Month: February 2006

A Little Good News Never Hurts

I commented to Leslie last Wednesday that I was having a really good year healthwise and hadn’t missed a single Tai Chi class all year. I spoke too soon, as I’m about to miss class tonight as I came down with a nasty cold Monday night and spent nearly all day yesterday and most of the day today in bed trying to recuperate so that I can enjoy the sunshine we’re finally getting here in the Pacific Northwest.

If it wasn’t for this story about Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative I’d feel even worse than I do right now. In fact, it was precisely when I read this NY Times headline in my RSS reader that I suddenly started to feel better.

I’m hoping that this will finally force the Republican party to take the environment into consideration in making decisions rather than blindly trusting industry, particularly the oil industry, to do what’s best for America.

Strangely, I even found myself in agreement with Mr. Haggard, the pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, one of the those who refused to sign but said:

that he did not sign because it would be interpreted as an endorsement by the entire National Association of Evangelicals. But he said that speaking just for himself, “There is no doubt about it in my mind that climate change is happening, and there is no doubt about it that it would be wise for us to stop doing the foolish things we’re doing that could potentially be causing this. In my mind there is no downside to being cautious.”

Even if it takes an important issue away from the Democratic Party, one they haven’t managed to fully take advantage of in the past, taking care of the environment is far more important than petty politics. Hopefully, Republicans who are concerned about the environment will now feel they can push their concerns in local and national elections.

Is it really “The End of the Internet?”

The article “The End of the Internet?� by Jeff Chester linked to by Fait accompli via woods lot makes me wonder how long it will be before commercial interests make the internet as irrelevant as TV has become to me. It’s an informative article that’s well worth reading.

Chester argues that:

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us–from content providers to individual users–would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

While it comes as little shock that the telephone and cable companies want to make more money, it is most surprising that this is the first time I’ve heard about this.

Considering how important free access is to the internet, why haven’t I heard that:

… both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet’s future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

Why haven’t any of the many associations I belong to sent heads-up warnings that I need to contact my congressmen or write letters to the head of the FCC?

To me, the major appeal of the web is the free access to information that I would otherwise never have access to, in particular, access to weblogs written by people whose views I would never hear except for the web. While I do access much of my news on the web, with a few notable exceptions there’s little that I couldn’t already get from my local newspaper or my cable programs. However, I agree whole heartedly with Chester when he argues that:

If we permit the Internet to become a medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal consumption, rather than global civic-related communications, we will face the political consequences for decades to come. Unless we push back, the “brandwashing” of America will permeate not only our information infrastructure but global society and culture as well.

For this administration “public good� seems to be synonymous with making money. They seem unable to see the fallacy in arguments like “What’s good for GM is good for America.� One almost wonders if this administration isn’t consciously trying to implement the philosophy Aldous Huxley made so famous in Brave New World.

As if to confirm Chester’s concerns, this article
about corporate giants charging for email appeared Saturday in the the New York Times informing us that

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

and that

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

An article in the BBC news entitled E-mail charging plan to beat spam puts a better spin on these changes, but one has to wonder whether these charges are merely the foot in the door for greater charges coming down the fiber optic cables.

Are you old enough to remember when you bought cable TV to avoid the constant commercials, or when you went to the movies to see the movies and not an endless string of commercials, previews, and more commercials as you wait for the show you came to see actually begin?

The Sound of Truth

One of the major themes in Shaw’s Wisdom of the Idiots is the conflict between the wisdom of the Sufis and the knowledge of scholars. Indeed, one of the major appeals of this work is the distinction between wisdom and knowledge:

AJMAL HUSSEIN AND THE SCHOLARS

Sufi Ajmal Hussein was constantly being criticised by scholars, who feared that, his repute might outshine their own. They spared no efforts to cast doubts upon his knowledge, to accuse him of taking refuge from their criticisms in mysticism, and even to imply that he had been guilty of discreditable practices.

At length he said: ‘If I answer my critics, they make it the opportunity to bring fresh accusation against me, which people believe because it amuses them to believe such things. If I do not answer them they crow and preen themselves, and people believe that they are real scholars. They imagine that we Sufis oppose scholarship. We do not But our very existence is a threat to the pretended scholarship of tiny noisy ones. Scholarship long since disappeared. What we have to face now is sham scholarship.’

The scholars shrilled more loudly than ever. At last Ajmal said:’Argument is not as effective as demonstration. I shall give you an insight into what these people are like.’

He invited ‘question papers’ from the scholars, to allow them to test his knowledge and ideas. Fifty different professors and academicians sent questionnaires to him. Ajmal answered them all differently. When the scholars met to discuss these papers, at a conference, there were so many versions of what he believed, that each one thought that he had exposed Ajmal, and refused to give up his thesis in favour of any other. The result was the celebrated ‘brawling of the scholars’. For five days they attacked each other bitterly.

‘This,’ said Ajinal, ‘is a demonstration. What matters to each one most is his own opinion and his own interpretation. They care nothing for truth. This is what they do with everyone’s teachings. When he is alive, they torment him. When he dies they become experts on his works. The real motive of the activity, however, is to vie with one another and to oppose anyone outside their own ranks. Do you want to become one of them? Make a choice soon.’

As an English major at the University of Washington I was certainly made aware of the split between poets and critics, with a definite bias towards poets in most of the classes I took. I’m sure that bias still shows in the way I discuss poetry and novels here, with emphasis on what they mean to me and whether or not they help to see the world more clearly rather than on critical analysis per se.

That’s not from a lack of ability. By the time I entered Grad school, I had generally mastered the literary game. In three years of grad school, the only “B� I ever got was one in Filmmaking. Several English professors even asked me why I wasn’t pursuing my PHD and trying to move up to teaching at the college level.

Simply put, I wasn’t a good enough poet to get a job at a college and had absolutely no interest in literary criticism. I could barely stand to read a book of literary criticism, even those written by famous poets like Eliot and Auden. Like Joseph Duemer,
who also attended the UW, when it comes to poetry I prefer “the concrete as opposed to the abstract.�

I wouldn’t be posting Shaw’s tale, though, if I thought it merely applied to poets and literary critics since I doubt that many who visit here are interested in such things. It seems to me that the last two paragraphs of Shaw’s tale apply just as much to many bloggers, particularly political bloggers, who spend days arguing over the issues of the moment, more concerned with attracting readers to their blog than with actually getting down to the truth of the matter.

Caught up in their own opinions and interpretations, they have little time for facts and less desire to arrive at some kind of agreed upon truth. The way they throw the term “fact� around, one doubts they even know the difference between a fact and an opinion, much less the difference between a sound and unsound opinion. For most of them, a good opinion is the one that draws the most attacks and, in doing so, attracts the most readers because that’s the way most of them measure success.

Just Full of Facts

I like many of the tales in Shah’s Wisdom of the Idiots, but this one comes a little too close for comfort — which might explain why it’s a favorite. All you have to do is glance at the column on the left and see the works I’ve read in just the last four years, a small percentage of the total number of works I’ve read over the years, and realize I might suffer from information overload.

Like most people who’ve spent a lifetime reading, I have more useless facts in my head than I’ll ever use, no matter how many games of Trivial Pursuit I get conned into playing. Some people admire others who are able to remember bits of information, celebrating it in program after program on television. Though I’ve often benefitted from the kind of memory that can tell you exactly where on a page a fact can be found and can answer multiple answer questions quite easily, I have serious doubts about the benefits of remembering endless strings of facts.

This tale suggests how dangerous undigested facts may be:

FULL UP

A man came to Bahaudin Naqshband, and said:

‘I have travelled from one teacher to another, and I have studied many Paths, all of which have given me great benefits and many advantages of all kinds.
‘I now wish to be enrolled as one of your disciples, so that I may drink from the well of knowledge, and thus make myself more and more advanced in the Tariqa, the Mystic Way.

Bahaudin, instead of answering the question directly, called for dinner to be served. When the dish of rice and meat stew was brought, he pressed plateful after plateful upon his guest. Then he gave him fruits and pastries, and then he called for more pilau, and more and more courses of food, vegetables, salads, confitures.

At first the man was flattered, and as Bahaudin showed pleasure at every mouthful he swallowed, he ate as much as he could. When his eating slowed down, the Sufi Sheikh seemed very annoyed, and to avoid his displeasure, the unfortunate man ate virtually another meal.

When he could not swallow even another grain of rice, and rolled in great discomfort upon a cushion, Bahaudin addressed him in this manner:
‘When you came to see me, you were as full of undigested teachings as you now are with meat, rice and fruit. You felt discomfort, and, because you are unaccustomed to spiritual discomfort of the real kind, you interpreted this as a hunger for more knowledge. Indigestion was your real condition.
‘I can teach you if you will now follow my instructions and stay here with me digesting by means of activities which will not seem to you to be initiatory, but which will be equal to the eating of something which will enable your meal to be digested and transformed into nutrition, not weight.’

The man agreed. He told his story many decades later, when he became famous as the great teacher Sufi Khalil Ashrafzada.

So that’s the discomfort I felt when I finally graduated from college. I know that there were times when I was in graduate school when I just wanted to be “finished� with classes, doubting I was still learning anything worth learning.

That discomfort probably explains why I went nearly two years after I first retired without reading a single book, choosing to spend my time working in my garden or hiking or cross-country skiing in the mountains.

When I finally decided I wanted to start reading again, I chose to go back and re-read a number of books that I had found interesting years before. After that, I started reading books that I had bought during all those college years but hadn’t found time to finish. Four years later, I still haven’t finished all those books, though to be fair reading an old book has often led to buying new books that explore similar ideas.

I hope that taking time to write about everything I read helps to digest what I’ve read and put it in some sort of perspective. I do think my reading and my other interests have begun to dovetail.