Bread Crumbs

Will Smith, in I Robot, plays a detective who is following the bread crumbs left him by a famous scientist who killed himself as the only way to get a message to Will. As Will arrives at the last site, he says, "Bread crumbs followed, old man." It doesn't always work that well, as you see.

Here, I ask only that you follow me over to the new site. This is my last post at thedilettantesdilemma.blogspot.com. I'm shifting over to thedilettantesdilemma.com, which is a site offered by WordPress and which is a good deal friendlier to the kind of writing I do. So please come along.

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The next post over there will be called "Welcome, friends."

The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel

Really, It’s Just KFC.

In general terms, this post is just a celebration of Neal Stephenson’s mastery with words and the fun he has with thunderous incongruities. I’m going to do that in two ways—both from The Diamond Age.


First, I want to place the utter centrality of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Shanghai, several decades into our future. Judge Fang, Constable Chang, and Miss Pao are the participants in this spoof. They are trying a little boy named Harvard for assaulting a rich young engineer and stealing some of his possessions. Up to this point the trial has been conducted in English.
At this point, the three revert to Chinese.

“The hour of noon has passed,” said Judge Fang. “Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Chang.

“As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Miss Pao.

Judge Fang switched back to English. “Your case is very serious,” he said to the boy. “We will go and consult the ancient authorities. You will wait here until we return.”
The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. “Venerable” because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. “Inscrutable” because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices.

I think I have not passed a KFC for a decade or more without some version of the “House of the Venerable and Unscrutable Colonel” passing through my mind.

Today’s second celebration of Neal Stephenson will be made up of my notes on some of the words he introduced me to. I’ll pick my favorite five for today. I give Stephenson’s use first; then whatever I have come up with as the meaning.

7. coenobitical
Page 25: There were a bunch of coenobitical phyles—religious tribes—that took people of all races, but most of they weren’t very powerful and didn’t have turf in the Leased Territories.
This isn’t as weird as it looks. The dictionary cites cenobite, which solves the oe- problem and getting from cenobite to cenobitical is a short trip. A cenobite is a member of a religious order living in a monastery or convent. This distinguishes them from anchorites, who were hermits. Cenobite is a version of the Greek koinos, “common” and bios, “life.” There are later forms, of course, such as the Late Latin coenobium, “a cloister.” The prefix is pronounced SEE-no, as in evil.
9. coarcted
Page 30: All the other thetes, coarcted into their tacky little claves belonging to their synthetic phyles, turning up their own mediatrons to drown out the Senderos…
This is an unfamiliar word that really adds something. It is just right. The meaning of the adjective coarctate in biology is “compressed or constricted” or “rigidly enclosed in the last larval skin: said of certain insect pupae.” Stephenson, with the verb coarcted gets not only the cramming together but the insect image as well. “Crammed together as tight as the final skin on a larva” is the clout he gets out of this word.
7. phyles
Phyle (Greek φυλή phulē, "clan, race, people", derived from ancient Greek φύεσθαι "to descend, to originate") is an ancient Greek term for clan or tribe. They were usually ruled by a basileus. Some of them can be classified by their geographic location: the Geleontes, the Argadeis, the Hopletes, and the Agikoreis, in Ionia ; the Hylleans, the Pamphyles, the Dymanes, in the Dorian region. [Wikipedia]
41. decussating
Page 341: The unmarked decussating paths would have been confusing to anyone but a native.
Decussating paths cross in the form of an X. How that’s different from an ordinary intersection, I’m not sure. The Latin is decis, “10.” That’s 10 as in X, since it’s a Roman numeral. Decussare means “to cross in the form of an X,” which is, apparently, what “decussating paths” do.
33. glacis
Page 258: “…who would struggle their way up the vast glacis separating wage slaves from Equity Participants.”
I am shocked to find that this word is pronounced like “glasses,” except the final s- is also sibilant. It looks so French. A glacis is a gradually slope. It doesn’t have any particular temperature, although it shares the root of the Latin glacialis, “frozen.” I think it’s the connotation he wants. A glacis can be part of a fortress; the embankment sloping gradually up to a fortification so that anyone attacking it will be exposed to gunfire the whole way. I think that’s the picture he wants us to have of wage slaves trying to become Equity Participants.

Debt-Limit Chicken--And Worse

July 27, 2011. It is now less than a week until the United States of America tells the people who have loaned money to us that we were, after all, a bad risk. The debt limit confrontation has been pictured as a game of chicken between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, the only presiding official in the Congress who opposes him. Sen. McConnell will have to wait his turn.

So…a game of chicken. We drive our cars toward each other at high speeds. In the best outcome, you flinch and turn aside and I win. In the second best outcome, I flinch and you win. In the least good outcome, neither of us turns and we kill each other. But now that I have gone that I realize that there is an outcome even worse. We both flinch and turn into each other (that would be to the right for you and to the left for me—how very familiar that sounds!) and reveals ourselves not only as cowards but as incompetent cowards. That would be worse.
I’m not sure that chicken captures all the elements of this contest, however, so I would like to try several others. How about Russian Roulette? You spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger. You have five chances out of six of surviving—if you do it one time. If you do it over and over—I’m not at all good at calculating cumulative probabilities—the odds get worse.

So let’s consider the roulette elements of the present situation. President Obama can’t control the Democratic votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers. Speaker Boehner can’t control the Republican votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers, which, until recently, was the same one the President preferred. The two parties are highly ideological. Votes which pitted 80% of Democrats voting one way against 80% of Republicans voting the other way were once unusual; now they are the commonest kind of vote. The new Tea Party-backed Republican House members believe they owe intransigence to their constituents—it is their sworn duty—and that intransigence has now been turned against the leader of their own party. This has led Eric Cantor, the Number 2 man in the House to tell them to “Grow up,” a sentiment also found on the lips of the President. How awkward is that?

This is highly unstable. Now we approach this brink over and over. The probability of hitting the live chamber, by this analogy, goes up radically as you do it over and over. Eventually, you will hit the live chamber—that would be the House in the present scenario—and you blow your brains out. Actually, that might have happened in the 2010 elections; it’s still too soon to tell.

The third scenario, one which captures yet another aspect of this impending disaster, is a champion battle. I’m thinking of David and Goliath as an example. I’m not really sure, now that I think of it, what was supposed to happen to the army of the defeated contestant. Were they supposed to be massacred? To be slaves? To be put in internment camps? I really don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter, because the notion of “champion” is all I need. Theoretically, if David wins, it is good news for the Israelites. If Goliath wins, it is good news for the Philistines. But fiscal default isn’t really like that. If we default, both David and Goliath lose. And all the people David and Goliath represent also lose. All of us are killed or enslaved or put in camps, or whatever. The cost to anyone of borrowing money for anything will go up, for instance. You don’t need to be on the losing side to suffer this defeat because both sides are the losing sides—not just the champions but the armies and not just the armies but the civilian populations. Everyone—litigators, bundlers of financial instruments and off-shore hiders of revenue and Chainsaw Al personnel departments—loses.

These three images together give us a fuller picture, I think, of what
we’re up against. This account sounds crude and contemporary to my ears,
however. This is how Lincoln put it.

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were
anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to
avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place,
devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and
divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them
would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

The Two Tournaments

Today, I want to follow up the perspective on aging and dying that I called “rising above decline.” As I promised, I will be using a tennis tournament to point to the differences that strike me.

But first, a word from my sponsor. I’ve been playing around, for the last several weeks with a WordPress-supported blog. A number of people had told me that WordPress is a better provider than BlogSpot and after experimenting for a while, I have concluded that they are right.

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Now about the tennis tournament. To make this work, I am going to follow a particular player through a tournament. Since I was sure that Roger Federer was going to win Wimbledon this year (he didn’t: Jo-Wilfred Tsongas defeated him), I’m going to imagine that he gains, at each stage, what Erik Erikson says he would gain if “life” were a tennis tournament.

I’m going to come back to the tournament metaphor several times, I think All of them are going to imagine that Roger Federer won Wimbledon this year, which, alas, he did not do. I like the tournament metaphor, though, because it is familiar and graphic and goes in the general direction of my argument. I always consider that last one a plus.

Here are the two parts for today. If you distinguish, as I proposed in “Rising Above Decline,” the trajectories of the body and of the “self,” we see how different those trajectories are—or, rather, how different they might be. In the first application, I will trace a body through the tournament. It loses. Not to spoil the suspense. In the second application, I will trace a self through the tournament. You could win this one. The goal of the opponents you will face in this tournament isn’t to kill you; it is to defeat you. There is no reason why you have to be defeated. That’s what I think, anyway, and I have played enough really bad sets that I think you ought to listen to me.

If you imagine life as a tournament and your body as an entrant in the tournament, you can easily pick out opponents. Events and conditions that damage your body are opponents. Your body never recovers from having lost the use of arms and legs in a car crash. “You” might; there are perfectly happy quadriplegics; but your body doesn’t. You can survive measles with no adverse effects at all. You won that round. You can live with persistently high levels of stress. You win that round too, but you are disadvantaged by it in later rounds. But at some round or another, an enemy will defeat you (your body) and you will drop out of the tournament. Erickson has eight stages (about which, more later) and the tournament metaphor recognizes that you could lose at any of them.

The most substantial point to be made of the bodily tournament is that you will lose. No one wins this tournament. You can to better than expected, but eventually you will meet an opponent who is tougher than you are—cancer, say, or pneumonia, or heart attack—and you will drop from the bracket. In saying all that, I have used the tournament bracket to define “mortality;” nothing more.

If, on the other hand, you picture your “self,” rather than your body, as the entrant in the tournament, then everything is different. You still face opponents. One of the great values of Erikson’s system is that you know what opponents you are going to face. And you might lose to any of those opponents. If you come up against “role-confusion” as an opponent, for instance—and in Erikson’s Stage 5, you will—you could play a bad game and lose. The result of losing to that opponent is that you really don’t formulate a notion of who you are that you can accept and commit to. You don’t form, in words I have come to like a great deal, “an accurate and acceptable self-image.” On the other hand, you could beat all these opponents and face, in the finals, “despair.” That’s the last opponent, as Erikson conceives of it.

But you don’t have to lose even this final match. You can win and you can be undefeated even at the very last when your self goes away. So the trajectory of the tournament in which your self plays could be entirely different from the tournament in which your body plays. The body will inevitably decline, but “you” may rise above it. It will lose, but “you” need not.

Enough, probably too much, about mortality. It is the other tournament that will concern us from here on out. I’m in Stage 8. According to Erikson, the opponent I am currently battling is “stagnation.” I’m doing pretty well, but I got banged up some in several of the earlier rounds so we’ll have to see how it goes.

Rising Above Decline

Today, I want to think about dying and about not dying. It’s pretty simple in a way, but I have quite a few posts I would like to write about getting old and about people who have written persuasively about what is involved—B. F. Skinner and Erik Erikson are the ones I will be following—and I find myself blocked because I have not said the few simple things that need to be said first.

Let’s start with “self.” In my line of work, a self is a social construction: I have a work self and a running self and a punning self and so on. And when I say “my self,” that is what people ordinarily refer to. [Footnote 1 English has come to use person as the crucial word. There is an irony there because person once referred to the theater masks used in Greek drama, so that dramatis personae didn’t mean so much “cast of characters,” i.e., the actors and actresses, as it meant the range of masks to be used. The derivation per-, “through” + sonare, “to sound,” shows the dramatic origins of the term and also why an actor would “sound through” whatever mask he was wearing.]But when I say “myself,” I mean me. I mean all of me and my close identification with myself as someone who has a past and who has done some things and who is so substantial that it is legally liable. Since a self is socially required, “myself” is socially liable as well, of course.

Myself includes my body. My self does not. From the standpoint of my self, my body is “it.” I am still fully engaged in this conversation but “it” is exhausted and will go to sleep no matter what I want it to do.[Footnote 2 None of this is meant to imply that I believe the body and the other part (self, soul, essence) are independent entities. The body is the host to the neurons, the interaction of which generates the possibility of selfhood. I know this is controversial in some settings, but since I believe the self requires a supporting cast of connected neurons, I also believe that when the neurons go, I go. I am, in this sense, a psychosomatic unity and neither element works alone. Surprisingly, The Matrix is very good about this. As is The Bible, in a very different way.]

OK, that was the hard part. “It,” i.e., my body, is in a state of extended and predictable decline. Nothing works as well as it used to and things are going to keep on declining. Mostly, I’m fine with that. But I don’t think “I” need to follow along too closely. The analog of bodily death, it seems to me, is personal despair. I got that from Erikson and eventually, I’d like to write a little more about how I understand him and how I feel about it. I do need to die—or, to say it another way, “it” needs to—but I don’t need to despair.

The best summary of this I have ever seen was the title of an article about the kinds of economic uses schools could be put to when there were no children to put in them. The population of the district was declining and the business manager was looking for a way to turn a profit on the empty buildings. The article was called “Rising Above Decline.” So I think “it” will decline, but I think “I” can rise above it. [Footnote 3 I will still think that when I get to the question of pervasive dementia, but that isn’t the focus of today’s piece.] There is a good reason to die, but there is not a good reason to despair.

My body has a predictable arc of decline. About 60% of adult males, age 50, can do this; 40% at age 60; 20% at age 80, and so on. That’s a social assessment of who can do what. I have my own assessment as well and any number of metrics could be called into play here. I think I’ll use running times. I always wanted to run a 10K under 41 minutes. Never did. I got to 41:12 once and to 41:15 twice. After a while, I started just being sure that whatever the course was, I was in under 45 minutes. Then under an hour. My Wildwood Trail times for a mile have gone from 9:15/mile to 10 minutes. My standard time these days is about 13 minutes, although that includes some walking, and I do sometimes run the last mile or so under 12 minutes. Each.

I am illustrating “decline.” I’m perfectly contented with these times if they are all I am capable of. I keep pushing on the edges to see if bad things happen when I push. When they don’t, I push a little harder; when they do, I count myself satisfied. Sometimes more than satisfied, although I wouldn’t want to have to justify how good I feel when I have done what I am capable of. I call it “leaving it all on the trail,” a version of the “leave it all on the floor” of my early basketball days.

When I have pushed my body to do what it is capable of that day, I am really tired and entirely content at the end of the day. If it took me an hour and twenty minutes to run the six mile course and that’s the best I could do that day, I’m proud of myself. If I think I really could have run it in an hour and fifteen minutes and just didn’t have the guts to do it, I am disappointed in myself.
I win nearly all the time because I keep adjusting the goals down so that I have a decent chance at achieving them. I like winning, but I like to set the goals where they demand my best performance to reach them, so being disappointed today is the price I pay for really believing in my satisfaction the next time.

If this works out right, the next post in this series will imagine the “stages of life” (Erikson) as a tennis tournament, like Wimbledon, in which each victory gives you the opportunity to play someone better than the guy you just beat, but which also gives you additional tools for the next match. Now that I think of it, it is even more like the New Wilmington (Pennsylvania) summer tennis tournaments, where each player brought a new can of balls to the match and the winner got to keep the unopened can.

Owning Less

I own a lot of books and I own different ones for different reasons. I’m going to have to get rid of nearly all of them soon and I find myself stumbling over how different those reasons are from each other. That’s what this post is about.

The default date Bette and I have chosen for moving out of our home here in Southwest Portland and moving into a retirement center of some sort is 2017. That isn’t a hard date. It’s the time when we want to be ready to move—we’ve chosen a place and made some early payments and located ourselves at the top of whatever list we want to be on—not the time when we absolutely will move. Still, I am mindful of my father’s often-repeated maxim that it is good to “pre-think the inevitable.”

Wherever we move, we will have something like a fifth of the space for books that is currently occupied by books where we live now. We need to get rid of four fifths of our books. It’s hard to say it out loud and take it seriously.

That brings me to the question of why I have the books I have. Some of the books I have are biographically significant. I have the revised edition of Dolbeare and Edelman’s American government text, which has a nice little recognition of me in the acknowledgements and the substantially different treatment of the federal bureaucracy that I had asked for. That doesn’t seem like a book I should get rid of. I have the copy of Jim Davies’ Human Nature and Politics which I was reading when I called him at the University of Oregon and told him I was blown away by the book and wanted to do doctoral studies with him. That’s what got me to Oregon. I have my brother John’s signed copy of Galápagos, which, in addition to being a well-conceived, well-written, and beautiful book, acknowedges my contributions to its present form. I’m not going to give books like that to the Salvation Army.

I have reference books. I have a lot of reference books. Most of them are biblical commentaries or cribs of one kind or another. Some are etymological collections I couldn’t find elsewhere.. And there are some reference books that you really need to have within arm’s reach, even if you could go to the library and find them.

I have books I read over and over. If I designed a graphic like this Venn diagram, the red spot would be a great deal larger. I read The Lord of the Rings over and over. I read the four Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey books quite a bit. I read Ursula LeGuin's Hainish Trilogy and EarthSea books. And other, less respectable collections as well. I want to keep the books I read over and over, no matter how big the red spot gets.

The political science books that I have kept around as markers for a path I might be moved to take some time will have to go. It won’t be hard to do without the books, but it will be hard to say out loud that I will never actually pursue this or that very interesting path of inquiry. Evolutionary psychology will probably fall into that category, as will brain studies, world culture conflicts, and nearly everything about contemporary politics. The books on the psychology and sociology of intimate relationships, about dating and true love (not the same thing, in my experience), and histories of marriage in the West since the Industrial Revolution, will have to go. I will make an exception of Gary Chapman’s The Five Languages of Love because it has been such a good book for Bette and me and because it is about the need to find and learn the language your partner understands best.

No more new novels in paper form. Probably Kindle books or whatever has replaced Kindle by that time. Or I will buy them and read them and pass them along. And then if I have to read them again (that red spot), I will try to get one from the library.

So—as you can see—it isn’t the books that make this hard. It’s the rationales. I have become the person I am in large part by reading and internalizing the information and the arguments in these books. Now I’m going to have to find out how well I do without the books. The reasons for having books are so powerful; the reasons for not having them seem, somehow, weaker.

Well Dad, it’s time to “pre-think the inevitable.” Maybe I’ll start on it tomorrow.

Forgiving Debts

We are a credit-driven society. We know all about debts. You see something you want to buy, you give the merchant your credit card (thereby acquiring a debt) and when, eventually, the bill comes, you pay it, thus discharging the debt. That’s how it goes. Being “forgiven” this debt is nearly inconceivable . Even bankruptcy doesn’t do that.

It is our individualism that makes this so clear. If you didn’t buy it, then you don’t owe a debt for it. But we weren’t always so individualistic and our notions of forgiveness come from a setting that was much more collectivist than we are. The people of Israel were bound in a covenant with God. You don’t get much more collectivist than that.

A part of this covenant with God was that there was a collectivity (a tribe, let’s say) that owed a debt. It was an obligation. Often it was clear how the debt was to be discharged, but it was not always clear just who was to do the discharging. That’s where forgiveness comes in.
Let me give a simple example. Redemption was a part of the Israelite covenant. Leviticus 25 offers a good example. Every Israelite properly belonged to God, therefore there would have to be some limits put on the length of time anyone could be a slave, even if he sold himself into slavery. Selling yourself into slavery is like hocking yourself at the pawnshop. You probably shouldn’t have allowed things to get that bad, but you did. You screwed up so badly, let’s say, that you really don’t deserve to be redeemed. We can imagine that, can’t we?

The interesting thing about the Israelite covenant is that it really didn’t matter whether you deserved to be redeemed or not. You belong to God. You are not, to use an expression with New Testament overtones, your own. God deserves for you to be redeemed, to be restored to Him. You may not deserve it, but God deserves it. And for that reason, someone has a debt. It is not a debt to you. It is a debt to God. The debt is discharged when someone—probably a close kinsman—goes to the man who owns you and pays him the money he demands to release his claims on your labor. You have now been redeemed. You don’t belong to yourself now because you never belonged to yourself. You belong to God again, and not to the slave owner to whom you had hocked yourself.

We are now in a position to reconsider the forgiveness of debts. Raymond E. Brown, in a lecture on the beginnings of the church, says that he thinks that Matthew’s “debts” is historically richer than Luke’s “trespasses.” Brown’s idea is that you “trespass against” someone by committing an act against him or her. “Trespass” is a clear act. But you can owe a “debt” to someone you don’t know. Brown thinks that Matthew had the covenant obligations in mind. I might “owe you” redemption, for instance. If you are from my tribe and if you were sold into slavery and if I am your closest kinsman, then I owe you your freedom. I may not know you. If I know you, I may not like you. But because we both belong to the covenant of God and because you should have no other owner than God, I have a debt to you. I am to find you and make the transaction with your owner that will restore you to God.

I have a debt to God, but because of that debt, I owe an action to you. If I did not take that action for whatever reason, I would need to be forgiven by you and by God, since I had transgressed against both. It is for that reason, Brown argues, that “forgive us our debts” reaches so deeply into the community.

As Christians, we don’t have the covenant obligations our Israelite forbears had. In fact, the apostle Paul struggled over and over with the question of just what we did owe each other. Paul thought that living the life of the Spirit ought to make questions of what Christians owed each other practically obsolete. But Paul was a pastor, so he knew these questions weren’t obsolete. What do the strong in faith owe the overscrupulous? What do husbands owe wives? What do those with the charism of administration owe to their congregations?

Whatever specific behavior we owe—or the attitudes that support the behavior—we owe to people who “belong with us” because they “belong to God.” The debt we owe, using Matthew’s phrasing, is a debt of action and not taking the needed action is failing to discharge our debt. Anyone who has been given the gift of encouragement and who withholds encouragement from a brother or sister has not paid the debt he owes . Anyone who has been given the gift of administering the affairs of the church and who has not done so has not paid the debt he owes.
The conclusion here is that owing an action to a brother or sister is not quite as straightforward as owing a debt on your credit card. When we pray “forgive us our debts,” we mean “forgive us the debts we have not paid.” We mean, “forgive us the debts of which we have already defaulted.”

It’s a very pushy notion. That is one of the many reasons I like Pay It Forward. It isn’t about divine grace, but there is a divine sort of pushiness about it. As the attorney says, “You accepted the gift. You’re obligated.”