Category: politics

An Ancient Mind Plague

Mark Davis2 Comments

In addition to Cormac McCarthy, Milan Kundera died this summer after a remarkable run of 94 years. I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the early 90s and loved the strange detachment of the narrator and small moments like the critique of muzak in restaurant settings (I am now much more critical of restaurants that poorly manage sound reflections; how am I to enjoy my company in a cacophony?) But I had little use for his central philosophical pretense concerning eternal return or the use of metaphors as placeholders for people, though I have known people who strain to operate that way. Structuring a narrative around flimsy Continental ideas from Nietzsche, in turn influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Pythagoras, was too conspicuously self-absorbed with an intellectual airiness. It’s easy to achieve pretension but quite another thing to convey lofty thoughts effortlessly. I might have accepted a narrator musing on the topic among many others, playing with it while laughing at his own ridiculousness, and concluding that such concepts were mythological at best.

But there is a certain circularity in that otherwise educated people continue to latch onto narratives and metaphors that are appealing and unexpectedly strange, from little dioramas about the motives of people in our lives to grand conspiracies and mythologies filled with resurrections, demons, and eschatologies. The conspiracy narratives are a special contemporary problem accelerated by modern communications technologies, but there is nothing particularly new about them in thrust, focus, or pervasiveness.

Aluminum cans cause Alzheimer’s disease? Procter and Gamble’s logo was satanic? When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, the Hindu kids thought that certain toothpastes from Australia were adulterated with cow fat or something to undermine Hinduism.… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

Notes on Pumps: Sensibilities and Framing with Algorithmic Feedback

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“A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about.” So begins Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” in the 1964 Partisan Review. And what of the political anger and disillusionment across the United States and in the developed world? What of the gnawing desire towards superiority and control that accompanies authoritarian urges? What of the fear of loss of power to minority ethnic and religious groups? These may be the most discussed sociopolitical aspects of our modern political sensibility since Trump’s election in 2016 when a bitter, vindictive, hostile, crude, fat thug briefly took the reigns of America, then pushed and conspired to oppose the election of his successor.

What attracted his followers to him? I never encountered a George W. Bush fanatic during his presidency. Though not physically small, he talked about “compassionate conservatism” with a voice that hung in the upper register of middle pitches for men. He was neither sonorous nor mean. His eyebrows often had a look of surprise and self-doubt that was hinted at in claims he was a very reluctant candidate for president. I met people who voted for him but they seemed to accept him as an acceptable alternative to Gore or, later, to Kerry—not as a figure of passionate intrigue. Bush Jr. did receive a rally-around-the-flag effect that was based on circumstances that would later bring rebuke over the casus belli of the Iraq War. Similar sensibilities were true of the Obama years—there was a low positivity for him on the Left combined with a mildly deranged antagonism towards him on the Right.

Was the lack of Trump-like animating fanaticism due to the feeling that Bush Jr. was a compromise made to the electorate while Trump was, finally, a man who expressed the real hostility of those who vote Republican?… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

Mark Davis2 Comments

Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

Leon, Humanism, and Modesto

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Modesto, California has a motto that sits proudly on an arched sign as one enters the city from the teaming congestion of Highway 101 that rumbles with diesel trucks through the agriculture core of the state: “Water Wealth Contentment Health.” It is a throwback to The Golden State’s climate and the hope for a better life that led settlers to Modesto (Spanish for “modest”). The goal back then was to build and create, to achieve something where nothing previously existed. There are plenty of caveats we can lard on concerning the fates of indigenous peoples and consequences of the water management system that made it all possible, but the goal of bettering oneself and growing wealthy and content was a driving force across America—an obvious extension of “The Pursuit of Happiness” encoded in the US Constitution.

So it might seem strange that billionaire Leon Cooperman appears in The Washington Post confused about whether or not his success is some kind of moral failure. He came from modest roots, worked his way through college and graduate school, and then worked to make money on Wall Street. Now, with family grown, he still works at making money every day. He lives in an expensive home, but less than he could afford, drives a modest car, and shops deals at Costco. He also gives away prodigious amounts of money to educational and social charities, and he has pledged to give away most of it before death.

Plaudits on success and a long life. He is modesto, mostly, though some of his personal sentiment (at least as reported in the WaPo article) could be a bit more refined. Of a showy Bentley in his neighborhood: “…I could buy and sell that guy 100 times.”… Read the rest

Bobos and Grifters

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It’s a good time to be a pundit trying to find a vein of gold that explains the polarization of modern America. Is it political, societal, sociological, psychological, economic, or some mixture of all of the above? Take David Brooks’ new Atlantic essay on bobos and boubours. Here we have modern politics emerging from social, economic, and meritocratic trends that build on his riff on Richard Florida’s ideas of the creative class in the early 2000s. I’ll sum it up as simply as I can, though I also want to touch on why it seems flawed to me. But here we go:

  1. An intellectual elite arose that controls media, educational opportunities, technology, and culture (the “bobos” for bourgeois bohemian).
  2. Our politics (and some international as well: Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson, etc.) reflect a backlash against these new overlords by the “boorish bourgeoisie” (boubours) who see their political voices suffocated in this new class order.
  3. Maybe if we mixed together a bit more we can reduce the temperatures and empathize with one another better.

OK, so Brooks is on that solution bandwagon that always reaches for more social integration to solve all ills. It is positive and very bobo (I doubt he would disagree given his self-confessional acknowledgement of his own status as part of the creative class in the article.) We have seen calls for less assortative mating, more bipartisan dinner parties for congresspeople, and other ideas in the past.

All very positive, agreed.

But what if the real problem is more sinister? How about the idea that many people are being manipulated by con artists with respect to the things that should matter to them?… Read the rest

Autonomous Ethical Reasoning

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I got my first run in today after two months off. It was refreshing in that I was finally moving beyond the pain, but it also gave me that runner’s high oxygenation that lifts my spirit and fuels my thoughts. My wife and I decided a change of lockdown venue was in order so we relocated to New Mexico (after completing and checking our ballots in Arizona, I will note). My run took me up into the local mountain range and around an iconic rock formation. A coyote was sniffing around the trail until I spooked him. Some things are constant across the West, including the numinous sense of peace and calm that overtook me while I recovered under some trees and watched a few fanned-out contrails slowly drift in the high winds.

The fragility of American democracy keeps coming up in the run-up to tomorrow’s elections. Hostility, disinformation, legal actions, disruption, and general uncertainty have overtaken what was once a fairly simple process (Florida in 2000 notwithstanding).

Richard Just wrote a long-form piece in The Washington Post Magazine titled How Religion Can Help Put Our Democracy Back Together, though the title is shockingly more certain than the actual article that rebuilding is possible. Here are some of the ideas that Just circulates:

  1. If we were all a bit more attuned to the great mysteries that religions promote we would be more humble in our political engagement.
  2. Perhaps our shift away from religious involvement means that we instead idolatrously attach to political leaders.
  3. We have become obsessed with politics and lost the sense of inner peace that religions can provide.
  4. Religious communities are trust building, unlike other kinds of community involvement.
… Read the rest

Innocents in Intellectual History

Mark Davis1 Comment

In 1999, I lived in a modest, rented townhouse in Redmond, Washington with my wife and a year-old baby. I had just quit my academic R&D position in a fit of pique over issues of contracts and conscience, and had uprooted our lives to go to Microsoft to be a program manager while still harboring an academic’s independent streak. I had hair down to nearly my waist that I tied back in a ponytail after it dried a bit on my way to work. I had a coordinating goatee, too. On dark, overcast days I would sometimes reach back to reposition my hair tie and the cinched area would still be mildly damp into the afternoon.

In Seattle that year, the World Trade Organization came to meet and with it violent protests over, well, what was it over? Some of it had to do with the notion of globalization of the economy. Some of it had to do with a hope for labor empowerment. Some of the participants were just anarchists, it seemed. I had a run-in one morning with a door guard-type who thought I had tailgated her through a security door at Microsoft. We had been warned in a corporate-wide email about security concerns were the protests to come out to the suburbs. I dutifully backed out, pulled the door shut, and ran my access card to open the door. Curiously, even after that, she decided not to ride the elevator up with me, a look of uncertainty and fear in her eyes.

And then there were the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 that felt similar to those Seattle actions of more than a decade before.

Kurt Andersen, author of the memorable Fantasyland, has a new book and a new Atlantic essay, College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots, that continues his theme of capturing intellectual history as a series of consistent trends that are easily observable and digested.… Read the rest

Flailing in the Think Tanks

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Despite my best efforts to find some depth in modern intellectual conservatism, instead about the best we get is just about the worst imaginable. Much discussed is the Atlantic piece by Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule who argues for what he calls “common good constitutionalism” that asserts that an authoritarian assurance in defining a moral basis for legal decisions is best for all of us. Individual concepts of life and liberty be damned:

…that each individual may ‘define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever after. So too should the libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology—that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech, that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,”  and so on—fall under the ax. Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.

Vermeule’s opening salvo is that the doctrine of originalism that conservative legal thinkers have hewed to has shown little progress in reversing the trend towards greater and more expansive liberties. These freedoms, without paternalistic guidance, take us down the slippery slope of moral turpitude. We need stronger hands at the tiller who can properly control the minds of the mob for their own good. In reality, though, Vermeule is just a “Catholic integralist” in disguise, which is to say he is promoting a kind of theocracy where law is subservient to the best guesses of Catholicism.… Read the rest