Another 3 AM Wall Post, or The Problem with Monotheism

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OK, so here it is 3:18 in the morning and I have been startled from sleep by a weird dream in which my old buddy Lawrence and I are being forced to either check out of, or switch rooms at a generic convention hotel. Apparently, some rock band had trashed a suite across the hall and if we didn’t move we would share in charges for those damages. I don’t remember just how we were linked to the band.  .  .  dreams fade so fast.

Anyhow, I am lying here thinking, naturally enough, about the problem with monotheism. The major issue - it seems to me at the moment - is that monotheism is defenseless in the face of rational thought.  I mean only a completely callow theologian - or someone whose notion of “the world” is constrained by their own tiny village - envisions a single god, who, in addition to managing the affairs of the entire universe, is supposed to see the single sparrow fall. 

On the other hand, if you have Flutter, goddess of the feathered creatures, a single sparrow is right in her wheelhouse, her having rather limited responsibilities. You know what I mean? OK, so she took her eye off the ball with that whole passenger pigeon thing, and the Dodo. But the bald eagle is rebounding nicely. And crows have always been fine,

Of course the problem with that approach is that you can end up with a whole unwieldy family tree of gods and goddesses, and no doubt arguments would arise regarding who really was responsible for the sparrow. Is it Flutter, goddess of the feathered creatures, or the Blessed Beaker, responsible for not only the quality of wine and ale, but also for certain creatures possessing beaks? And don’t forget the problem of simply remembering the names of all the gods and goddesses and their attendant rituals. 

So, purely organizationally speaking, it does make sense to bring in a sort of celestial CEO whose portfolio includes clarifying areas of responsibility for each specific god or goddess. This would allow penitents to address their supplications to either Flutter or the Blessed Beaker specifically; or perhaps more generally to the Celestial CEO who would see to it that the request was brought to the appropriate deity’s attention so that the falling of the single sparrow would be duly noted.

Perhaps that is why I worry about a deity tasked with keeping an eye on me - or the sparrow - continually. I am more comfortable with a more inverted structure to sacred interactions. As the old Paul Simon song Some Folks Lives Roll Easy, puts it, “Here I am, Lord, knocking at your place of business.” The idea is a type of unique, individual, conversation in which the petitioner can chat directly with the deity on an “as needed” basis. I mean, realistically, prayer is often an internal values clarification exercise. By the time you figure out what you are asking of Flutter, or Zeus, or whatever deity resides at the “place of business” you have sought out, you have also come to a better understanding of what’s on your own “to do list” and which items you hope will attract some divine intervention.

That may be asking a lot of the sparrow. But on the other hand, the sparrow may be working from an entirely different model.

Well, it is pushing 4 o’clock now. I wonder if the rock band has checked out yet. .  .  . 

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Stretched Upon Parting

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It is only natural that a work with the length and complexity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would merit more than one post here on The Wall. This is the first, others may follow.  

As Frodo prepares to leave Middle Earth to sail to The Havens with Bilbo, Gandalf and the great Elves of the now-ending Third Age of the World, he speaks to Sam of the nature of partings.  He is, in his words, “stretched” between the world in which he has lived, but where he can no longer find his ease, and The Havens, a place that he has never seen but which promises peace and, my word, harmony.  My thoughts about retirement bounce about in that conceptual space.  Doing “phased retirement” in which one essentially becomes half a faculty member for two years seems sometimes an excellent idea. Other times it recalls the old saw - a uniquely appropriate noun - about cutting a dog’s tail off an inch at a time so that it doesn’t hurt so much.

I find myself in a situation that will become increasingly unique. I have worked in the same job, at the same place, for 37 years. And, depending on where you draw the lines, I will have been here 39 or 40 years when I become “really” retired. Teaching as I do about technology, media and communication, it has never really been the "same job."  When I first came here we were teaching film and audio editing using razor blades and tape.  Today audio and visual editing is an exercise of keyboard, mouse and screen, of hard drives and 4K resolution. A reality built around black mirrors in purse or pocket and speakers in your ears.   

The “messages” of the early 80s were “programs" that would begin each fall, and show “reruns" in the summer.  If you missed it, well, you missed it.  Home video recorders lurked somewhere on the horizon for thousands of dollars. The idea of using critical methods cribbed from Sociology, English, and Philosophy to examine the cultural and social meanings embedded within those programs needed to be defended in professional journals.  I wrote one of the first of those defenses for the 2nd edition of Critical Studies in Mass Communication back in 1985. It was called "Of Butterflies and Criticism,” and was seen, with the exception of a few like-minded renegades, as being every bit as flighty as the title might imply. 

Today we post 300 hours of video to YouTube every minute, and independent entities like Netflix and Amazon create new video narratives that we can “binge on demand” for hours and hours.  News programs give way to social media posts, rants and tweets. Further, any insightful analysis of this brave digital world without multiple references to dead French philosophers and their intellectual progeny is considered, if not completely passé, then at least in very poor taste. So, yes, I work in the same physical place, but not in the same intellectual or pragmatic space that I walked into those several decades ago. Like Frodo, I feel stretched. 

Frodo had grown up in the Shire, a sun-kissed and bucolic land, lolling blissfully amidst gently revolving seasons, careless and carefree, and utterly oblivious to the encroaching dangers from which unseen hands did provide shelter.  I do not mean to imply that my professional world in 1981 fit that gentle description. The aphorisms “fights in the academy are so vicious because the rewards are so small,” and “trying to lead a faculty is like trying to herd cats,” did not spring from some innocent Socratic world beneath shady oaks.  Still the conflicts in those academic Shires seemed more polite, the politics less naked.  

Yet now almost 4 decades later, “the shadow in the East,” as it was known in Middle Earth, has crept upon my academic landscape. The change is all the more ironic in that it is one we dearly sought, earnestly courted for years. You see, in the modern “research university” a department without a graduate program sits at the children’s table, separate from and irrelevant to the conversations of the adults at the big table. For a decade or so we have been able to offer both a Master’s and Doctorate degrees. So we now sit at the big table amidst the cut-crystal of research grants and funded-centers, while fawning graduate and research assistants wait table, hoping to be invited to port and cigars afterwards in the billiards room.

Frodo had gone to war. He had cast the ring into the fire. But upon returning home to the Shire, even after purging the remnants of the shadow, he could not find comfort in this land he had left behind.  Were we to grab, for just a moment, another book off the shelf, and turn to a different wizard - Frodo had seen the man behind the curtain.  After 40 plus years in the academy, here and elsewhere, there are few if any curtains behind which I have not peeked. Yet, the pipe-dream of a university that still beguiles me, and provides the hazy lenses through which I view my professional ideal, comes from the academy’s version of the Shire. From 1967 until 1971 I was a student at Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts college in Kalamazoo, Michigan - not unlike Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio where my father had taught when I was boy. I saw both those institutions as part of the academy’s "sun-kissed and bucolic lands, lolling blissfully amidst gently revolving seasons." They may have looked very different from within, from the front of the classroom. If so, I was willfully deceived, and have worn those comfortable blinders for 30 years.  

Ah, you caught that discrepancy. I have been in front of the class for 40 years, but the blinders have served me for only 30. Try as I might, I have not been able to keep them in place this last decade.  As we rushed to take our place at the adult table of graduate degrees, the gentle laughter of the children’s table - and yes, the occasional tomfoolery - got left behind.  We began to take ourselves terribly seriously. We hired - sometimes under significant pressure from the big table - colleagues who delighted in taking themselves very seriously, who would parade around in invisible yet insistent robes of their own importance and reputation.  We also hired, often of our own volition, bright and brittle young colleagues whose voluminous resumes cloaked aspirations to possess similar raiment. Their abilities were without question, their loyalty less so.  I have watched them come and go this last decade and more, drawn away by bigger chairs at larger tables.

So dear Frodo, I too am stretched. We know we cannot return to those Shires of ours that once were but are no more. Tolkien has given you The Havens where the gentle folk of the Third Age of the World walk, and laugh, sing and talk amidst elvish trees of wondrous blossoms and matching fragrance. He leaves me no such solace. Friends whisper from the beguiling glades of retirement, “Come on over! It’s wonderful.” That may well be. Maybe the academic Shire I hold in my heart never actually existed. It surely exists no more in my waking and walk-about reality. Perhaps I would feel less stretched had I not so loved the illusion. 

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Linguistic Larceny

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It was time for our semi-annual HVAC inspection.  The technician showed up with his impressive tool belt, and a small satchel leaking wires, gauges, and other gizmos and gadgets necessary to his trade. I do not know what your experience is in these instances, but mine inclines me to hide the checkbook and credit cards. It seems that no matter how well the system seems to be operating major - and expensive - adjustments are necessary. And, if one is to believe these modern day snake oil sales reps, the company requires them to advise you just what all needs to be done.

Anticipating a sales pitch for a small nuclear power plant for the attic or a backyard wind turbine, either of which would allow us to sell power back to the grid once the reasonable installation costs of 8 to 12 thousand dollars had been defrayed in just 15 years, I tried to cut him off at the pass: “I’m moving into phased-retirement, so we are really in a ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it mode.’”

To my astonishment his reply was a wry chuckle and, “I hear you friend, believe me, I hear you.” And he went off about his business. A couple of hours later he came back into the house for me to sign off on his inspection forms. One page included several hundred dollars of suggested “upgrades.” “You don’t really don’t need any of this stuff, but they expect me push it,” he allowed. 

He did want to talk about some of the art in the house and we spent a pleasant half hour or so talking about Venetian masks and Christine’s fondness for Renaissance religious icons. However, upon leaving he said, “Oh, the pollen is about to get bad. You might want to replace your furnace filters. Lowe’s has pretty good prices.”  I thanked him and hustled off to the computer to visit the company website to give him a glowing review.

The next day I gathered up the old furnace filters and took myself off to Lowe’s to purchase replacements. I found the right aisle, made sure I was in the section for the brand of ultra-hypo-allergenic-catch-everything filters we use and started to put one in my cart when the price tag smacked me upside the head: $60.00!  Now don’t get me wrong, I was expecting 25 or 30 dollars, but 60 just seemed off the chart.

I inspected the filter more carefully.  I discovered that there was a mustard colored disk nestled in the middle of the filter with instructions written below. Seems I was about to purchase a “Smart Filter” which, once I had downloaded the app and paired it with my phone would use a proprietary algorithm to detect optimal airflow, report on local atmospheric conditions, and, oh - let me know when it needed to be changed, for another 60 bucks!  My inner-Luddite rose up in indignation.

Maybe the damn thing works. Who knows. That is not the issue. The issue is that the marketers have stolen another word - “smart.”  We see it everywhere. Our telephones are “smart” phones, our televisions have become “smart” TVs - both themselves linguistic remnants of a previous era when “tele” was all the rage.  Look in the beverage section of any drug store or convenience store and you will see Smart Water on display, seriously. A closer inspection of the label might well reveal that the Smart Water is also “gluten-free.” I don’t know. I am afraid to look.  

But I digress. Let us return to the issue at hand. These filters are not “smart.” They are anything but. Let us seek some clarity in the dictionary. Dictionary.com - which compiles from some more recognizable sources gives us this:

Smart (1- 6) deal with pain, as in “that smarts”, an opportunity for cheap shots that I pass up only reluctantly.

—adjective, smart·er, smart·est.
7: quick or prompt in actions, as persons
8: having or showing quick intelligence or ready mental capability: a smart student
9: shrewd or sharp, as a person in dealing with others or as in business: a smart business person
10: clever, witty, or readily effective, as a speaker, speech, rejoinder, etc. 

My furnace filters - actually their furnace filters, I bought the ones with similar filtration that did not “pair” to an app on my “smart” phone - are not, by any stretch of these definitions “smart.”  Yes, it can “say” “I am dirty - change me.” But it cannot say “I am dirty. Change me. And by the way, the house is on fire.” You need a different app for that.

There is, perhaps, a better descriptor for these filters. I suggest “savant”. Back to the dictionary: 

Savant -

1: a person of learning; especially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature)

2: a person affected with a developmental disorder (such as autism or mental retardation) who exhibits exceptional skill or brilliance in some limited field (such as mathematics or music); especially : autistic savant.

These filters are “autistic savants,” in less PC days also known as “idiot savants.” Brilliant in one tightly focused area, but complete idiots in the rest of the world. Think Rain Man but without Dustin Hoffman’s tug at the heart strings.  The reinvention of “smart” is the salesforce’s foot in the door, which by design or not, pries open the way for the “Internet of Things” We are encouraged to see the Internet of Things as this helpful safety net of “smart” products moving in graceful accord to cocoon us safe from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” An equally, if not more, plausible interpretation is that the Internet of Things will be an unruly conglomeration of idiot savants who don’t know that the house is on fire.

But, I keep forgetting that this is a post about linguistic larceny. “They” have stolen “smart.”  Mind you I do not believe, as apparently the French still do, that language is a static beast, doomed to be forever constrained by the standards of the breed.  Not at all. I believe the chief glory of the English language lies in its complexity and flexibility. After all, Shakespeare invented words. By various counts some 1,700 English words first saw the light of their literary day in his plays and poems. 

But Shakespeare didn’t just toss in words “willy-nilly” or “dilly-dilly” for that matter. Rather he did so when the language as it stood failed him; when the emotion or meaning of the moment stretched the fabric of the language to the shredding point. Then a new word, a better word, a more precise articulation became necessary, and he supplied it. The current pilfering of “smart” is no such moment.  It is rather the opposite of such a moment,  it is a cheapening of the language that smears nuance or clarity to confusion - a child’s finger painting with streaks of red, green and yellow still visible around the edges, but which on closer examination fades in its center to grit and mud.

In truth, I am more disappointed than offended.  One clings to the hope that humanity remains on an ascending path. That we become, with each succeeding generation, something better, more refined, more perceptive, more capable of expressing beauty and harmony than we were before. Yet when our language which, with our visual depictions, enables the expressions of our most ascendant selves becomes instead increasingly brutish and simplistic, the opposite conclusion presents itself: we are, in this aspect at least, devolving. 

It may well be, to complete my earlier uncited cribbing from the Bard, a time to “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.”

Hamlet, Act III, scene 1.

By which I mean one should seek to apply the second tenet of Distilled Harmony, Enable Beauty, to your language. Written, spoken, dreamed, imagined. Who knows, well-crafted language might eventually morph into a meme.

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And for those of you who might be curious, some etymology on “dilly dilly” - a phrase so completely stolen by Budweiser that hollering it at the 2018 Master’s Golf Tournament will get you ejected. Right, the Augusta National Golf Club, while creaking its way to admitting women and people of color still prohibits any commercial “messages” on the club grounds. Obviously the apparel and the equipment of the golfers is excepted.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that in the 1700s a “dilly” was a cart used in agricultural and industrial work. As in “Get your dilly over here.” However, in that era it was also used as an adjective meaning foolish or mad. That might lead to “Are ye dilly? Get yon dilly over here!” It was not until the early 1900s that it acquired the Budweiser stolen meaning of “delightful” or “delicious.” Yet, Wikipedia traces the phrase/lyric “Lavender blue dilly-dilly, lavender green” to English nursery rhymes as early as the late 1600s. Which could, in theory, allow for “That lavender blue dilly dilly seems a dilly color for yon dilly.”

No more dilly-dallying around .  .  .  .   

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Hawking Contradiction

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Steven Hawking’s death continues to recede, but I am still processing it. Given his physical challenges it seemed a continuing miracle that he was alive. But strangely I kept thinking he would persist in defying the odds, and somehow always be there. You’d think our knowledge of his frailty would make his passing easier to accept. But it doesn’t.  

I often encourage my students to avoid being intimidated by the experts, the professionals, even the geniuses. If you want to write, write. If you want to sing, sing.  Driven to sculpt, start a business, become a philosopher or cosmologist, cardiologist, guitarist? Do it, do whatever you choose. Don’t worry about the myriad examples out there who seem to do it better than you. 

But once, maybe twice in a lifetime, you encounter an entity so exceptional that you realize that you could never reach the plateau from which they view the world. I saw Steven Hawking as one such person. But not merely as a physicist. Mathphobic from an early age, I never seriously contemplated playing in that sandbox, so have no real basis for evaluation. I am perfectly content to accept the shared notion that he was the best and brightest since Einstein. Yet there are others who would respond, “Yeah, but what about Feynman? Weinberg? Higgs? Greene? “ Not my sandbox. Not going there. And as I said Hawking staggers me not solely because of his accomplishments as a physicist, but more because he did it all inside his head. No blackboard, no scratchpad, no tablet computer. He was the captive of a body in full revolt, eventually able to only control a few facial muscles. But even so stricken, he was still able to think those amazing thoughts. So, confessing to that level of admiration, I feel less constrained in addressing what appears to be significant contradictions in some of his more broadly focused pronouncements.

  

The New York Times obituary reveals a few of them:

In “A Brief History of Time,” Dr. Hawking concluded that “if we do discover a complete theory” of the universe, “it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.” He added, “Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that,” he continued, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.” 

But then later, "Dr. Hawking felt that there was no need to appeal to anything outside the universe, like God, to explain how it began.“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper,” he wrote, referring to the British term for a firecracker fuse, “and set the universe going.”

He went further later that same year, telling the British newspaper The Guardian, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” 

But still again elsewhere, “God not only plays dice with the universe, but sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

I find the certainty implied by these “Hawkingisms” interesting especially in light of his major finding “Hawking Radiation,” the formula for which he requested to have carved upon his tombstone. The intellectual pursuit that found its resolution in Hawking Radiation, began with other physicists challenging one of Hawking’s own earlier certainties - that nothing could escape the gravitational embrace of a black hole. Nothing, we now know, except Hawking Radiation, the electromagnetic energy that escapes when a black hole captures only half of a particle-antiparticle pair that can spontaneously form along the event horizon of a black hole.

So, I ask myself, is there not an inconsistency between an individual who has literally reshaped our perception of the universe purely through the manipulation of the electronic impulses in his brain, and the idea that “the brain is a computer that simply stops working when its components fail.” What happens to all the information - encoded in cascading mercurial electronic flashes, that resided in his living brain - information that, in my admittedly limited understanding of the reasoning underlying Hawking Radiation - cannot be lost? So where does that resident information go when the “components” fail? 

Perhaps Hawking’s earlier musing regarding the eventual potential to “know the mind of God” is informative. I have no intention of addressing what Hawking may have meant by God, or even more mysterious, “the mind of God.” But there is - in that phrase - an inescapable implication of a kind of universal sentience that still transcends even Hawking’s incredible intellectual scope. A sentience that may well find its clearest manifestation in a “sentient field” that - like the Higgs field imparting mass to all the particles in the universe - permeates the universe lending a shared sentience to existence. 

Again, it is good for us to remember that the awesome mental manipulations that led Hawking to the notion of Hawking Radiation were jump-started by the fact that his initial thoughts about black holes were wrong. They were “certainties” that had to be revised through deeper consideration. More energy, more information being ordered and reordered inside Hawking’s head.

I am reminded of Arthur C. Clark’s (author of among others, the Space Odyssey works) assertion that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It strikes me that there is a warning there. What appears to be magic will, given more time and additional reflection and research, reveal itself to be no more than the latest version of evolving technology. The same might be said of the transient certainties in Hawking’s seemingly conflicting observations. Is there “a mind of God” or do we need not “seek God to light the blue torch paper” of the universe? 

Surely, the most insidious intellectual trap for physicist and philosopher alike is certainty. In asserting the finality of death  - the final crash of the brain, the human computer - Hawking proves himself no more immune to hubris than the rest of us less gifted. The intricate patterns that danced across his stunning bundle of neurons were no random firings. They were intellectual symphonies of surpassing - and lasting - beauty.  And while they were certainly his creations, it is not for him to declare them extinguished with his passing.

I have no trouble imagining philosopher-physicists a thousand years hence explaining to their students, “Yes, they believed that the energy patterns of thoughts died when the individual brain in which they originated ceased its primary biological functions. Settle down now. I know, I know, it seems quite primitive. But remember we’re talking about the early 21st century. Things were quite primitive. It wouldn’t be until  2347 when Jannis et. al. discovered that .  .  .”  

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