Aug
29
Rant: The Cult of The Expert, Or The Media Is Problematic In Exactly What They Get Right
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In complaining about the media being biased, many of us forget that journalists do go to people considered the expert in their subject and repeat that opinion, complete with the facts supporting that opinion, in their work.
They’re learning from people we’ve set up as experts. We’ve given those experts institutional credibility; we’ve given them methods with which to work that can be scrutinized to the smallest detail; we are more than willing, above all, to listen to them and take them seriously.
And then we blame journalists for being suckers, because they’re supposed to have this magical access card to “truth.” We really should be asking why the Leftist activist ideology underlying the mindset of some journalists doesn’t get at truth more often compared to what I’ve outlined above. But if we asked that, we might have to concede that the status quo nowadays is 60’s activism, that the revolution became the establishment in a blink of an eye, and all of us on the Right and Left would have to wonder about our own sincerity.
If we could reflect rightly, we’d have to admit we are being naive in the same moment we are power-hungry. Perhaps there is an innocence in being a journalist (maybe that’s what Woody Allen was hinting at in Scoop) - maybe there is a humility in just wanting to find something out.
So if that’s the case, what do we do about experts?
The deep problem is in the ideology underlying both journalism and expertise. Both things are easily understandable in a democracy: everyone knows that knowing facts are important, and since experts are on the “front lines” of discovering new facts, there needs to be a middle man of sorts to help us sort out issues.
But let’s say you, I dunno, love wisdom. It would seem expertise in-and-of itself is an attack on wisdom, as wisdom might be something related to things we consider religious, i.e. cultural artifacts that have no place in science or scientific-type inquiry. We have professors of religion who compare religions and can tell us everything that religion would say, and tell us which might be the wisest, even though the mere existence of such a professor says that all religion is defunct.
Furthermore, a journalist that attempted to be wise - skipping the experts - could be insane. Recounting objectively what the Church of Scientology has to say could lend a credibility to that institution which wouldn’t exactly be prudent, whether or not such objectivity is accepted by the public or not.
In fact, the more one looks at it, the more journalism seems to depend on expertise, perhaps even is a form of expertise. The idea is that with the facts presented as best they can be, we can all make rational, thoughtful decisions. Nothing like the Huffington Post could ever emerge from a world of experts, could it?
So what do we do about experts and journalists?
Generally speaking, we just need to admit there are things we don’t know, and that there are things we wouldn’t be able to understand always if we did know them. Again, I’m surprised we don’t have this attitude. Nearly every day I encounter people who know better than I do, who act better, or who knew better and acted better. It’s not hard for me, even in my field, to take a backseat and let someone else drive. There is about one nanosecond of a twinge of jealousy, that’s it.
I know most people are willing to admit there are things they can’t deal with expertly: the argument above depends on the fact that people are humble in one area of life! So why do they insist on a general knowledge of what all too human experts say to create truth? Why can’t the private criteria they use for the sake of being humble be applied to what they extol publicly?
Technorati Tags: journalism, rant, media, experts
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Aug
27
Hopefully, A New Beginning
Filed Under personal | Leave a Comment
He’ll be gone for a year doing this.
He seemed scared when I left him at the airport, worried about checking bags and getting his ticket. I think people have made things sound too complicated for him. The truth is, from there on out, in this place called “the real world,” there isn’t freedom the way there is at home or among friends. The private is a very different sphere from the public - the public is mainly rule-following. We, of course, have carved out the private from the public by means of such rules, i.e. allowing everyone the right to speak and what that implies, etc. But that doesn’t mean any real rules are followed in the private sphere of life at all (in fact, the viciousness of family politics might be because of that very lack of order).
He’s gonna be fine. Mom is worried sick.
One thing we did late Saturday is watch 3 films, one of which I only sort of watched, but wow do I want to see the whole thing. The movie is Spike Lee’s “Inside Man,” and he was mesmerized by how carefully the dialogue was written and how many themes were woven into the film. I didn’t watch it that carefully, unfortunately, and I want to view it again. The other two - Woody Allen’s “Scoop” and “Doom” starring The Rock - actually had their moments, but I don’t know that I need to see them again.
That’s the only regret I have for him going to this place: most evangelicals I know really suck at having taste in movies. Watching LOTR and The Chronicles of Narnia over and over again does not breed holiness or taste. But the ability to find how one can be free in a public sense, not merely in the thrall of images of one’s own choosing - well, let’s just say that’s something necessary, if not something incredible.
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Aug
26
Is Being Serious Something You Work For, Or A Natural Product of Having Fun?
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To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.
- from W. H. Auden’s “Lullaby”
Someone asserted the other day that there were bands trying too hard to be serious, and that a band had to just have fun and if it then became serious, well - that was the mark of true artistry.
Now what is funny is how dogmatic this statement is - one must have fun first. And it is true that in Plato’s Laws, one of Socrates’ (I know, the “Athenian Stranger’s”) first concerns is to introduce the Spartan and Cretan lifestyles to the idea that one must be educated in how to handle having fun, not merely in how to endure pain. Furthermore, there really are a lot of bands which try to be “serious” and fall far short of the mark. Bright Eyes and Cursive don’t get many compliments from me because their attempts to be serious end up reinforcing some of the worst aspects of being young.
I’m keeping this topic narrow, it seems, by using the word “bands.” But given that poetry relies on musicality, and that all of us have lyrics we relate to and recite subconsciously, I think the question of “music” as “How is our life determined by our passions?” is not far from here. This is really the question of how we can be serious generally, and whether we want to be serious.
I think in this day and age it is vital to be serious about something just because. The reason for this is that morality and aesthetics are realms which fall apart if one doesn’t have the ability to generate seriousness out of nowhere. A libertarian ethos absolutely drives the idea that in doing what one likes to do only, a greater good can be had. It is never clear that some people might like self-sacrifice enough, though, to keep a civilization going.
I suppose you’re wondering about the quote above. What impresses me is how Venus gives the lovers a reclining slope and a vision - it is all comprehensive, and it does this “gravely.” Romance is so comprehensive it includes a gravity it was meant to dispel. And yes, there is the hermit, experiencing in small discoveries about the everyday a joy about the ordinary. The point is that my interlocutor was only half right. You need to be serious to have fun, too, and the claims involved - articulation of a good, ultimately - are never as arbitrary or as universal as they seem.
Technorati Tags: seriousness, fun, poetry
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Aug
26
Tact
Filed Under personal | Leave a Comment
What will inevitably happen is that the small thing won’t be let go. It will be used against you at the worst time, usually while you’re in the midst of doing things for that person. Part of what makes one good at dealing with people is that one is able to give, not merely persuade. But that you have power over both must mean something is wrong.
Since you’re not perfect, that means not only are you imperfect but you have a fatal flaw which, viewed correctly, makes all actions suspect.
There is an enormous resentment that can be unleashed when bonds are just being forged, because quite a few people have nothing better to do but think about how much better they are than others. This exact same charge will be leveled at you.
Because it is just the beginning of a relationship, you can let go. You can apologize and step back and not care. There’s only one problem with that - the small things that get on someone else’s nerves might reveal more about them than you.
In most cases I have found that stepping back and letting someone have their pride creates a relationship that is mediocre at best. After all, you’re the one striving to find common ground, to be nice to others, to give the benefit of the doubt. That you wouldn’t be given a similar generosity is a problem: it means that you have to placate someone else’s ego to be let in their “lives.”
Now I should make clear that some people are absolutely worth this placation. Some people are really amazing and arrogant at the same time. Sometimes you do have to kowtow because they’re ultimately right.
And sometimes - especially if you’re the one reaching out - that person is you. Being someone who’s good with people isn’t about being nice all the time. It’s also about knowing that what you do is worth having pride in, and knowing you deserve to be reached out to also.
Technorati Tags: relationships, social skills, advice
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Aug
22
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Comment:
We have considered the problem of Man fundamentally alienated from Nature. Here, divinity rapes a girl, taking the guise of Nature. There is a unity, but a forced unity, and the tragic beginning brings forth a tragic ending.
The Homeric understanding of Zeus is being used here, but perhaps also rejected. Zeus is the god whose plan causes the withdrawal of all gods and the rule of heroes on this Earth throughout the course of the Illiad and Odyssey. For all his problems, Zeus puts in action a plan that brings about the possibility of justice between humans, the possibility of all too human rule.
But here, Zeus is committing an act of horrific injustice. He turns himself into a beautiful creature that is monstrous in its attempt to pursue beauty. “A sudden blow” testifies not just to the violence, but the lack of a plan on Zeus’ part. And yet, there is a strange order to the whole incident. - And that order is not merely the rough arrangement of the stanzas into past, present, future. -
There are “wings” above the “staggering girl;” “dark webs” caressing the “thighs,” and her “nape” is “caught” in his bill. The unity of Man and god involves a correspondence of motions. The middle image of her thighs being unable to move and the last image of her head being unable to move are motions we can understand in terms of appetites (sexual is included here) and rationality.
But what about that less metaphorical motion, the one of one creature flying and the other one walking? Why did god choose to fly?
The strangest word in that middle stanza is “vague.” Why are her fingers vague? Is it that Leda’s hand looks overwhelmed by the white around it, and that one cannot see it anymore? Or is something else going on, perhaps with her state of mind (i.e. the last two lines of the poem)? Whose “strange heart” are we talking about?
An answer is suggested by way of contrast with Among School Children. There, Yeats, contemplating Helen of Troy, brings forth the topic of Leda once again:
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
The issue is Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes, the comic poet, is portrayed in that work as giving the most tragic account of love. Man was originally a creature who had two faces, two sets of arms, two sets of legs. The back and sides were rounded, but other than that, this being looked like it could be split in two. This creature was able to roll around the Earth and was exceedingly powerful and almost rolled up to Olympus, before Zeus and Apollo split the creature and twisted each half around to create Man. Hence, love now is a result of a fundamental alienation from our better halves, where we would be more powerful than the gods if we were the way we were before. It can’t ever be had that way, though, because of the artifice of the gods: we have a back and a front, a direction built into us now, that takes us far away from what we were, and what we experienced.
But Yeats is changing this story too, or at least his narrator in “Among School Children” is. The change is that he is saying this “globular” creature was more like an egg - eros wasn’t a claim to power, so much, as a beginning.
And now we see what is happening. The question of human and divine beginnings is a competition: Who can work with Nature the best? That competition brings Man and god into a strange, deadly unity: we are loved by divinity even as we are abused by it and even as we are seeking to use it.
That last comment, “use divinity,” seems out of line given the emphasis in both these poems on beauty’s innocence. Someone is being raped, another watches a city be destroyed over her. And we know from Shakespeare that beauty is best preserved in writing of an immortal beauty, an intellect which is the product of all ages. It does not seem like beauty wants to put on power, especially not to beget anything.
The rape metaphor is the sticking point. One does not want to say “this rape didn’t happen,” especially not in a world where women are still treated awfully. But it is curious that divinity does the rape, divinity being that which we aspire to in many ways. It is even more curious when one considers the distant yet very human love in “Among School Children,” where generational unity is seen as the product of a new age. The narrator of that poem is going to die, and what will be is his concern, not his own power.
That human/divine contrast is making me wonder whether the divine exists in any significant sense in this poem. The issue more like this: the age eclipsed by Christianity had a serious flaw - it put too much trust in eros. Knowledge is literally an afterthought in this poem. The question of freedom is submerged under the reality of power.
Another age requires another beginning. It might be that all beginnings are erotic, where revolution and competing wills and an attempt to conjure a divinity that masters one more than one masters it erode any possibility of self-rule. That is the question of this poem, whether all ages are the same.
My own thought is that “Among School Children” is a companion to this, that there are alternatives if one takes knowledge and freedom more seriously. But it should be noted that the ultimate Platonic teaching holds that eros is everything, and as we can see from this poem, that is a curse as well as a foundation.