The Paradox of Idle Talk and More Communication

The Paradox of Idle Talk and More Communication

The problem with an increase in communication is that all communication takes time and energy. The more we communicate, the more time and energy we need to dedicate to expressing things and taking in what others express. The more we communicate, the more likely it is that we will spend less time and energy on each thing communicated-- both those going out and coming in.

Most of our communication is done on a fairly simple and superficial level. This makes sense because most of what we want to communicate on a daily basis is simple, practical and immediate. The superficial and simple can often work well enough in these cases. It makes sense in terms of saving time and energy. It makes sense as well because we don't want to spend more energy and time than necessary to do things that are simple and everyday. Heidegger uses the phrase idle talk in his book Being and Time, and in many ways idle talk is the kind of communication I am describing here. He says idle talk is common and even somewhat necessary, and he shows understanding of and appreciation for it.

Heidegger also criticized idle talk because aside from working-- in both the fact that it can get many things done and in that it saves time and energy-- it also tends to hide the fact that there is another type of communicating and thinking. This other, more authentic type, of thinking and communicating, goes past the everyday, the simple and what everybody knows or even beyond what can be clearly known. When we spend more time and energy communicating in general, we tend to fall deeper and deeper it to simple communication, in to idle talk. We get further and further form thinking and communicating deeply, because habits are hard to break and because we see less need to break from them the deeper into them we get.

Idle talk becomes habit, and it allows us to communicate more and more, which is what modern society and modern technology both make possible and encourage. As we communicate more and more, it becomes more necessary to save more time and energy on each instance of communication, each 'message' sent or received. All of this snowballs and further hides the fact that we can communicate and think in a deeper way. We not only don't take the time and energy to get beyond idle talk, but we no longer see the importance or necessity of doing so.

It is a paradox: the more we communicate in terms of the number of 'messages' we send and receive, the less we actually communicate in terms of detail, depth and substance. It is a paradox, but it is very real and also very depleting and crippling. It is why communication can be so present and prolific but also so unfulfilling.

Scrabble with Statistics

Scrabble with Statistics 

Statistics are like Scrabble tiles. If you have enough of them you can arrange them to say just about anything you want.

Not only are numbers meaningless without ideas and words that attach them to things, but they are easily manipulated. Actually it is the ideas and words that numbers are attach to, and those ideas and words cover over things. Numbers do not have a direct connection or relationship to things. You can't attach numbers to things that are not defined and labeled, and as a result numbers are at the whim of the ideas and words that we create. Numbers on their own mean nothing, numbers that have any meaning have that meaning because of the words and ideas that we as humans create and arrange.

There are many books on the subject, about how to lie with statistics and that raw data is not at all raw. I have never read any of them from cover to cover, but I have browsed through a few and read some reviews. There is nothing there that someone well versed in philosophy (or the philosophic musings of major physicist from the middle of last century) doesn't already know. Numbers themselves are not authoritative or objective, they rely on ideas and words which are always open to interpretation and manipulation.

You can take numbers and make them say anything you want if you are willing to reinterpret or outright manipulate the relationship they have to things by reworking, hiding or misrepresenting the words and ideas that make the numbers meaningful. This is one of the ways that Nietzsche's saying, 'there are no facts only interpretation' is true.

This Is Not an Attack, It Is a War

This Is Not an Attack, It Is a War

“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”
-- Jerome Adams, U.S. Surgeon General

I appreciate the sentiment here, and I think the Surgeon General is doing a great job. I also think he is right in making the point that this will be localized.

But, I do think he is wrong in comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. They were indeed important, traumatic and difficult, but unlike this pandemic they were single events. This virus is not a single event and not a one day thing, especially if you want to emphasize the localized reality of it.

This is like the War on Terror more than 9/11 itself. The whole war stretching from the first World Trade Center bombing and the embassy bombings in Africa, through 9/11 and up to today. This won't last as long as the war on terror, which is good. It will be different because we won't really be able to got back to our daily routine in between attacks, threats, etc. The emphasis was to go back to normal but to be more aware and vigilant. This time will be under some form of lock down that makes major changes to our everyday life until this is over, and that could take months.

It is like World War II more than it is like Pearl Harbor. It won't last as long as the war did. That is one way in which it is better. It also won't be as deadly either in all likelihood. But it will kill average everyday Americans where they live like no war has since the Civil War has. It will also require more personally of every American than any war since World War II. Other wars since then haven't required rationing or significant changes in industrial production,. This will require those things, even if it is just rationing of medical supplies and the halt of much commercial manufacturing.

Unlike the war on terror, and unlike the American experience in World War II, this will take place locally on US soil. It will affect people where they live. And it will--because it is localized and because we are trying to slow the spread-- take place in different places at different times. This week may be the worst in New York City, but for other places the worst is yet to come in days, weeks or even months. For that reason, it is important to pay attention to what is going on locally where ever you are. Yes, what Washington DC is doing is important, but the decisions your state and local governments are making and when they are making them is what you needs to be paying attention to. It is a nation wide struggle that will take place at different times in different parts of the nation and coming out of it in the best shape possible means paying attention to it locally.

Digital Time, Broken Time and Alienation

Digital Time, Broken Time and Alienation

Our sense of time is broken, and it has been for some time. The digital world moves much faster than the physical world. That is an unavoidable reality. The digital world was once a shadow of the physical world, but it has now eclipsed it and overshadows the physical world. The digital is still no more than a shadow itself, but it has managed to cast the physical world into darkness. Even if that seems impossible and illogical, it is our reality.

The speed of the digital has made us impatient with the speed of the physical. We expect decisions in and regarding the physical world to be made as quickly as messages move in the digital. We expect results to appear just as quickly. We want instantaneous decisions and results: an ecstasy of decisions and results. (Forgetting how empty the ecstasy of communication in the digital world tends to leave us.) That will never happen, and the unrelenting desire and expectation for this ecstasy alienates us from the physical.

A change has been forced upon our everyday lives now. It has been forced upon us by a physical reality that cannot be meaningfully copied or mirrored in the digital: not in algorithms, images, charts, graphs nor models. I hope this change can help us come to terms with this new alienation and doesn't drive us deeper it to it. These physical restrictions are a double edged sword that can cut either way; it all depends on which way (or ways) we push the blade.

Science, Technology and the Economy... Amen

Science, Technology and the Economy... Amen

Christianity talks of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the God of Christianity. Three names, three people, one being in one God. It seems simple to someone that is used to it, that is raised in that tradition. That is deceptive because anyone with real faith and real experience or understanding of Christianity, or any living religion, knows that it is complex, mysterious and filled with things that are unknown and unknowable. What is the will of God, and how can we know it? And then, what about following it? The Trinity? Three persons in one being, in one God? These are just the beginning of the questions. Questions that after two millennia of being worked on by some of the best minds are still unclear and lacking definitive answers.

At one point I came across a feminist interpretation of the Trinity that exchanged the traditional terms for three more gender neutral ones: Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. While this interpretation definitely has validity and connection to the truth and mystery of the Trinity, it is missing something that made me resist it as anything more than one possible alternative way to think about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. My hangup: it is very impersonal. To say that the Sustainer works in mysterious ways seems to fall so flat compacted to the Spirit works in mysterious ways. Saying that the redeemer struggled in the garden and suffered on the cross has much less meaning, at least to me, than saying that the Son-- who is the person Jesus-- struggled and suffered. This interpretation misses the personal aspects of the traditional wording. It is interesting and enlightening, but it can't replace the standard. At least not for me.

However, I may be part of a group that is not typical these days. I want the personal just as much, if not more, than the objective. But I think most people are different, at least when it comes to truth. Most people want the impersonal because people and the personal are imperfect and inconsistent, to say the least. As a society, we seem to prefer the impersonal and abstract because we trust in things that are thought to be objective, like data and systems. This is why we put so much faith in computers, and as a society we will soon put more faith in AI than we can in a personal God, or even in any person.

We will move, if we haven't already, from the personal Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, though the rather impersonal Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer interpretation, into a new Trinity. It is the Trinity of Science, Technology and the Economy. Science creates the world we live in. (But we like to think of it as uncovering what is and was always there already.) Technology shapes and manipulates it to our fit our will and liking as much as it can. (Those with faith in the Trinity conveniently ignore or logically discount--usually by throwing blame-- what the God can't change, or the spin it, like any good faithful follower does.) And the Economy sustains the other two so they can continue their work. The good work; the work of God.

To be fair, this is not the way that real, well educated people-- especially real scientists-- see these things. This is really a manifestation of scientism. But I think it is widespread and it is spreading wider. It is most definitely a religion, a system of though that is based on faith. It is the religion of the new Trinity that bills itself as humanistic but is controlled by cold science: facts and data analyzed objectively, often by computers. It pretends to be realistic and materialistic, submitting to the facts and data, but it is actually more concerned with manipulating the material world and forging a reality of its own imagining. When that fails it spins the facts and creates illusions to cover over what doesn't fit its vision-- as does every good religion. And it is a religion. It is the religion of the new Trinity: Science, Technology and the Economy. Amen.

Essential Passages from Scripture:
In the beginning was Technology, and Technology was with Science, and Technology was Science. Technology was in the beginning with Science. All things came into being through Technology, and without it not one thing came into being. What has come into being through Technology was (a comfortable) life, and this life was the light of all people. This light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

When the day of Prosperity had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from the markets there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Individual accounts, like platinum cards with high credit limits, appeared among them, and an account rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Economy and began to spend in many amounts and currencies, as the Economy gave them ability.

The President cannot threaten the very integrity of that election unless you don't have any faith in the American voter...

"We cannot rely on an election to solve our problems, when the president threatens the very integrity of that election."  

-- Jerry Nadler, House Judiciary Committee Chairman 

I in no way want to excuse what Trump is accused of doing, but this is misguided: alarmist and simplistic. 

The President cannot threaten the very integrity of that election unless you don't have any faith in the American voter. He can spread all the lies and misinformation he wants, it is up to the people to decide. The same is true about Russia and all of the other candidates. It is true about the media as well. They can all try to mislead and misinform as much as they want; it is the voters who have the ability and responsibly to make their choices and to do so in a way that will make the government work.

I know that puts a lot of responsibility on people that are already busy and don't have much time to be well informed. And I add to the burden by saying that they need to be more than informed: they need to be knowledgeable and even wise. (Neil Postman does a great job of defining those terms in his book Building a Bridge to the 18th Century in the chapter titled Information.) That responsibility needs to be shared, but it is not. We tend to give away that responsibility to the media, the government, the politicians or even the algorithms that run our digital lives. 

But in the end, we need to rely on the people to make informed decisions. That is the basis of democracy. Information technology has made that more difficult than ever because we are all more misinformed than ever, but we believe we are well informed. (See Postman on being informed and knowledgeable versus being ignorant in Amusing Ourselves to Death.) Being awash in information to the point of being paralyzed, helpless and apathetic or only being able to react with knee-jerk responses it not being informed. 

Part of the problem with the people, the voters, is that we have all been educated in a way that didn't prepare us for the chaos of the age of information. We were taught that information is good; we weren't (and most students still aren't) taught that information is meaningless without context. This has a lot to do with the way that we understand what facts and truth are in the age of science. 

Science finds facts and puts them together so we can know what is true. (In this way it is like any method of inquiry or thinking.) The scientific method is presented as a mechanical (and therefore unbiased and objective) process that scientists go through to find objective and unbiased facts and arrive at objective and unbiased truth. This kind of truth and facts-- because it is objective and unbiased-- needs no context. Or that is what we are often told, or at least led to believe. It is how we understand science and scientific facts and truths. There is a problem with that, and we make it worse when we take that understanding of truth into our everyday lives. 

Science, when done well, is quite unbiased and pretty objective. However, it is also based on certain assumptions and values. These work for science, and they reinforce the idea that science is objective and unbiased. Everyday life, and the facts and truths of it, are different than that of a scientist in a lab and/or with the instruments they use to observe and measure. The context of science-- its facts, truths, assumptions and values-- exists next to but aside from the rest of our lives. It does what it does well, but it is not objective and unbiased completely. These work for science, but they should not necessarily be transferred into everyday life: not the idea of being unbiased, of being objective nor the assumptions or values. 

The context of science is not the same context that we live in: not the one that other academic fields like sociology work in; not the one that we have interpersonal relationships in; not the one that politics operates in; and so on. These things have their own contexts with their own facts, truths, assumptions and values. As a result, we need to know those facts, truths, assumptions and values as much as possible to be not just informed but knowledgeable and maybe even wise in those areas. 

That of course is not easy. But if we are educated to realize it is not easy, we will be more hesitant to think that things are obvious or self-evident. We will know that we need to be knowledgeable and not just informed. We will know when to listen to authorities who know the context and have knowledge and hopefully wisdom. 

This means that we need to be more than just informed, and as a result it something that the internet cannot do. No matter how much information is there, it can't. No matter how good the algorithms are that sort that information, it can't. We need to know when we need to go beyond information and where and who to go to get more. This is something we have to be taught; it is a way of thinking and acting in the world-- especially on the internet. 

Education should not just tell us facts, truth or information: at least not higher level education. Education needs to tell us not just what the facts are and what is true, but more importantly how and why they are true. This means understanding the context, which has to do with knowing the assumptions and values. That way, when the context changes, we can know and understand that the facts and truths may have changed, and maybe give us the ability to think about how. 

If you think that the president can 'threaten the very integrity of an election' by digging up dirt on an opponent (even if that involves lies and abuse of power), then I think you don't have a very good opinion of the American people who will be voting in that election. 

Maybe at this point we shouldn't have a very positive opinion about the ability of the American voters to choose their leaders. But laying the blame on Trump, or Russia or anyone else besides the voters is letting them off the hook and is really an insult to democracy. 

The media has a part to play, and I think they are not living up to it. The politicians have a bigger part to play, and I think they too are falling far short. The people have the biggest part to play, and they are falling short too. 

I am convinced that the fact that the people are falling short has to do with our understanding of what is going on and how we were educated-- both of which have been damaged by an over-emphasis on science and technology. It is the people and their education and understanding of things that needs to be the focus when we look into what is going wrong and how to fix it. Focusing on Trump, Russia or anything else is a scapegoat. It is a feelgood way to shift blame and fix symptoms while ignoring the problem. 

A Reflection on Waiting for Godot

For me, Waiting for Godot is about the postmodern condition.

There is no transcendent meaning; we choose meaning from the threads of tradition that have been handed down to us. Trying to weave them into something new or just trying to pull them forward or both, we scrape by. But we choose them, or at least we can if we are aware enough of the situation to do so.
We can choose to keep our appointments and responsibilities, though we know that doing so may have little benefit. We can kill our selves. We can leave or leave one another. We can beat each other. We have so many choices, and it can easily cause paralysis. And many of us are paralyzed, at least when it comes to making grounding choices. But none of them really provide a ground anyway. They just provide an aid in shuffling along, or shuffling in place.

Yes, things have changed since the play was written. We are, most of us, physically vagabonds. We are no longer physically hungry and wearing rags. (The reality of post war France, where it was written, was very bleek and destitute.) We have homes, food and clothing, often too much to the point that we don't know what to do with it or are distracted by it. We have our entertainment and our devices. We are never in need of Lucky's speech to pass the time. But what we have, is it much better?

And as we wait (because we are always waiting for something, even if it isn't Godot that we have chosen, even if we haven't consciously chosen at all) with all we now have, as things repeat again and again as we wait, are we any better for it? Godot could come at anytime, and we would likely miss him. But would that matter? We are missing the experience of waiting because we are always too preoccupied with passing the time. But maybe that is the true human experience: waiting. And we are missing it.

And we delude ourselves into thinking that nothing is repeating because we are so connected and so much is new and always changing. But things still repeat, we are just distracted from those details. And maybe that too is part of the true human experience: repetition.

Waiting for Godot is too dull and boring and meaningless for most people to stand. And maybe that is why so many people don't really understand what it is to be human and what a human life really is. They are just too busy trying to avoid it.