Eyes Front

I've gotten into the bad habit of looking back at the things that I've written over the past thirteen years, mainly because I'm either looking for something that I'd written about in the past, or checking to see that I'm not accidentally retreading old ground (I have, at least once, repeated a post after forgetting to update it out of "draft" status.)

I've come to regard reading my earlier writing as a bad habit because it always leaves me with the impression that I've failed at the primary point of starting this project in the first place: becoming a better writer. Despite the fact that I don't write this blog for a living, and nothing else particular important comes from it, I tend to see every mistake as an unforced error that should have been caught and corrected prior to publication.

Perhaps this doom me to always being an amateur author. I'm pretty sure that to make it as a professional, one needs the ability to, at some point, let go of the errors of the past. One chalks them up to learning experiences and proceeds onward. Which, to be sure, is how I tend to deal with my professional life. I've made errors at work before, and I suspect that I'm not done making them yet. But even though the stakes are higher, I find that I'm better about not stewing in them than I am when I'm doing something for my own personal enjoyment. I suspect that it's something of the serious teen that I once was reasserting himself. But I think that it's also the nature of work. On the job, we have managers and other people who will tell us how serious (or not) a specific error was. And for the most part, many of them aren't that serious, especially in the grand scheme of things; most businesses are robust enough that they can withstand someone having a bonehead moment now and again.

When I'm writing here, there's no-one to tell me that this error or that mistake is trivial. And so even though I understand that to be the case intellectually, there's always that little voice in my head that simply can't believe that I left out a word, or used a piece of punctuation wrong. And that points to the other reason I think that people can be harder on themselves in personal pursuits than in professional ones. For all that this weblog was intended to help me become a better writer, there's a part of me that stands firm in the belief that, as old as I am, I shouldn't need to improve. After all, pretty much every job that I've had as an adult has required me to convey information in writing to one degree or another. And I'm college educated at that. Why do I need to improve my writing, other than to do away with my own sloppiness?

In other words, I'm not at peace with the idea that what I'm doing can be legitimately difficult, even given that I'm an amateur. Which is strange, I think. I would have told you that of course I understood how difficult writing could be; after all, I started the project as a way to practice. But I think that what I didn't understand was the part of me that saw this as a means of confirming the "fact" that I was already a good writer. And the degree to which that part of me dislikes being contradicted.

Jingle-Bell Stop

It is now, finally, the Day After Christmas. And that means the End of Christmas Music until Black Friday of 2020. It seems more like a respite than the status quo, for some reason. But while attempting to guard my mental health against the constant onslaught of "Holly-Jolly Christmas" and "Silver Bells," it occurred to me that jingle bells, or perhaps more accurately, sleigh bells, have become entirely associated with Christmas, rather than winter more broadly.

As I understand it, the purpose of bells on a sleigh was not festivity, but safety. Horses may not be completely silent, but they don't make that much noise, even when in motion. And both hoofbeats and sleigh runners can be very quiet in deep snow. So while "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" presumes either murderous intent or negligence on the part of Santa Claus, a fast-moving sleigh will not stop quickly; an old woman who steps into the path of one that she didn't hear coming is likely to come to grief.

Returning to the point, the realization that there's nothing particularly "Christmas-y" about sleigh bells becomes a reminder that many of the songs that we associate with Christmas, such as the now-controversial "Baby, It's Cold Outside," are simply about Winter itself. And winter, here in the northern hemisphere, has just started. I admit to not being all that up on the modern music scene (I have a theory that holds that all of the music in a genre that you're not that into all sounds the same.), but it seems to me that Winter music is, effectively, a sub-genre of Christmas music, and thus locked into the same Black Friday to Christmas Day constraints that genuine carols inhabit.

So while Winter may be just beginning, songs about it are mainly an Autumn phenomenon.

Small Potatoes

So, I recently watched The Mandela Effect with some friends. Spoiler alert: the plot of the movie is basically as follows: Video game programmer Brendan must find a way to reboot the Universe in order to rebalance reality after the death, and subsequent non-death, of his young daughter.

The movie uses the Mandela Effect theory as a backdrop for a movie that seems intended to showcase the strength of parental love, although Brendan quickly starts to come across as a jerk who really only cares about two things, his daughter and himself, and this made it difficult for me to really care about the outcome. It also lent the movie a strange air of triviality. If a man could literally program the Universe to reboot itself from the moment of the Big Bang, changing the life outcome of only a single child seems like something of a waste.

The movie would have, I think, been much more engaging if the goal had been to radically remake the world. Had it been up to me, I would have aimed much higher, and likely delved into a bit more overt science-fiction. What would the world be like if, say, the Armenian Genocide had never happened? Or if the opening of North America to European settlement hadn't been such a disaster for the native people? Or if the Black Death had been contained? There are any number of large-scale historical catastrophes that one could imagine setting out to undo. Although I suppose that this is somewhat in line with the way people see the Mandela Effect operating in actual history; the name of a brand of peanut butter or of storybook bears aren't really pressing issues in our society. Even the date of Nelson Mandela's death, the namesake of the effect, doesn't have much historical heft, in the grand scheme of things. You would think that if the effect were actually caused by parallel universes or somesuch, that larger events would feature more prominently.

I presume that standard Hollywood sensibilities are at work here. I can see people being upset by the idea that some significant part of history is worthy of being erased, especially if that history were caused by direct human action at some point in the past. The Holocaust is an obvious exception, but it might be touchy to imply that it's not a universal reality. (Bringing the Mandela Effect and Holocaust denial together could quickly get out of hand, and spark a public relations disaster.) Which is kind of too bad. Applying The Mandela Effect's use of the Simulation Hypothesis to larger world events would allow people to explore a possible outcome of those events unfolding differently, or not at all. I'm not sure how well the concept would play in the box office, but it could be useful as something to discuss.

Mass Delusion

Beyond “media fatigue,” or what Soraya Chemaly, writing for CNN, called “profound societal misogyny,” or what the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino described as “the hardening of [her] own heart,” I detect something else at play in the underwhelmed response to Carroll’s allegation [that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her]. That something is at once more sinister and more jaded: We have stopped pretending, collectively, that we expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility.
Moira Donegan “E. Jean Carroll and the ‘Hideosity Bar’”

So this raises a question: If we understand that we don’t genuinely “expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility,” is there actually value in the pretense? Would E. Jean Carroll, Rose McGowan, Joan Tarshis, Chanel Miller or any of the other women who have alleged sexual assault on the part of men who have had tremendous power bestowed upon them, be any better off if society still pretended to have high expectations of those men?

But it seems to me that there is actually a broader collective pretending at work, one that’s been the standard for some time: That “value,” as applied to people, is an objective measure, and its universal equality is a matter of factual truth.

And even if one says that the value that is placed on human life and/or concepts of dignity are not subject to human choice, they are still subject to human perception. Accountability has costs. And if those costs are perceived to be greater than the benefits, then one can see why it isn’t pursued, even if there is legitimate disagreement over the accuracy of the calculus involved.

So while I take Ms. Donegan’s meaning, I suspect that the sinister piece wouldn’t be that “We have stopped pretending, collectively, that we expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility,” but rather that society originated and maintained the pretense for long enough that it often seems rational to behave as if it were true. (But this, is, of course, a cynical viewpoint. A more charitable one is simply that, collectively, the public has concluded that it does, in fact, expect that those who have had power bestowed upon them to behave responsibly and holds them accountable when they fail; and that there is no failure here. While a sizable and vocal minority may disagree with that understanding of the facts, it remains that the minority is incapable of swaying the collective determination, and so it stands.)

Ms. Donegan laments that “Laughter is, perhaps, also an appropriate response to the country that allows a man like Trump to maintain his status, his money, and the respect of his peers, a country that would allow a man like him to become president and still have the audacity to pretend that women are equals, in status or in law. In that sense, her story really is laughable.” But is there really audacity in telling oneself and others that one actually is the person, the nation or the society that one is expected to be, regardless of the reality? Is it really laughable that people will present themselves as the persons they are told they are supposed to be? Is it really unexpected that hiding the parts of oneself that are labelled as unacceptable is easier than changing them?

The difference between “there wasn’t a foul, so the referee didn’t blow the whistle” and “the referee didn’t blow the whistle, so there wasn’t a foul,” may seem clear when stated in as many words, but is often less so in practice. And I don’t believe that there is any question that part of the reason why so many people allow themselves to be convinced of the referee’s infallibility is that it makes it easy, and unaudacious, to believe that they live in a world where all people are equal, in status or in law, and that violations will be detected and punished.

But there is also another side the question of the expectations that we have of men, or people in general, “who have had tremendous power bestowed upon them.” It’s one thing to say that people have low expectations. It’s another to understand what their expectations actually are. Perhaps what social critics see as “more sinister and more jaded,” than misogyny or hard-heartedness is the fact that society’s expectations are more practical that moral. People expect celebrities to entertain them, political figures to advance their interests and businesspeople to provide worthwhile goods and services. And that may be the standard of accountability that is being applied, rather than an adherence to ethics or law.

Working For a Living

There was an Italian political philosopher, whose name I've long forgotten, who explained that his reasoning for preferring Fascism to Democracy was not that Fascism was a better form of government, but that he found it more honest. Democracy, in his view, required people to be educated not only in the functioning of government, but in the issues that government was expected to deal with. In any modern society, he reasoned, this body of knowledge was so vast as to be out of reach of anyone who could not devote themselves to it full time. Hence, there would be a political ruling class, as it were. And if that were going to be the case, one may as well be up front about it.

I am reminded of this whenever I find myself in a discussion of politics where the one point that everyone seems to agree on is that government is somewhere between incompetent and corrupt, yet at the same time, is not worth becoming directly involved in, or even knowledgeable about. People who can't manage to forge a consensus on what should be on a group pizza are nevertheless convinced that in a nation of 300+ million people, it is possible, even easy, to craft policies that everyone would find directly beneficial to them. People who become visibly incensed at the idea that some random person off the street could tell them how to better do their jobs think nothing of concluding that the only reason that government doesn't work in the way they think it should is rank corruption.

Perhaps the highlight of the discussion came when one participant confidently declared that any changes in taxation should only be made by a direct vote of the people, and that neither legislatures, executives or courts should have any greater say in the matter. When I then challenged them on why not simply make all laws subject to direct, rather than representative, democracy and simply do away with much of the rule-making apparatus of government, the answer was: "I'd like to have it done right, not to do it myself." There was a moment of silence. And then the laughter began.

For all that everyone found the sudden reversal of an old adage to be funny, that sentiment strikes me as common throughout the United States. Voting, whether it be for representatives or on citizen initiatives and the like, is the bare minimum amount of effort that participatory governance requests. Yet even that is beyond the desire of many people. For all that much has been made of what appear to be partisan efforts to suppress the vote by Republicans (or, much more rarely in my understanding, Democrats), many more people simply choose not to vote than have their path to the polls strewn with obstacles.

I have come to think that the biggest problem that self-government presents is that it's a job. And often, a full-time job at that. And for many people, two full-time jobs is simply too much to ask. Perhaps because of this, many people see themselves as the customers of government, rather than its managers. And so government tends to serve those people to do take the more active, managerial role, regardless of their goals and/or motivations. The function of representative government is, in large part, to lessen the burden of that managerial role. But it can't eliminate it. And as long as the management of government is uneven, the outcomes it produces will likely be the same.