectual life as tyranny does in social and political life. Kateb is a critic of evolutionary biological accounts of the human being that aim to replace other accounts. Like Thomas Nagel, he manages to maintain a strictly secular even agnostic foundation while still insisting upon a spiritualistic definition of our humanity. He agrees with the scientific conclusions of evolution but also agrees with the worries of those religionists who feel that those conclusions are insufficient and are partly bereft:

"Against evolutionary psychology in particular, we can say that it is a category mistake, indeed a serious blunder, to say that on any given occasion, a person't motive, mediated as it is by mind, is unconsciously determined by evolutionary inheritance. No human motive is reducible to a natural cause. Human self-description is not a superstructure of superstition."

"Against neuroscience I want to say that when a section of the brain lights up on a scanning device, as, say, the person is listening to music, we learn nothing interesting about the person's experience of the music or the music itself."

Kateb might be seen as going too far here in the eyes of many, especially with the popularity of bestselling non-fiction books concerning our brains on music, yet I would still maintain that Kateb's old fashioned argument might be more properly thought of as an argument on behalf of the humanities itself as an equal though separate companion to the sciences. And Kateb has much to say in the latter chapters of the book on what art is and how best to evaluate it.

Throughout the book Kateb wrestles with the tension between fairness and justice on the one hand and excellence and reward for unique effort on the other. Kateb also makes the rather unfashionable claim in this age of Nature awareness, that we are not wholly natural beings, but in part artificial, subject to cultural innovation and diversity. George Kateb is unafraid to take commonsensical intuitions (say, our sense of being somehow free in making choices, as not merely beholden to nature or tradition alone, our sense that we can trust at least some of our senses) seriously as having objective truth. He is not hypnotized into a skepticism about our perceptions by the apparent success of scientific assaults upon those perceptions. In this sense George Kateb is, as he admits on other occasions, trying to take a democratic approach to life in the wider sense of the word democratic than the political sense. Though he is labelled a political philosopher, Kateb wants to restore the value of that which resides outside of our roles as citizens, the value of that which is separate from roles as such.

I cannot recommend Human Dignity highly enough. Though it is ostensibly a work of non-fiction philosophy it reads as beautifully as poetry or prose. Its subject is nothing less that the state and status of our humanity itself.

Human Dignity by George Kateb The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2011

Memories Of A 1970s Childhood Part 3

If in some ways I seemed a typical boy, I suppose, for the time period, in other ways I did not in the slightest fit into the world in which I was forced to inhabit.

For as long as I have been conscious, or, at least, remember being what we would consider conscious, I have experienced this life as perceptual and sensual one rather than as a conceptual and discursive one. At times I have been convinced this has a lot to recommend it. But it appears to have its own problems because, since my intellectual and heavily cognitive work is, as Kirkegaard wold put it a retrospective affair, I have to rely upon distanced reconstruction often with the crucial help of other parties who, alas, come with their own biases and ideologies at worst, and dreams and imaginings at best. When I tell people this they are surprised because I appear an "intellectual" person who thinks a lot. But in actuality thinking and intellectual work is a disciplined affair I make purposive time for as I do practicing piano, since I don't automatically do it throughout the day, living as I do more perceptually.

Growing up as a male and in a male body doubtless has its own characteristics as my memories of lovely Carla demonstrate. In other ways I did not fit into the identity that my biology and culture provided. Nowhere was this more the case than in my extreme detachment from the world of sports of all kinds. Recently my mother told a story of how I did not understand the joy and necessity of navigating a ball. I had little memory of this since I did not conceptualize the meaning of a ball. Thus my mother’s memory put me back in touch with my perceptual relation of the same story.

Evidently, my mother took it upon herself to try to make a normal boy out of me and teach me about the joys of the ball. To put it mildly, this was most humiliating, though at the time I was too clueless to know this. She would throw the ball and I would stand and stare and not throw it back. I tried to remember what I had been thinking or not thinking. I literally did not understand that I was supposed to make a move and throw the ball back. I have little idea of how frustrating or shameful it must be for a child to not indulge in what after all is a kind of universal dance. But from my own experience I did not understand why anyone would get fun from tossing this inanimate spherical object back and forth. When my mother tells the story now she mostly laughs about it and shrugs it off, but I do know it must have been very odd indeed.

It was little wonder that many years later in one one year of a “Christian” school in which I did time in fifth or fourth grade, my PE coach had to have a special meeting with my parents suggesting that I had some serious mental problems, maybe even some kind of mental retardation, due to my lack of interest in balls. It did not help of course that this was one of those fringe schools that could not teach English or math, but had to make it Christian English and Christian math and so on. Everything had to have Christian as a prefix, and sports was no exception. Thus my instructor went on and on at this meeting about God’s plan to have boys run around and kick balls. He never exactly made it clear what was Christian about our version of baseball and basketball except to emphasize that we would have regular prayers before every team.

Even worse, in keeping with the coach and school's views concerning Christian athletics, girls in this school were required to rake leaves and were denied any athletic opportunities. And the worst part was that I conducted a one-“man” protest against the sexism of such an arrangement (thought would never have though to use that clunky neologism), and petitioned the school to allow everybody to do sports. I wanted to rake leaves, of course, with the girls, a desire which caused considerable offense to everyone at the school: girls, boys, and teachers alike. I had no allies, but then as now, I was not one to fear risking embarrassment or worse for some principle or another.

Thus, I was in trouble both for refusing to participate in sports on grounds that they were boring and pointless and wanting to "invade" the girls' raking team, which did little to secure people's comfort with my gender identity.

Often it seemed my real allies were not peers or teacher but very young adults and late teens that would drift in and out of my life as relentlessly and casually as I was required to switch school systems.

I don't think Carla was my first crush. After all I liked Lydia, and I don't think I (yet) want to tell about meeting Lydia's mom which caused considerable emotional confusion for me. I had a crush on an English teacher from second grade and went as far as asking her to marry me, but she only rebuffed me with a lengthy disquisition on adult and child's things and the differences between them. Thus, technically speaking Carla was maybe the second adult female I felt love for.

And Carla's magazines and books like OUR BODIES OURSELVES made her all the more alluring.

 I know that Carla was not the most appropriate object of my affections given that she was about 18 0r 19, but I had little concept of that since I tended to see her as a peer. I remember I was masturbating for the first time in my life a lot at this time and had very little privacy. I had to sneak in the office or plant bathroom. One time Carla walked in on me which was one of the earliest times I remember trying that activity out. I have to confess that the intensity of her appearance and the fact she slightly smiled at me before politely leaving, and above her all her beauty, with her revealing hot pants and halter top: all of this made it more intense than the memories of THREE'S COMPANY that had originally gotten me going. About a day later she showed up at my doorstep with a basket full of articles on male and female desire and basically started discussing male and female biology albeit with a feminist slant. She was the only person I had ever met that made me feel okay about my own sexual feelings. She told me that girls did the same things to themselves as boys did, but because of social "oppression" they were made to not want to share it with others even other girls. And she was the first person to talk to me about women's rights.

to be continued