Food/Sex/Death: Edition Aleph

"Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other." - either Mama Cass or the Marquis de Sade, I forget which, but as a semi-enlightened hedonist, I heartily concur.

Food
Around Berkeley, Journalism Prof. Michael Pollan has become almost as much of an institution as Alice Waters. And Pollan has emerged as a major public intellectual over the past ten years, with such books as The Botany of Desire (my favorite), The Omnivore's Dilemma, and now Cooked. I enjoyed his pre-celebrity books on gardening too.

(There are rumors around Berkeley that someone's friend of a friend once turned down the cereal aisle at Safeway very late one night and saw Pollan fondling a box of Count Chocula, but let's remain agnostic about this.)

I have yet to read Cooked, which came out earlier in 2013, cover-to-cover. Maybe because I feel guilty I don't cook? I don't cook well. Not yet anyway. I still note daily episodes of daydreams of me cooking a Lucullan whizbang-repast of Mediterranean delicacies for friends, maybe something that looks like this. Maybe in 2014. (Riiiiight...)

Medium published an excerpt from Cooked this past April. In this snippet, Pollan delivers strong rhetoric for the Generalist (if not an overweening one), and against Specialization. His prose shimmers and I come down with a touch of rhetoric envy. While acknowledging the Adam Smithian transformative power of the division of labor in our culture, Pollan is singing my song when he writes, "Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility."

I catch myself yea-saying, alone in the room, but then remember the last time I cooked was when I added filtered water to a bowl of Quaker Oats and microwaved it for 110 seconds, then poured some honey on top and sliced a banana. Somehow I sense this wouldn't cut Pollan's mustard. Or his mustard roots he grew in his own organic garden while chatting with Alice Waters about their high-paying speaking engagements upcoming. (Is mustard a root? I know there are seeds...)

Practicing biblio-osmosis (where you try to let the knowledge contained in a book sink into your nervous system simply be being near a book) with a tome on Mediterranean cooking somehow fell short, details of which are unnecessary to relate at this moment. Let this suffice: it seems I need to exert myself more.

Check out Pollan's paragraph that starts off with "Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles..." and ends with "corporations eager to step forward and do all the work for us." - Okay, I find it compelling stuff, and...shaming. We ought to take a stand against specialization by gardening, he's always argued, but now: learning to cook, which is a radical political act! To choose cooking "will constitute a kind of vote" and to "lodge a protest against specialization - against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives." Pollan somehow stops short of urging us to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, but I think I'm wise to his game. It's heady stuff. Aye: get commercial interests out of my cranny!

All in all, I'm swooning over the elegant ad for generalism, and all whipped up over learning how to souffle. Maybe even before the New Year. Pollan carries on a variant of the Emersonian tradition of self-reliance in Unistatian life, and I just find it appealing as all get-out. We ought to alter the ratio in our lives that has to do with  production <---------> consumption. To the barricades!

Not long after I read that excerpt, I ran across one of my favorite science writers, Maggie Koerth-Baker of boing boing. She's grown weary of Pollan's pronouncements, and offered as rebuttal one of her favorite cooks, Lynn Rosetto Kasper, and like Maggie, I recommend clicking the link for Kasper's short audio interview on Minnesota Public Radio. The gist: rather than feeling like you're letting the Earth, your own sense of coolness and the entire progressive political movement down by not learning to cook, do what you love to do instead, 'cuz that's what you'll be good at. And remember: when you're an eater, you're supporting all of those who love to cook, whether they're in your home or a kitchen in a restaurant, waiters, food delivery people, etc. Being a thankful, joyous eater has value, so stop with the guilt if you don't want to learn to cook. 

I think Kasper has let me off the hook. But I still want to try - at some point - to learn how to cook something like this:

                                                      da-rool, da-rool!

Any future situation that finds me mucking up perfectly good ingredients in the kitchen cannot possibly be as bad as this situation, described by the master storyteller and beloved Unistat anarchist Utah Phillips:

Sex
I'm going to touch on what I consider "prowess." 

First off: There's a retroviral-like myth that sex is really good exercise. Don't believe it. The New England Journal of Medicine showed that the average six minutes of fucking burns about 21 calories, which is about the equivalent of two segments of a navel orange. Some exercise. Even if you go at it for 30 minutes you're only burning 88-100 calories. A question: can't we just enjoy our "normal" fucking without having to multi-task? Can we leave the "getting in shape" bit for some other time? Why the fascistic insistence on having "better abs" while you're "making love"? How about tapping into some zen and just...Oh I don't know...paying attention while you're actually getting to do the one thing you're daydreaming about the most? Why undermine yourself? Or your partner. If either you or your partner are saying to themselves (or even out loud), "Oh yea! That feels soooo good! If only my abs were tighter, or you had more of a six-pack rather than a keg, this would be even better!," I'm sorry: you need to re-think your priorities. 

Oh, but there's the new "Coregasm," as explained by Callie Beusman, quite hilariously. Make sure you check out her other tips for staying in Navy-Seal-like shape while fucking. Callie and I are here to help any time you feel...empty and can't quite have enough of life.

Lots of us think that when it comes to sex, we're pretty good. Or maybe not-so. We have some sense of our prowess. Maybe we are on our game at times - when we've had lots of recent practice? - and then there are those not-all-that-great moments. (Hey guys! Here's a book...)

Back to prowess. It's difficult to assess prowess. There's boasting. There's he said/she said/they said. There's certainly quality, which is what most of us want, but how do you measure such an intangible? There's quantity, which seems more subject to measurement by definition.

There's USC bachelor's degree/feminist Annabel Chong (nee Grace Quek). She had sex with 251 dudes over 10 hours. I have not seen this documentary, but I've read a few articles about Annabel. She's a nice gal. Very giving. Some of her feminist colleagues seem to have balked at her stunt, but she seems like Doris Day compared to Lisa Sparks of Bowling Green, KY. (I refuse to ease into a "KY" joke here. You're welcome.) Lisa had 919 dudes in 12 hours in 2004, at the World Gangbang Festival in Poland. Just think, men: some guy's going around in bars telling an amusing anecdote that he once had "sloppy 919ths." Last I read, Lisa Sparks was happily married. She decided to settle down. We all slow down a little, I guess.

A few more miscellaneous items that might fit under this rubric of "prowess":

-Leigh Cowart's profile of porn star Marcus London, who says he can teach any man how to make a woman "squirt." London is quoted, "I put my hand inside a woman and I can tell. I can feel things. Like car mechanics looking under the hood of a car, I know what does what." Jeez Marcus, I put my hand in there too; I thought I knew what was what, but what are you, some sorta Houdini? I thought it was more up to the gal's psychosomatic synergistic physiological receptivity, and not her V-8. And oh yea: I saw what you did there with "hood." Good one.

-In my opinion, Marcus London, however good he is, is an amateur compared to Rafe Biggs, a psychologist who suffered a tragic accident and became a quadriplegic. Biggs has, like some tantric yogi Adept, rewired his brain in a remarkable case of neuroplasticity, and just...something we should all marvel at: he has orgasms through his thumbs! Yep: they're called "transfer orgasms" in the trade, and Biggs says his right thumb is the Giver of pleasure (not technically "fingering" his girlfriend, but possibly "thumbing her a ride"?), while the left is the Receiver of sex energy. I wonder if his thumb ever gets tired and he just fakes an orgasm? And what about non-orgasmic females who read this story? This could be a real blow: the guy learns how to get off through his thumbs, and they can't...I hate the word "achieve" in this sense, but let's let it stand. I say: if Biggs can do it, there's still hope for all of us. Maybe I'll work on rewiring my own brain to achieve the ability to cook? Anyway: Rafe Biggs: we salute you. Errr..."thumbs up"?

-Mary Roach's book Bonk taught me many things. One was that Masters and Johnson (Give 'em a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine! I dare ya!) coined the term "spectatoring." They said that many women didn't have orgasms because they were too self-critical and seemed to be imagining what they look like while they were fucking. The definition given was "viewing oneself judgmentally and critically during sex." (p.251) My guess is that our screwed-up sexist culture does this to women, and this is one of the few times I wish they could be more like men, as most of us apparently think we're Casanovas, temporarily in the running for People mag's "Sexiest Man Alive," while we're getting at it. Believe me, women who spectator-ate: the guy is into you; you're great and you look just grand. Seriously.

Enough with sexual matters for now. On to death.

                                          Prof Shelly Kagan of Yale

Death
There are so many ways to go with this.

Okay, I've taken up too much of your precious time here with all these trifles about food and sex, so enjoy this philosophical essay adapted from Yale Philosophy prof. Shelly Kagan's book Death. I love the title; it sucked me right in: "Is Death Bad For You?"

This seems a wonderful way to demonstrate how philosophers are taught to think these days. You posit an idea and play with it, toss it around, look at it from a few angles, this brings us to a related idea, which you then fiddle with in your trained-philosophy brain, and so on. Suddenly, that which was familiar seems to have become unfamiliar. Is Death Bad For You? Yes, most people would reply. It's way up there on the ultimate list of Bad Things...what're ya stupid er somethin'? Then they'd hurl a couple of epithets at you (me), and suggest therapy, medication, or maybe "You need to get laid, dude!" (I would then be tempted to tell them about Marcus London and Rafe Biggs and Annabel Chong and Lisa Sparks, if only experience hadn't taught me this would likely get my ass kicked.)

Ah yes: nonexistence can be bad for us due to what economists call opportunity costs: you're deprived of the possible good things life could bring because you are no more. Bad! And: if "death is bad for you" is a true statement, there must be a time in which it is true. It certainly isn't now, because I'm alive. Check...and mate? Nope, there's way more to this: existence requirements, possible persons, death not being bad for someone who never existed, etc.

A current philosopher (at least I think so, I don't have his number and cannot verify) named Fred Feldman notes we'd like to live to be older. But to what age? If you said "Eighty five?," well then why not 87? How does 92 strike you? Ray Kurzweil apparently wants to/thinks he will live to be 973, and outdo Methuselah. Hey Ray: howzabout hangin' to 975? Dream large, man!

It all seems so...arbitrary. And here's a wrinkle: what if you're 40 now, but rather than thinking you'd like to make it to 50 (you have literally taken Van Halen out of context when they said, "I live my life like there's/no tomorrow..."), you wish you'd been born ten years earlier, so now you're 50? You would have achieved your goal already! If that seems weird and/or stupid, Shelly Kagan reminds us of Lucretius, who wondered why people worry about death and their non-existence when they seem to overlook their non-existence before they were born!

I wish I could be more like Epicurus and Lucretius on the subject of my own death, but I seem more like Woody Allen, who observed that many people would like to achieve immortality through some heroic actions or brilliant works left behind at death. Woody said he'd like to achieve it another way: "Not dying."

One last idea - but you really ought to read Kagan yourself - is the posited day all human and mammalian life on Earth gets wiped out by an asteroid. As Kagan writes, "Someone 30 years old might reasonably think to herself that if she'd only been born ten years earlier, she would have lived longer." (Touche?) That makes me think of someone living in Europe in 1348, at the height of the Black Death. Loved ones and neighbors all rotting in death all around you. And just in the past hour you note you've got a touch of the sniffles. When will the guys with the wagon come and take care of this stench?

And then you catch yourself in a wistful mood, thinking, "Man! If only I'd been born in the 1240s, 'cuz then 20 years later it would've been the Sixties. The Sixties were happenin' man! Whatever happened to the revolution? The Church does nothing but hassle us, feudalism can bite me, and now this Black Death bummer? The 1260s were da bomb. These modern days aren't all they were cracked up to be. O! To have been alive in the Sixties!"

Metaphysics and Overspecialization: A Meander

Woody Allen once talked about the time when he was expelled from college because he was caught cheating during the final exam in Metaphysics, when he "looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

Aristotle
The subject of metaphysics is something I will never truly understand, but I'm cool with it. It's a blast to try to understand. There are many, many metaphysical roads to take from Aristotle, who is generally credited with being the first to tackle metaphysics as a "science" or a topic in philosophical thought, even though he didn't use the word, apparently. Along with a lot of hand waving and trying to field answers from students about "ultimate things," he variously called what his translators have labeled as metaphysics: "theology" "first philosophy" "first science" and "wisdom." When I read him, he wants to get at the "first cause" of things. He wants to talk about ontology, or the Being-ness of stuff. (Kant put epistemology as the "first philosophy" but I'm getting ahead of myself.) The part that has most intrigued me lately is the search for that which does not change. Given my understanding of physics, I'm not sure there "is" anything that does not change, but it's an interesting idea to think with, and I guess Aristotle was influenced by Plato here, at least a little.

The semantics of "metaphysics" among non-professional philosophers (like the OG) has always seemed a mess, but as I get older, that bothers me less and less. Just think of what metaphysics implies: thinking about things that are above physics. Or beyond physics. It's supposedly a topic that addresses those things that have no mass, no atomic or subatomic structure and no energy. I usually see the topic as what Max Stirner called a "spook": we humans can make up all kinds of things and ideas that simply don't exist, and then reify those "things." And yet, as some sort of humanist type, this notion of metaphysics goes back so far...it's a part of us. And therefore, it can't be negligible, even if it's just made out of words.

Aristotle's origin of all things was with the Prime Mover. For a good time over the next month, mentally insert "Prime Mover" in place of "God" every time anyone says it or writes it...or you think of It. Report your results! ("For Prime Mover' sake! Put the toilet seat down once every blue moon!")

Words
I remember where I was when it happened. I was sitting in a room a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean, near the Los Angeles harbor. I was half-awake and listening to some scientist answer questions on the radio. He said something about language and neuroscience and I started to perk up and listen attentively: it turns out that language, our words, have physical status. It's hard to pin down, but neural imaging, studies of brain damaged people, and our understanding of synapses and learning...the words we use are all tied up with larger neural clusters (made of atomic goo and having some weight and mass)  that have to do with our being human beings with bodies and living in a world with language...but the words themselves have some physical, ontological status, even if it's hazy and difficult to pin down. They're taking up neural space. It made sense: language does not Speak from On High to us. It's not "out there" and emanating from some Superior Being. It's a biological property, and for abstruse evolutionary reasons we developed it to a very high degree, compared with our other-ape cousins. And a lot of it seems localized in the brain - language, that is - and it's so enchanting to other parts of our brain that most of us seem to think that language "really does" reflect "reality." It "actually" maps anything "out there" into words, in a perfect fit. If we're stunned and "can't find the words to express...," it's only due to some temporary imbalance. Possibly of the humors. Or not enough coffee. Too much wine. Not enough sleep. You're freakin' stoned again?

Topics
What are our thought-chains that lead us back to privately pondering the origin of matter, what happens after death, whether there's a superior, even transcendent intelligence inhering somewhere, or a perennial favorite: why is there something rather than nothing?...or why we find ourselves getting all worked up over other peoples' answers to these questions? For me, often: mortality thoughts. And, especially in groups of friends and acquaintances of "curious, breathing, laughing flesh"(Whitman), we're already outside our ordinary "reality": drinking some wine or other inebriant accomplices, jousting with witticisms, stoned on weed, euphoric in music, coming down softly from a whirl of flirtation. I know these states get me going on some metaphysical topic, but often I keep it to myself. Although I do like to hear where you stand. And why.

                                                   Habermas

Jurgen Habermas (and Marx)
I see Habermas as the Noam Chomsky of the European Union, committed to rationality and saving Europe from monied interests. (To my German and other European readers: I apologize in advance for the paltry riffs on Habermas I'm about to play.) Habermas, now in his 80s, is still fighting for something saner. He's made splashes in legal theory, political theory, sociology, psychology. (Here's a blogger-champion to read on him.)

I first became interested in Habermas when I heard a lecture about his idea of an "ideal speech situation," and this seemed to come of his historical views on the rise of literacy and media, coffee houses and newspapers. Everyone should be allowed to speak their view, without fear of recrimination. Metaphysical appeals are the wrong way: we should talk about what's demonstrably "real." Only rational thought will save us. With enough of this massively democratic speech, the better ideas will out. I'm making this too simple to an absurd degree.

Anyway, since the early 1980s - when Habermas was advocating no metaphysics in public speech about our life conditions - he's gradually softened up. He now believes that the discourse of religion has its place in public speech in his massively democratic ideology. Even though he confesses he's "unmusical" when it comes to religion (borrowing a phrase from one of his biggest influences, Max Weber), Habermas thinks there's no getting around the impulse to religious thought. Even though he still seems to be an atheist, he's made amends with religion while trying to maintain his Kantian-Enlightmenment rationalistic ideal speech situation idea.

Peter Berger, reviews Habermas's slow move toward allowing religion/metaphysics. I agree that Habermas is like Edward Gibbon's magistrate, who finds the various religious beliefs of the populace, "useful."

Being a carrier of the Critical Theory tradition (even though he had some cogent critiques of Adorno, Horkheimer, et.al and their opposition to "instrumental rationality"), Habermas is thoroughly steeped in Marx's ideas about religion, that it was "the sigh of an oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions," and that it was the "opiate of the people." Marx: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up on a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." - Contribution To The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843.

A common reading of this goes something like this, thumbnail: Religion is a conspiracy, mostly by the Ruling Class, to conceal from Workers the actual reasons for our unhappiness. I think anyone pondering Marx (or The New Atheists, for that matter) ought realize the ambiguity here in Marx. For he might also be saying, religion has the correct insights in that our suffering must be overcome and what we really desire ought to have satisfaction, but  in looking toward religion we make a fundamental error in thinking of deriving our happiness through metaphysics, and not the nitty-gritty mundane, materialist world, which will require knowledge and action.

Anyway, one of the most renowned thinkers in the European Union had at the center of his social ideas the rejection of appeals to metaphysics as a basis for rational understanding, and now he's allowing metaphysics into that program. Which now seems primarily aimed at saving the idea of a relatively sane Europe.

I've often wondered, in the years since I read Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (I read volume 1 and only thumbed through volume 2), that the ideal speakers in his ideal democracy might need to know more than about what they've specialized in, because I've been in rooms with far too many well-educated specialists who can't understand why the other guy ain't seein' it all from his angle. About which more later below...

Very Brief Take on Philosopher Kings
I still get a charge out of the far-more ancient-than-Aristotle Chinese view of metaphysics in the Tao Te Ching: "That which is above matter is the Tao." Hey: it's a decent take. Or at least it makes it for me.

There was a time when the Schoolmen, the Scholastics, doing philosophy as theologians, were The Cheese intellectuals in the West. When they decided to hold the Renaissance, starting on January 1, 1500, some Humanists, artists, engineers, poets and political philosophers began to get a piece of the action. By around 1860, Natural Philosophy (AKA "science") began to rack up win after win. And this held sway through the Roaring 20th century.

Richard Rorty said the Philosophers had always insisted that, no matter what others thought, theirs was The Cheese all along. They had constructed a bunch of elaborate systems that placed something between the individual and the world: Mind. Language. History's Laws. But theirs was the discipline ne plus ultra.

Whatever, it had always been assumed, says Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, that the role of philosophers was as meta-cultural criticism and the assumption that only philosophers had a "God's Eye View" on all the other sub-disciplines and fields of study. It was even up to philosophers to tell the lesser historians or economists or psychologists or anthropologists to do more of this, less of that.  We're never going to arrive at a One True Real Copy of Reality if you keep doing that sort of fieldwork! Do something else. The very picture of Plato's Philosopher Kings. As the renegade Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner called it: a Platonic Complex.

Rorty says, enough with the idea of achitectonic disciplines: the true role of the philosopher is to live up to its name: love wisdom. And we do that by being Generalists: we read about popular culture and wonder what it means for sociology. We talk to some historians about medicine and get some ideas there...how can this all "hang together...?" We read the philosophy of science and then about actual conditions in labs and see if we find something there. We look at marginalized discourses and books and authors and then make conversations about what they may have to offer that is being missed by those not being marginalized. We wonder about happiness and political power and economics and language and quantum mechanics and Dark Matter...and how it all hangs together. Or might.

Rorty says: enough with the Philosopher King role. It never worked and was pretentious and it alienated philosophers from a more valuable role: as messengers between disciplines. Generalists.

(Right now witness the Third Culturalists trying to assume the role of Philosopher Kings, and attacks from the traditional Humanities and other places. Maybe start HERE. How much of it has to do with funding and prestige?)

Contra people like Pinker and Dawkins and (what I see as) their sophisticated scientism, I do not abide by the idea that there exists any meta-discourse, anywhere. (As of October, 2013)

                                          rendering of Margaret Fuller

The Fascinating Case of Buckminster Fuller's Metaphysics
Talk about a Generalist! And yet, as I parse Fuller's books, I always got the feeling that, as much as he paid lip-service to economics, sociology, poetry, and the humanities, he thinks (he died in 1983, but his ideas are still alive for me) Science is a meta-discourse. And metaphysics actuates science.

So what is metaphysics, according to Fuller? Scientific laws that express a tremendous amount of generalization from a dizzying welter of individual cases. Or, an example in Bucky-speak:

Humans are unique in respect to all other creatures in that they also have minds that can discover constantly varying interrelationships existing only between a number of special case experiences as individually apprehended by their brains, which covarying interrelationship rates can only be expressed mathematically. For example, human minds discovered the law of relative interattractiveness of celestial bodies, whose initial intensity is the product of masses of any two such celestial bodies, while the force of whose interattractiveness varies inversely as the second power of the arithmetical interdistancing increases.
-Critical Path, p.63

Fuller thinks that humans, constantly looking into Nature, using their Minds (different than the brain), discover generalities expressed in the language of math. As time goes on, these generalities get honed and become evermore exact and interaccomodative. (<----I just used a word that I'm not sure even exists, but every time I study Bucky I get infected with his unique verb-ifying language style, so I say what the hell and let 'er fly.)

But this bit about the Mind not being the same as the brain? Well, first let's get to Fuller's conception of God:

Acknowledging the mathematically elegant intellectual integrity of eternally regenerative Universe is one way of identifying God. 

Ohhh...another Platonist. Hey, whatever floats your Dymaxion House!

God may also be identified as the synergy of the interbehavioral relationships of all the principles unpredicted by the behaviors of characteristics of any of the principles considered only separately. 

Recall: Fuller is the grandnephew of American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. There's something genetic. Nevertheless, Fuller seemed Leonardo enough for the 20th century.

Oh yea: Mind does not equal Brain:

Brains always and only coordinate the special case information progressively apprehended in pure principle by the separate senses operating in pure mathematical-frequency principle. Brain then sorts out the information to describe and identify whole-system characteristics, storing them in the memory bank as system concepts for single or multiple recall for principle-seeking consideration and reconsideration as system integrities by searching and ever reassessing mind. 

Okay, this brain sounds pretty impressive to me. How can anything be better than that? Well, here's how Bucky conceived mind:

Only minds have the capability to discover principles. Once in a very great while scientists' minds discover principles and put them to rigorous physical test before accepting them as principle. More often theologists or others discover principles but do not subject them to the rigorous physical-special-case testing before accepting and employing them as working-assumption principles.
-pp.159-160, Critical Path

The mind, unlike the brain, is weightless, massless, colorless, and not detected by any instrument that I know of. Furthermore, for Fuller, the physical principles that actually work to run our world of technics and know-how, are also weightless, massless, odorless, colorless, and they don't take in or emit energy, etc:

Mind and general physical principles, generalized, are metaphysical entities. And their synergy runs the world.

Fuller, in book after book, is able to think about our lives and educations and be somewhat dispassionate about the way we were trained to think of inquiry and knowledge as being separate entities. At other times he sees this as something like a conspiracy theory against Mind by powerful interests. Why so much at stake? Because, specialization gets you extinct. And we need as many people to think in creative, generalistic ways as possible if we are to avert catastrophe. Think of his God, his idea of Mind, your Mind. Does it make sense? In the introductory chapter to Synergetics he sees specialization as fostering isolation, futility and confused feelings. Humanity is "deprived of comprehensive understanding." Understanding based on the soundest metaphysical principles. Because most of us in the West were educated to specialize, we tend to abandon personal responsibility for thinking of the Big Picture, and taking social action. We let others deal with the big stuff. He doesn't say it, but he seems to equate specialization with marginalization. "Specialization's preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy."

Fuller sees art, science, economics and "ideology" all as having separate "drives" and "complexedly interacting trends" which could be understood via synergetics, but hardly anyone "in" one of those fields seems to believe this. This is threatening to the survival of the species. Giant pandas only eat bamboo. When the bamboo is gone, the panda is gone. 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct (or a like number; it's not good news), and not all extinctions were due to specialization or overspecialization, but there have have been enough extinctions, presumably, due to this short-sightedness. And we're supposed to have all the tools! We live at the equator and near the Arctic Circle, in rain forests and deserts, savannas and at 10,000 feet above sea level.

Related to this, here may be one of the brainiest conspiracy theories you'll ever read:

We have also noted how the power structures successively dominant over human affairs had for aeons successfully imposed a "specialization" upon the intellectually bright and physically talented members of society as a reliable means of keeping them academically and professionally divided - ergo, "conquered," powerless. The separate individuals' special, expert glimpses of the separate, invisible reality increments became so infinitesimally fractionated and narrow that they gave no hint of the significant part their work played in the omni-integrating evolutionary flow of total knowledge and its power-structure exploitability in contradistinction to its omni-humanity-advancing potentials. Thus the few became uselessly overadvantaged instead of the many becoming regeneratively ever more universally advantaged.
--p.162, Critical Path

In a slim and criminally underrated and under-read book by Fuller, GRUNCH of Giants, he goes into the history of this conspiracy by the very few to use the "wizards" for their own control of wealth and power. And if you can get with the prose style, you might find it very rewarding.

With this I abandon my typing with the idea that we've specialized too much; we've been marginalized, the survival of our species is at stake, and the deepest synergetic nexus of survival and real wealth is metaphysical know-how. I had no idea I'd end up here. Adieu!

P.S: Not long ago I was delving around in the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, and in 1948 he seems to have thought very much like Fuller on these topics. I wonder if Fuller influenced him, or Quine influenced Fuller, or this is another of those convergences that Charles Fort described as "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time." In 1948, in an essay, "What There Is," Quine said that our best scientific theories "carry an ontological commitment" to objects whose existence is incompatible with nominalism.

                                                 Buckminster Fuller

Some Odd Intellectual Disciplines

One of the areas I've been caught up in the last few weeks is the plight of the lumpen professoriate, or "a superexploited corps of disposable workers" (Cary Nelson, Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary For Higher Education, p.208), the increasing use (general timeframe here: 1985-now) by administration and tenured faculty in even our "best" public universities of graduate students en route to their PhDs teaching heavy loads at wages roughly equal to fast-food clerks and bellhops. For up to ten years. No benefits. Humongous student loan debts. (We're talking the Humanities side of the campus here.)

American universities have become more and more corporatized since Reagan. This is a story that is not nearly well-understood enough by the electorate.

And when these overworked students finally get their PhDs they are not hired as faculty, much less tenure-track faculty. 'Cuz then they'd have to be paid a decent salary. And the tenured professoriate and Administrators have seen enormous gains since around 1980 in academia, especially the Administrators and college presidents and football and basketball coaches. The university has roughly come to be modeled along neoliberal economic "managed" health care in the totally inhuman and disastrous (to most humans) "health care system" in Unistat. How depressing! (I hope it's better where you live, my non-Unistat readers!)

And in one of the books - How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, by Marc Bousquet - in the introduction by Cary Nelson - Nelson talks about this vast underclass (at minimum 250,000 as of this book's release in 2008) and how they, rather ironically, need to raise their own consciousness about themselves as a kind of tempworker-class, by applying the very theories they were trained to apply to classic texts or society or history or gender inequality. "We have seen one body of theory after another encrypted, to apply Derridean usage, as a form of specialization. Every body of theory with broad implications for understanding our own practices has sold its potential for professional critique in exchange for institutionalization." (p.xvii)

Ahhh...the ironic "privilege" of specialization! And, I must say, despite the inevitable veneer of academicese shot-through these books - and there are many - written by these angry, highly-educated, crapped-on (to be frank) intellectuals: it's unbelievable! But I do believe it. I've known a few of these. 

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Anyway, I wanted to talk about some odd intellectual disciplines I've noted in my reading. Some of them might be fictional; it's up to you to figure it out:

Transcendental gastronomy: I will say, and hope you believe me, that the great enlightened-hedonist Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) said his book The Physiology of Taste was in this field of study. 

Adoxography: I will throw this out there: I found this term while reading a novel, but the novelist insists it's a real type of writing: it's "good writing about trivial subjects." Or so I say to you I have read... (Hey wait a minnit: If it's a "real" word, am I doing it now? I doubt it. And if it's not a real word, oughtn't it be?)

Exo-Theology: Okay, I found this one in a book on the social psychology of UFO-alien-contactee groups. Roughly: "gods"are "really out there" and have influenced human culture for many millennia, and ...I'll just move on...

Grossology: C'mon! I made this one up for sure, right? If I didn't, it's the word used by teachers of elementary school kids about how the human body works. Its founder, Ms. Sylvia Carol Branzei-Velasquez, defines it as "teaching science through gross things." It turns out kids can't get enough of learning how snot, flatulence, feces, halitosis, etc, etc, etc: how it's produced, its function, what it's made of, and I think you, Dear Reader, would rather me get on to the next Odd Discipline:

Cryptozoology: Okay, you know Big Foot, Sasquatch, the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman? Cryptozoologists study that stuff. And wow: there are a lot of those...quasi-phenomenal beasts out there: The Loch Ness Monster you've all heard of, but what about the Chupacabra? Unicorns, sea-serpents, giant squid, cyclops, and my all-time fave, Mothman. This field is REAL, folks! (Even if the creatures might not be, in the sensory-sensual world? I assume they "are real" in humanity's Poetic Faculty, though: too long a history of this stuff, and well worthy for study by specialists in psycho-archeology and folklore.)

Garbology: Let's just say it's the gathering of hidden information about people and their habits, what they're trying to hide, or simply not telling us, by capturing and carefully sifting through someone's else's trash. You wanna read about an interesting weirdo? Check out A.J. Weberman. 'Nuff said.

Transitory Professor of Trendy Studies: Sure I made this one up out of whole cloth. But nooooo: the late great professor Richard Rorty made this up in reference to himself. See Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, p.56

Nutragenomics: Sounds plausible. Could someone you know (or a friend of a friend) be specializing in this field? Via genomic information, it looks into the varying dietary responses to all nutrients, including fats, carbs, minerals, vitamins, insulin resistance, how a person feels when they exercise, etc.

Dendranthropology: It is the study based on the idea that humans originated from trees. Okay, okay: no one studies this, but it was apparently an actual discipline at one time, if I believe Kacirk and his book Word Museum. (page 57)

Erotheology: This probably originated in the yoga of tantra (a likely story!), and studies the human body as a place of worship. Why are you grinning?

Pornolinguistics: I swear I didn't make this up: one of Noam Chomsky's best linguistic students at M.I.T, way back in the 1970s, got fed up with Chomsky's inability to adequately account for semantics in his schemas. The student then wrote linguistics papers that were widely circulated in underground academic linguistics geekdom. One was titled "English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects"(guess you hadda be there), signed by Quang Phuc Dong of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology. The fed-up student: James D. McCawley, professor of pornolinguistics...and "scatolinguistics" too.

Interstellar Pharmaco-Anthropology: I copped this from Robert Anton Wilson's novel(s) Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. As far as I know: probably does not yet exist as a subject for a specialist. But I think I'd be a good candidate when it becomes possible. I've already done plenty of research all "undergrad" and informal-like...I best leave it at that. (Lemme get this straight: I am NOT claiming I've been in "outer space" in any 2001 sense...)

Rational Civil Theology of Providence: This is real...or it has some quite robust ontological standing as an area of specialization. It was what Giambattista Vico said his magnum opus The New Science was about. And for a long time, scholars didn't know what to make of Vico's exceedingly weird and wonderful and scholarly book. But now there are scads and scads of specialists in Vico, so I'd say it's an actual area of study...even if many (hell: most!) Vico scholars describe their endeavors in different terms than Vico here. 

Pornosophical Philotheology: This may or may not be "real," but I will say that it is found on page 432 of a very very famous book.

The first person to name the book AND describe how they interpret the term, wins a load of old props from the Grossology exhibit. Good luck! And I hope you enjoyed this...adoxography?

On Scientific Specialization, and How It's Like Cholesterol, With Rant Sandwiched

When I started this blog, in a whimsical mood three or so weeks ago, my first blatherings riffed off of Robert A. Heinlein's oft-repeated line, "Specialization is for insects," which my staff and I (total: 1 person) tracked back to Heinlein's novel Time Enough For Love. For Generalists, it's a line that functions as a rhetorical battle cry, and, while it seems pretty damned argumentative, it's also pithy, eh? Yea, verily, it's got great pith, and has survived in the memetic fitness struggles, with its seeming hermetic dynamics, and I'll leave it at that.


The plea for less specialization has been made countless times (or rather, in my limited scope, I have lost count) in the 20th century and on into the 21st. Two of my favorite Generalists, Robert Anton Wilson and Buckminster Fuller, were talking (RAW interviewing Fuller):


"The problem with Fuller's talk, as well as his books, is that he has always been a comprehensivist. 'If nature wanted us to be specialists,' he likes to say, 'we'd be born with one eye and a jeweler's lens attached.' He refuses to discuss any one subject without relating it to other subjects. When asked in an interview in 1980 if he had one most important idea, he snapped, 'Absolutely not. There is no 'one most important thing,' since every system in Universe is plural and at minimum six. No, I have never found one most important thing. I deal in Universe always and only.'" - from pp.109-110 of Robert Anton Wilson's Right Where You Are Sitting Now


Maybe the main "problem" with thinkers like this is: you need to put in a big initial effort to grock their comprehensivist, unified field ideas. It takes "time," that seemingly increasingly tricky taskmaster.
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A Quick Rant Sandwich With a Side of Aside?

My circumambient peripheralizations and non-definitions of just what I mean by "Generalist" will be fleshed out more explicitly over time (wot?); however, I would think a reader's gestalting faculty would have given them a sufficient purchase over three weeks of my blogposts, dancing around the idea. Or: if half of all the Humanities students who graduate in 2011 end up with jobs that don't require a degree at all, why do we even teach that stuff any more? Oh, because in a democracy we want well-rounded people, blah, blah, blah? Hey, that sounds great, but what about the $75,000 in student loans they have to pay off? (And the Dubya admin put an end to filing for bankruptcy regarding student loans...)

I smell a Racket. A lot like the Housing Bubble. Not good. The previous paragraph seems overweening (it was), a big non-sequitur (think again), and now I revert to the generalistic:

I recall my college days, talking with fellow students about courses we'd taken, and often hearing something like this formulation: "I've already had Astronomy and American History till 1876; I still need it up to 1976. Have you had Humanities yet?"

As if these fields are innoculations. Have you had your booster of Statistics? (Good. Then you'll never need it again! You're safe!?) Best to take Plato to Spinoza now, so you can stop worrying about getting that in the future. (What about medical students who take a class in Immunology? What if the professor's humor is infectious? Now I'm being flippant.)

To quote 50% of Simon and Garfunkel, "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school...," it was tacitly implied that Shakespeare had nothing at all to do with Current Events (the class was actually called that); 20th Century History had nothing to do with what you'd be studying 15 minutes later: Biology. Und so weiter...

It was only when I took some time off from school that I learned all that was bullshit; there were no Iron Curtains between anything I studied, and all it took was a little bit of imagination to see how everything impinged upon everything else, seemingly disparate "areas" of thought suddenly were seen as suffusing another branch (grafting?) of knowledge, and it was too easy to mix metaphors because of all of this.

I will say: this feeling one gets when one suddenly sees how the boundaries are artificial, for whatever socially constructed and bureaucratic reasons? For me, it was dizzying-unto-vertigo. And then: fantastic and liberating-unto-euphoria. I realize now that this feeling is not as common as I would have thought. Anyway, I've been stuck "there" ever since...
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Did I mention cholesterol? Okay, I'll get on with it:

Not long ago I enjoyed a short essay by a climatologist named Gavin Schmidt called "Why Hasn't Specialization Led To The Balkanization of Science?," as collected in What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited by Mr. Third Culture John Brockman's son Max. 


Schmidt says that, like cholesterol, specialization in the hard sciences has a good version and a bad one, and in a minute I'll go over his notion of studies that are "centrifugal" and ones that are "centripetal." But first let me say that Schmidt writes engagingly and gives excellent specific examples in his short essay, based on his area of expertise, climate science, which anyone could imagine, involves quite of lot of knowledge of General Systems as they pertain to the dynamics, chemistry, and composition of the atmosphere, the land, the oceans, and ice fields...and how they all interact.


Now, just within this broad discipline, there are specialists who study sea level changes from satellite data. Others spend years studying El Nino effects in the Pacific and its variability. Ice-core samples taken from sophisticated deep drilling in Antarctica, measuring gases trapped 800,000 years ago? That's another sub-speciality. Others take massive data sets and build models to gain a firmer grasp of various situations.

Schmidt begins his essay by quoting John Ziman: "Scientists are those who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing." Catchy, and maybe at one time (circa 1900-1950?), sorta "true," but not now. And why? Why hasn't science kept specializing until most scientists can't understand what any other scientist is talking about?

First off, reductionism has worked marvelously well in the history or science, but there will be periods of diminishing returns, and the way out of the problem is interdisciplinary studies. As for centrifugal and centripetal?

Centrifugal forces in science, Schmidt says, drive increasing divergence, deeper knowledge about narrower and narrower phenomena. Centripetal forces counter the trends of the centrifugal studies. It's easy to see why centrifugal studies are needed, but Schmidt says they can go on too long for reasons that are "institutional, avoidable, and to be deplored."

(When I read this essay I couldn't help but think that Kuhn's period of "normal science" involved a lot of centrifugal-like endeavors.)

The exponential growth of scientific data and specialist publications with their occult-like impenetrable jargon (available only to a select few initiates) creates isolated sub-fields and sub-sub-sub disciplines, and a sad resultant is that no one can stay "on top"of all of "the latest" in the general fields. So what do specialists do to avert a Platonic Cave vision imposed by their specialist everyday realities?

Answer: popularizations, ambassadors and publication in the specialist literature. Edward N. Lorenz wrote some of the seminal papers in Chaos Theory, but more scientists know about it via James Gleick's book. O! The value of a good popularizer of science who really understand the stuff and can write for a large, intelligent lay audience! (Gleick's masterful, difficult-to-put-down work on chaos theory Amazon link is here. It's a thrilling read, and highly recommended for most Generalists. Take it to the bank!)

The Ambassadors are specialists who like to talk with scientists in other fields; they tend to bring about more collaborations. They would be a species of "Connector" in the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the term.

Specialist publications are usually impenetrable, not only to the lay public but to scientists outside of that discipline. But every now and then some specialist article is so interesting because it's about something "really big," like the Alvarez's 1978 finding about the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous. Another type of specialist paper that arrests Balkanization is something that appears with data that could potentially impact a variety of subdisciplines, like "the possible human role in the extinction of large mammals at the end of the last ice age."

The third and most important specialist article that moves this Centrifugal-Centripetal Dialectic forward is the kind of robust, meta-analysis study of new large-scale models. These are works of intricate synthesis and encourage new cross-disciplinary research.

Schmidt's fascinating article ends with this:

"Fundamentally, the drivers of interdisciplinary science lie in our desire to explain what we see and in recognizing that the answers we seek are not tied to individual scientific disciplines or specific tools or methodologies. Those are human constructs, and they are simply no match for the forces of nature."

And I will sum up thus: bureaucratic excessive specialization = "bad" LDL cholesterol; synthetic centripetal, productive interdisciplinary work = HDL or "good" cholesterol. Errr..something like that.

At any rate, as of this date: Balkanization in science: staved off!
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This has been a stab at an article about specialization within the physical sciences for a reader who's interested in being a Generalist, if not an overweening one. We must say, when we look at the role of specialization in the physical sciences, that, if indeed specialization is for insects, we appreciate the insect-work! A colony of digger-ants and their Hive Mind architecture and division of labor is truly a marvelous thing to behold. And insects don't do synthesizing, centripetal work. (That we know of?) We appreciate (almost) ALL ways of employing the grey matter. Hat's off to the not-insect and quite-human specialists (and synthesists) in the physical sciences! Huzzah!

I hope my attempt to enlighten about a species of non-Generalist didn't bore you to tears, and thanks for reading! I see my prolixity got the better of me and will try to write more pithily subsequently, but hey, blog posts are cheap.

A Non-Definition of "Generalist"

My starting a blog was fairly whimsical; for a long time people had been telling me I really "ought" to blog. I'm the type of person, it seems, for which blogs were invented, it was hinted. One of the types. Since I started, I have noted there are a few other blogs that have taken as their center of interest Generalist thought, and I hesitate to read too much in those (a couple really terrific ones!), for fear of being too influenced by the ideas there. I hope, after 30 posts or so, to have added something to the conversation. And truly, like you, I largely write to (l)earn...

It seems the idea of being a person fascinated by very many areas of thought is not new. But the idea of self-description as a "generalist" seems fairly new. And that's probably because of specialization, which is clearly still in its ascendancy. Why is specialization such a big deal? Probably due to the demands of the technocratic State, its attendant mushrooming  bureaucratization of bureaus, the seeming ad infinitum compartmentalization of compartments, the demands of "efficiency" in business and government, the clamor for constant technological innovation, and the ever-acceleration of information.

Aristotle was a staggering Generalist of the synthesizing variety, it seems to me, but in his time it seems there was no dichotomy, and we just look at what existed before him, and then see what he produced and say, "What a compendious mind he had." True. Not only compendious, but creative...Did he at times "specialize" in, say, Logic? Oh my yes, but hey: no one was really doing it that extensively at the time, so he...generalized in all his areas of specialization? (Riffing on the false - because reified - polarities of generalists vs. specialists can lead one down a path of reductio ad adsurdum. O! the perils!)

In our age, it seems that some academics are Generalists, but probably most are not. The demands of the academy probably foreclose on a life of freewheeling Generalism. But academics are Knowers. It's difficult to get your Ph.D, obviously. One must specialize like mad these days. But most Ph.Ds I've known have a few side-interests in which their knowledge is extensive. We will find some tremendous Generalists within the groves of academe.

For quite a long time now intellectual artists not affiliated officially with any institution have been at odds with their more well-paid (salaried) knowledge specialists within the universities and think-tanks. One common notion (of some substance): Academics, seeking tenure, are overworked and bogged down with minutiae and endless papers, but have a class standing (pun semi-intended?) and relative material comfort. They are "responsible" professionals. They see their Generalist cousins as dilettantes or wide-eyed lovers of speculative thought or naive autodidacts unwilling to commit their minds to a prolonged discipline, pun most definitely intended. Or as weird polymaths who couldn't hack the Academy due to some unfortunate eccentricities. Or as cranks with overweening Big Ideas and too many novel Theories of Everything, etc.

The idea of a taken-for-granted solid class status for the academic seems in a state of flux recently, for reasons too various to dig into here.

The Generalists are often ironists, often with advanced degrees but disdainful of the inherent conservatism of academic life. (I am not saying academics are political conservatives, although very many are, despite what a person like David Horowitz "thinks.") Their economic lives are more precarious and they must hustle and create to pay their rents (I'm of course generalizing wildly here!). In his recent book, The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (one of our great Generalists, and when will I quit capitalizing that word?), says:


"No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing." (p.45)


Another: "The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail." (p.47)


This 2010 book by Taleb consists of Taleb's aphorisms, and it's at times too delicious for our tastes; I cannot help but throw in one more quote:


"The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and nonperishable - work within institutions." (p.79)


Ahhh: scholars vs. academics. 


Taleb, in his book The Black Swan seems to consider the term "erudite" used as a noun, as highly desirable. 


Then there is a fantastic case of perhaps the most visible intellectual in the world (as of 2011 falling behind Dawkins?), Noam Chomsky, an academic who, since the early 1960s, has consistently and famously attacked intellectuals for kowtowing to State power. 

We have some obvious problems with a taxonomy of "intellectuals" here...

Perhaps my favorite modern intellectual genius-crank, Ezra Pound, constantly railed against academics, who toiled not in universities but "beaneries." Here's a choice bit of Pound vis a vis these topics: "the mentality of bureaucracy and beanery":

"1. Desire to get and retain job.
2.  That many scholars write under a terror. They are forced to retain a pretence of omniscience. This leads to restricting their field of reference. In a developed philological system they would have to know 'ALL' about their subject. Which leads to segregation of minute proportions of that subject for 'profounder' investigation. With corollary that any man who knows where the oil well is, is considered superficial." - Guide To Kulchur, (1938, p.70)


So, no definition of "Generalist," but rather a walk around the dark periphery of the subject as posited. More later? Your thoughts? Any aid towards clarification?