heroism

Children will gladly accept narratives in which they're heroes. Every ethical rule, every principle, makes a hero of its enactor. What's right is what's good and if you do it, you're good, a hero.

I was told often as a child -- no, I breathed it -- that I should follow my conscience, do what's right, protect the weak from the strong, act on principle; that I was free and everyone should be. And since the adult world is intent on destroying children, the temptation of heroism is that much greater. I would be that hero. That pathetic child self would be redeemed.

The mistake -- Bradley Manning's mistake, it seems, one tied up with his heroism -- is believing that they meant it. The mistake is not recognizing that principle persists only because it's useful, because it redeems someone, because it helps someone manipulate. She who acts on principle will suffer at the hands of the principle pushers. She who acts to please will be rewarded.

Check out Big Bird, starting around 2:07:

Big Bird, sadly, doesn't mean it.

portrait of anarchist blogging

The sound of bullets swept through the room, then faded just as quickly, as a wiry man, breathing heavily, slammed the door behind him.

"Still bad out there?," a voice inquired.

"Same as ever," the wiry man responded.

"Still losing?," asked another.

"What do you think?"

"Speaking of which, Jesse over there is really onto something," said another, pointing to a long-haired, Jesus-looking dude furiously painting the tanks, state mercenaries, and trampled babies just outside the door.  "He seems to get it slightly better than the rest of us."

"So when are we going out there? What's the plan?," implored another, clearly a newcomer.

[Laughter. End scene.]

homophobia

Homophobia is easily dismissed by homophobes with "I'm not afraid of gay people," where "afraid" is assumed to entail running the other way for reasons of physical or emotional safety. "I talk to gay people" and "I've never run away from a gay person" are often considered thorough falsification, as if white 19th century southerners could have proven their non-racism by talking to or not fleeing from black southerners. Think about that.

Homophobia is not the fear of being dominated by "a homosexual." Homophobia is the fear of being gay, which wouldn't be a problem, if not for the fact that being gay means being a woman, which again, wouldn't be a problem, if not for the buried-to-most assumption that women are the lowest form of anything.

Insinuate that a macho man is a girl and see how he reacts. "If you're not afraid of being a girl, put on this dress. Then let us talk about you the way that we talk about women. No, this is not a game of pretend. You are a woman. Are you OK with that?"

Homophobes are afraid of being women, who are worthless (in the fantasy!), which is why young men throw themselves on grenades. To be not worthless. Is there anything more masculine than throwing oneself on a grenade?

Women are considered worthless because the rejected son is worthless, and the son seeks to control women so as never to be rejected again. She who is worthless cannot reject him (even though she actually can, since it's a fantasy he doesn't quite believe) because her opinion is worthless. Thus men who spend their lives victimizing are reenacting a victimization. You reject me? You bitch! I will destroy you, or me.      

Reasons boys feel rejected by mothers and act out with machismo may include the difficulties of parenting generally, the convenience of the less powerful mother as a rage target, the greater presence of the mother as opposed to the father (making her a greater focus of rage), the possible fragility of boy brains as opposed to girl brains, and the general systemic benefits available to boys (unavailable to girls) for acting like macho asshats.

go to school or die, you fucking kid

"...[W]hile we cannot actually change anybody’s behavior, we can influence behavior, and there are two primary ways to do that— through persuasion, and through leverage. And what I try to point out is that while leverage is the most widely used— in the form of rules and consequences, punishments and rewards--and while those things have a place, I think we need to get better at learning how to persuade people that what we’re trying to get them to do, vis-à-vis being successful in school, is really in their interest, that it’s to their benefit to behave and to do what it is that we’re asking. Unless there’s a realization that you help somebody see how their life is going to improve by doing something that’s foreign to them, something that you’re going to require of them, unless they’re convinced of the benefit to them, they’re not going to do it. It’s going to be too foreign to them."  

 --- first useable Allen Mendler quote I could find on the internet (emphasis in original)

Some of my students are teachers and one of them has a book by the above Mendler called "Motivating Students Who Don't Care." As you might guess from the title, the point of the book is to provide teachers with techniques to get people to do what they don't want to do. Oh whoops, I put a period there. Let me finish...for their own good. The title could also be rephrased: "how pretending to care about students' interests, acting like their friend, and treating them with 'respect' makes them more likely to do what you want them to do while at the same time and, in fact, by way of, maintaining the lie for you and them that you're genuinely interested in their perspective, needs, goals, etc."

If you actually cared, you wouldn't need a book. You'd just fucking care. Which is easier than it sounds. Or if you're the sort of person who cares, maybe it doesn't sound so hard in the first place.

But, sadly, it is in the best interests of students, sort of, to do what the teacher wants them to do. Because if they don't, they will die, thanks in part to teachers.

At the bottom of all this is the same dilemma we see in progressive politics generally -- how to reconcile the desire to be a progressive force involved in creating a world where people get along and are nice to each other and in which everyone is mostly equal with the death threat that underpins the entire system you actively maintain.

Most dissidents are well aware of what happens if you don't pay your taxes. There's a series of steps the state will take to get the money out of you. If you don't resist, no problem. They'll take your money and you'll tell yourself that you wanted to give it to them and that you'll get lots of benefits from it like roads and videos of Mars and safety from powerless Middle Easterners and that you live in a democracy where you have a voice, dammit. If you resist a little, they might give you a warning and if you still refuse to pay, you'll end up in jail. If you resist arrest, they'll take you to jail anyway. They'll use handcuffs, fists, tasers, any means necessary. Which means they reserve the right to kill you.

Similarly, students who resist teachers' demands are first told to cooperate, then given detention, then sent home for a little while, then for a long while, then...then what happens? Loving acceptance, because we care about kids' feelings and respect their right to choose their own course? No, the end of the line is unemployment, misery and, without help, death, because without credentials, you can't get money to buy necessities from the people who control the money and the things it represents thanks to the state, which rests on a foundation of violence. If there were a commons, if there were reasonable odds at making a living without credentials, it might not amount to a death threat. If the school system did not exist to funnel human capital toward the people who uphold it, it might not amount to a death threat. If a typical, unconnected-to-wealth child could forego school with reasonable chances of survival, it might not amount to a death threat. But it does. Go to school, or die. As soon as you sign on to be a teacher, this is what you're a part of. (I'm an ex-public high school teacher, not that it matters. But this is just analysis, and only finger-pointing where warranted. It's true whether you like it or not. Descriptive, not normative.)

Mendler's approach to corralling non-compliant students, in this post-just-hit-them-until-they-obey age, and in the face of the painful self-image problems caused by acknowledging that your job is to get students to do what your bosses want you to get them to do, no matter what that is, by any means necessary, is to create the illusion that your job is not that at all. Mendler pretty clearly believes his own, if I might use a technical term, humanshit, and expects other teachers to, as well.

The way to create the illusion of non-authoritarianism, so important for most progressives, is to give students a little slack before ultimately making exactly the same demand -- obey or else. Give them a questionnaire asking them how they like your teaching. Write them a note. Make them feel important. Throw them a bone. Give them a New Deal to get them off the streets. Get them to settle down, stop being mad, resistant, in order to improve the odds of compliance. They'll feel like they're driving their own ship. And if they don't, you gave them a chance. You listened. You cared. You sentenced them to a life of misery and possibly death.

the subject is a vampire

In response to this Levi Bryant post, I wrote:

Sounds like you’re placing the subject outside existence. There’s the universe and, then, outside this, there’s meaning. That doesn’t sound like flat ontology. If world is all there is, and there is meaning, then meaning is world, so doesn’t it make more sense to say that meaning is something that happens in that bit of world we call human? Meaning is a local thing.

He was kind enough to repost the above comment from an email I sent (Wordpress and I don't get along) and respond:

There are a few things that need to be distinguished here. On the one hand, it’s necessary to distinguish between substances and qualities. A substance is an entity that can exist on its own, while a quality always exists either in a substance or occurs between substances. A color like red, for example, is a quality. It requires a substance in which to exist and cannot exist apart from that substance. Pointing out that qualities like red can only exist in substances doesn’t negate their reality, only their independence. My contention is that meaning is a quality, not a substance.

Second, it’s necessary to distinguish between substances and the point of view substances have on the world around them. A substance’s point of view is how it grasps other substances and qualities. My claim is that meaning arises from a substances point of view, it’s not something that inheres in the things grasped, themselves. Meaning is the way entities such as ourselves, cats, super-complex computers, government agencies, etc., grasp other things in the world around them. This doesn’t place these entities outside of existence, but is merely the recognition that these entities grasp the world in a particular way. It’s no different than recognizing that bats grasp the world through sonar while cats grasp it through vision, smell, and sound, and that sonar is in the bat, not the thing detected (the thing detected is nothing like a sonar blip).

All of this is important because we need to recognize the variability of meaning across species, people, cultures, and entities. A few years ago I was hosting some dear friends for dinner, and I was talking about how I was thinking about renting a truck to so I could rent a tiller to turn over the soil in my garden. My friend, a Chinese woman, got very excited and declared “that would be great! then you could haul some trees for us and help us plant them!” At the time I was very offended. I thought, what nerve this woman has thinking I’m going to do all this labor for them. I attributed a particular meaning to her proposal. Later I realized that she had given me a hugecomplement (her meaning). In asking to do this favor for her, she was proposing that our families become more tightly bound to one another, that we form obligations to one another. She was saying she wanted our families to be closer. If we treat meaning as a property of the things themselves we can’t get at this sort of variability of meaning.

Bryant doesn't dispute my claim, as far as I can tell. He thinks his view is consistent with mine. Maybe it is, mostly, but he's still placing the subject outside world, which creates problems. That last sentence, for example. Meaning is not a property of the things themselves? Buddy, humans are things! You agreed. Meaning is a property of humans, which are things (though I use that term with reservations explained elsewhere on this blog).

The subject/object dualism is alive and well in Bryant's "flat ontology," which makes it a not-so-flat ontology. Bryant thinks he has solved the problem of subject/object dualism by placing both inside Being, at least rhetorically, but if you can't describe subjects in the same terms you'd describe anything else, you don't have a flat ontology. He's saying they're inside Being but continuing to use schemes that, in effect, place the subject outside Being. If the subject needs a completely different category outside everything else, it's transcendent, not immanent. The best answer, at this point is, arguably, that the subject is merely a thing that acts funny. I am worlding. You are worlding. That's all. Not that it's a very satisfying answer.

Bryant seems to be using "subject" to indicate "non-object" but also, when pressed, as object.

building blocks of consciousness

(Note: I think this is pretty much in line with what R. Scott Bakker is saying at his excellent blog Three Pound Brain, not that he'd sign off on it. What I'm saying below may well be either obvious or wrong. It feels to me, though, like a pretty extreme form of speculation and possibly a decent heuristic.)

Definitions work by exclusion. You draw the line around the category with what it isn't.

Imagine a scene, any scene. There's a zoom-in mode where you look specifically at a thing and everything else gets blurry and there's a zoom-out mode where you see everything, you think. But it looks to me like the zoom-out mode came very late in the evolutionary game. The ability to have two modes certainly did. Is the zoom-out built from the zoom-in? If so, it seems unlikely that the zoom-out would escape the structure of the zoom-in.

Zoom-out mode makes it look like everything fits together seamlessly. The frame is a nothingness on the periphery you only consider for thought experiments. (The evolution of vision was not driven by awareness of a periphery.) But when you're looking, you're just looking...at a complete picture.

What if the building blocks of consciousness are the organization of world configurations by what they're not? Dog and not-dog, tree and not-tree. You need to leverage each "object" against everything else. But it's not even an object, it's a non-object through and through, built up from other non-objects. What you get is not a picture of reality; it seems a stretch to even call it an approximation. What you get is functional (you can find food) but it's also a picture that has no direct connection to what we imagine it to depict. If the foundation is layers upon layers of not-thats, it starts to make sense why the world we perceive is so dreamlike and nutty, why it's so unreal.

Could this be mainly a visual process that other senses don't use? Is consciousness as we know it the capture of most or all sensory information by vision-based processes?

the walls move

The ability to focus by exclusion, dividing the world into "cheetah" and "not-cheetah," evolved in the context of finding and (not) being food. To identify a moving object, especially, you need to imagine a fixed background. The focused upon object is the inside, everything else is the indeterminate outside.

Humans use this sort of framing to understand politics. The inside of a house has animate objects like people and cats and videos on computers and it has a frame, the parts that remain still while the action happens. Acceptable political discourse is, at best, about where we should put the couch. It's never about whether we should move the walls around or knock them down.