Scratchpad

Syncretism

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20 Apr. 2008

I had a conversation with Tim yesterday in which I managed to repel him by admitting that I'm currently trying to wean myself off caffeine. Things quickly degenerated, ending with him grunting about the end of civilization and something about prying coffee from his cold, dead hands.

I was thinking about this conversation a few moments ago as I was walking home from the nearby bagel shop, clutching a nice, warm cup of coffee in my hands. The crux of Tim's argument was that the act of drinking coffee is so intensely pleasurable, that he feels so magnificent after having just had a cup, that he can never bring himself to give it up. I didn't actually disagree with his assessment of the sybaritic pleasure of a cup of joe (hence why I was in the middle of imbibing even as I am trying to stop), but I realized as I was walking that my disagreement with him is over which aspect is so pleasurable. It's not the caffeine. It's not even the coffee itself. It's the ritual of having a favorite drink, at a certain time of day, and allowing yourself to momentarily do nothing but wallow in the ritual. When I drank Dr. Pepper, nothing could be as heavenly as the peppery, sweet bite in the back of my throat and the mild irritant of the fizzy water. When I switched to Italian soda, the sharp bite of the bubbles continued to please. And, now that I drink coffee, I delight in its warmth when I have it hot, and its creaminess when I have it cold. And always, always through the three I have engaged in my sinful little delight at the same times of day.

As I admired this intriguing little realization, it struck me that it's not at all unrelated to the whole host of other disagreements I am currently having with a whole host of other people and ideological positions. I've struggled recently - painfully unsuccessfully, I might add - to articulate to myself and others exactly why I'm having such a nasty break with so many positions I thought I held or that others expect me to hold. Why can't I bring myself to be a feminist if I'm both a lesbian and a liberal? (This particular failing has been especially infuriating to many people I come across, as I am apparently "supposed" to be a feminist.) Why have I suddenly decided I am against the death penalty when I had no problems with it before? Why do I suddenly think Democrats are absolutely 100% full of shit even as I continue to identify as liberal?

Let me back up just a bit before going on. Although the discussion Tim and I had is finally allowing me to answer all of these questions, it was preceded several nights ago by a different conversation that laid the foundation for my coffee-inspired realization. The conversation was over whether the death penalty is acceptable or not. I was surprised that, save one, all of my friends said it was. My argument against it was twofold.

The first part was that, although at any given time we must out of practical necessity put our faith into the fact that we are right, history consistently proves us wrong. We now know that the earth is not flat. There is no such thing as the ether or the vapors. Freud was mostly wrong. Newton's been proven inadequate and Einstein's starting to look a little shaky himself. Personally, I'd go so far as to say there may not be such a thing as truth, but that's beside the point - all of those theories and beliefs have proven immensely useful while they were in vogue. They worked. They allowed us to make decisions, create worldviews, get things done. They gave us a direction and let us put our shoes on in the morning. So I'm not saying that we should discard any effort to believe things or choose a position. But I am saying that you'd have to be just plain stupid not to exercise a level of humility when it comes to your beliefs. Greater men than you or I have been proven wrong by the cruelties of time and popular opinion, and I, for one, simply cannot bring myself to believe that I will escape that fate where they did not.

The crux of the second was the same - that you'd have to be just plain stupid not to exercise a level of humility when it comes to your beliefs - although in this case substituting the words "misguided and dangerous" for "stupid." I was struck fully by the repercussions of this when watching, of all things, the movie Jesus Camp. There's a scene in which the leader of the camp is discussing how her goal is to create "God's Army." When noting how that differs from, say, Muslims teaching their kids to lay down their lives for Islam, she laughs a slight, dismissive laugh, as though she can't believe the obviousness of the answer and says incredulously, "because...excuse me...because we have the truth!"

And, in essence, this understanding of the possibility of error is what I see the entire American democratic system being based on. The system is built to mitigate error through the use of checks and balances and through heterogeneity. The idea is that an unchallenged belief system becomes extreme because there is no way to identify errors. And, god forbid that belief system happens to be wrong, the possibility for disaster is increased exponentially. In essence, America is founded on the idealism that through reason and Enlightenment we can become greater than we are, even as it also relies heavily on the practical realization that people are fallible. The system relies on the use of heterogeneity to mitigate error, given that homogeneity magnifies them.

Given that, it seems to me that the death sentence is inherently un-American. It removes the ability to come back later and say, "Oops. Heh heh. Sorry we locked you in jail for 30 years. We fucked up." The person is dead - there is no rectifying that error. The death sentence wraps the judicial system in the mantle of infallibility and removes the ability to check or balance its decisions in retrospect. Likewise (to finally, finally bring this back around to what I was talking about initially), I find that many ideological positions wrap themselves in that same cloak. It's wrong, they say, for our opposition to engage in (fill in the blank - building armies, refusing to listen to outsider voices, discriminating, refusing to pay taxes for our cause - the list is endless), but because we're right, it's okay for us to do that.

So that's the ultimate realization I've had with regards to my inability to reconcile myself with any number of positions I feel like I ought to be taking but just can't. It's not that I necessarily have any problem with the theoretical position. It's that I have a problem with the practice of carrying the ideas to fruition. The air of infallibility taken on by practitioners, the willingness to engage in inherently dangerous and fascist behavior because we're Just. So. Sure. that we're right. Our society laughs behind its hands at Machiavelli, calls him wicked and wrong and says we'd never do that, yet to our peril we live his philosophy every day.

Given this, the only position I do find myself being able to take is the one that embraces - actually, truly embraces - the fact that opinions diverging from one's own are necessary and absolutely vital to a healthy society. To that end, I do buy into a lot of the Democratic party's platform. Diversity is vital to a vibrant, progressive, secure, and robust society, one that can withstand the most pressures from the most directions at any given time. And also to that end, I can't sit in a room with a bunch of Democrats vilifying "the enemy" or belittling divergent opinions as stupid or wrong. It's hypocritical and dangerous. Democrats wonder how they manage to blow it at the 11th hour every election cycle? It's because they don't practice what they preach and everyone realizes deep down that they're full of shit, their promises mere empty rhetoric. They say all the right things, they have all the right aims, but they don't look to the heart of why they are striving to achieve those goals.

In other words, they haven't analyzed their own positions. They think they want diversity, but they fail to appreciate why, and so they fail to realize when their own actions inhibit their ability to reach that goal. And when the chance for ritual presents itself, they pass it up, holding out, wrongly, for its pale shadow - a mere cup of coffee.

It's all the Same, but Different

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18 Feb. 2008

I was startled when I logged in to my news reader this morning and saw something like 8 of the same headline staring at me from multiple sources. In spite of news companies' tendency to copy each others' stories, that's actually something of a rarity. So this was obviously "Big News."

At any rate, I'm intrigued by how different each of these articles is. Not surprised, just intrigued. On a lark, I also went to the Houston Chronicle site, just for the sake of comparison. Oh, Houston Chronicle, you never disappoint.

I'm still processing all of the different articles. I suspect there will be a slew more as the day progresses. It does come at any interesting time for me - just a couple of days after I noticed what might turn out to be an impostor meme in its nascent stages.

The more you look, right?

Silos

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23 Jan. 2008

I finally decided that after being in NY for four months it was time to check out at least one local lesbian hangout, albeit with trepidation. (Honestly, could there possibly be a less interesting scene in the entire world than a lesbian bar? If so, morbid curiosity impels me to keep looking for it.) So I popped on down to a little joint in the West Village, sidled up to the bar, turned to my left, and to my complete non-surprise saw another Sarah Lawrence grad from my class on the stool next to me. We'll call her H.

Needless to say we got to talking (if nothing else, it's hard to shut a Sarah Lawrence student up) on a whole host of topics, including words, neighborhoods, experiments in group ethics, pulling people off of subway tracks, girlfriends, the Internet, waiting tables, tiny apartments. You know, the usual topics for liberal arts geeks who get together. All in all, quite an enjoyable evening, and I had to scold myself for expecting it to turn out badly.

Even so, I was - and have remained - particularly discouraged by one aspect of the conversation. We were talking about words. I believe her friend asked whether a particular word was a real word or if she was making it up, and the bartender, who was a weird, veritable font of random trivia and aspires one day to be on Jeopardy, indicated that it was. Then the OED came up and we started talking dictionaries and made up words. I suggested that if H. was really as intrigued and simultaneously disgusted by made-up words as she indicated, she should check out the Urban Dictionary.

Now, as an aside, I find Urban Dictionary wonderful and fascinating and hilarious, and although I used to be rather uptight about "proper English," I've since come to embrace how wonderful and rich language can be through the process of evolution. Sure, there are certain words that I abhor and refuse to use (I'm thinking mostly of business-ese here...the utilizes and synergies and concretizing), but, on the whole, I think that playfulness and ingenuity are admirable traits in all other areas of life, so why not with language?

So, having divulged that about myself, I shouldn't have to tell you that I was pretty crestfallen when the bartender piped in with, "Urban Dictionary? Oh my God, that is the worst fucking site ever. I fucking hate that site. It's an affront to the English language. It's illiterate, ghetto central," or something pretty similar.

I felt like I had to come to the site's rescue. "Well that's the point, isn't it? That's what makes it so fascinating. I mean, it's precisely because these aren't the types of words you would use that it's so wonderful. This isn't stuff you're going to hear from most of your friends or the circles you normally run in, it gives you a little window into a whole different culture." Which is true, but I know that my defense came across as pretty lame.

And then, what the fuck out of the blue, H. comes at me with something about how everyone thinks the Internet is so wonderful but it's not, because it leaves out whole swaths of the population. Essentially, she came at me with the access argument, but couched in slightly different terms. Her implication to me was how could I be defending the Internet as being great when there are so many minorities who aren't represented on it? (As if that's the Internet's fault and not society's fault, but I haven't quite got to that part of the story yet).

Now, that's fine, that's all well and good, I've heard that argument a million times before, but the part that really slapped me at the time and which has only more persistently been seeping into every pore and just nagging the hell out of me ever since is that we were just discussing a website frequented by and essentially made by these very same "underrepresented minorities" she was purporting to defend, and she and everyone else in the conversation was trashing the site as being an illiterate piece of shit. But more to the point, they were making it very, very clear that they absolutely, positively do not go to those sorts of websites.

So the bit that's really started to nag at me is just how accurate is the party line on underrepresented groups on the Internet? And I do mean party line - I hear this argument stated as fact all the time on any number of the mailing lists I'm on, in articles in the Times, on Slate, Personal Telco...everywhere. (And by everywhere, I mean everywhere there are liberal, white, educated folk who have the white man's burden to make sure everyone gets access, or at least talk about it whether or not they are actually trying to do anything about it.) After watching the conversations in such places carefully over the last several years, after studying topics like viral marketing, after listening to endless political rhetoric, I've become keenly aware of how truths wax and wane and become more true within closed communities and it's become very, very hard for me to accept anything as fact just because I hear it a lot. If anything, the more I hear something the more suspect it becomes in my mind. I've come to hate taking anything for granted, least of all my own beliefs.

So that's it. It's been bothering me like mad ever since I had this conversation. I've been on some crazy sites during my love affair with the Internet. Forums haunted by professional mercenaries. Social networks comprised of miners and welfare moms. Porn sites. I came across a blog the other day by and for perfume industry professionals that practically bordered on scent fetishism. Black power sites. Sites from school kids in rural Appalachia. Sites from African-American expats living in Africa. Latino dating sites. I even looked at a couple of neo-Nazi sites once...for a few minutes, anyway. Even I have my limits. But mostly I just stick to my little corner of things and chat with the folks I know and who have similar interests to my own. And that's the part that bothers me. Here we are talking about underrepresented this and unfair that and no access and human rights, and from what I've seen (and this extends beyond H., to be fair to her) most of the people doing the talking aren't willing to explore the very corners of the Internet they claim don't exist.

So is it that they don't exist? Or are they there and are we just too damn ignorant and self-important to know they do exist? Do we actually want to know they exist? Or maybe we want them to have access, but only if the pages they make look and sound white?