New Year's Humbug

New Year’s Eve.

The Biggest Non-Event of the year, and the last non-event of the year. Also, more ominously, the entrance into the desolate armpit of the year.

The Holidays (as we have to say now, so that faith-based political-correctness can engulf everything – the rule being to mention God on every possible inappropriate occasion, such as in the courts, at football matches, at political rallies, at military events, but never mention her at the usual times of yore like Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Advent, Good Friday, Ramadan, Channukah, Yom Kippur, - “Happy Holidays! And God Bless Texas!”) …the Holidays have been coming at us for months, accelerating, getting closer together, with Labor Day, then Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, and now - - - - ???

February: time to celebrate Seasonal Affective Disorder, either by hiding in the fetus position reading Sylvia Plath in the newly restored original edition, or sitting staring at a brightly shining expensive blank wall. Apart from that, the new year grants us the coldest days, continuing gloom, and all those official holidays nobody pays any attention to. Martin Luther King Day and the various Presidents, snuck in on Mondays so you won’t notice them. It works! And if you think about why we have MLK day, it doesn't exactly make for relaxing bonhomie, more an occasion for collective guilt. And the Presidents? We should be having a holiday because we love Presidents!!? I don’t think so.

Any proper holiday has to fall on an unpredictable day, like Christmas and New Year, so that you have to pay attention, or else always be in the middle of the week, like Thanksgiving, so that it messes up work schedules, and gets us a day off. Mondays in February because of moral leaders? Sorry, doesn’t cut it. And New Year’s is just a drunken "Waiting for Godot". We need to get into sync with the people who really know how to party. That's why I recommend

MARDI GRAS!!

In New Orleans (where my son Sebastian was born) it will already be underway by the time this hits cyberspace. It’s grandly symphonic, with endless rehearsals so that, when the day comes, you can do it right. Being on a Tuesday it smashes the week to pulp. It’s religious in origin, therefore compulsory, but the name Mardi Gras has nothing to do with religion (passes the Happy Holidays! test) and most people don’t even know that it means "Fat Tuesday, The Festival of St. Atkins." You won’t hear many references to God on Mardi Gras, not even “God Bless the Bars of Bourbon St.” Slap-bang in the midst of the armpit of the year, it is quickly followed by St. Patrick’s Day.

It’s early this year because Easter is early. You know how to calculate Easter? There’s a simple rhyme that helps. It goes like this:

No need for confusion
If we but recall,
That Easter on the
Sunday immediately following the first full moon that occurs right after the vernal
Equinox doth fall.

So Mardi Gras is on February 8th in 2005; that’s just 39 days away. I’ll be ready. There’s too much work done in this country, or at least, too much time spent at work, and it needs to be kept under control. The only reason Mardi Gras isn’t everywhere? – the boss wouldn’t like it. You know the guy; Ebenezer Scrooge.

As soon as you realize New Year did nothing for you, let’s all commit to Mardi Gras. With St. Pat. on March 17th, a Thursday, we’ll be well on our way to May Day, which everybody celebrates except us! Southerners seem to have a lock on our politics. We should give in, and accept the universal necessity of Mardi Gras.

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

Mardi Gras

Tsunami

What can be said? What can be written? Speech and writing have their value, and have tremendous power, but not only are they impotent in the face of such an event, they feel impertinent. I shall not try to compete with any reportage, or imaginative attempt to empathize with, or gain insight into, the experience of those who were there, or the experiences of those who died, or almost died. It is, in the most mundane sense, unimaginable.

Unimaginable in two ways. The first is the obvious way: that the phenomenon is so unusual and so huge that it is on a different scale from anything most of us will ever experience. The struggle to imagine this is manifest in the news reports that constantly update the death count, that emphasize and re-emphasize the size of the geographical area affected, and that describe the peculiar circumstances such as the sucking of the water away from the shore before the destructive wave returned.

The second way that it is unimaginable is that for each person who died, it was their personal death, as unimaginable as is every death that happens every day, to every person who dies, noticed or unnoticed. Some die amidst horror, others do not. And for those who were there and survived, vision extends only as far as the horizon, and the terror was their local terror, the forces they had to contend with to survive were local. However clear to many that this was a huge event, the enormity is beyond human perception. Nonetheless, for many, it must have been quite beyond belief in this particular way: they were witness to the inescapable death of so many people all around them.

Nothing anyone can say or write can effectively increase our understanding of such things, but perhaps reporting can make our imaginations more blunt. The curiosity to understand catastrophe has clear utility. We have an urge to understand and perceive disaster so that we can avoid it. That becomes instinct, and fuels curiosity, even if we are not proud of it. But the assuaging of that curiosity by news media that daily bombard us with disasters ever described with maximal fake emotion in order to gain our attention, and ratings success, does make us callous. We learn to resist, and then something like this happens.

Defending Astrology

Arghh! I can hear gasps of disbelief. He can’t really be whacko enough to believe in astrology can he? Not when he just dumped all over the Gospels. I'd rather invoke my Scottish ancestors and say "not proven."

Astrology is often trotted out by scientists and intellectuals as the archetype of stupidity and uncritical gullibility, popular nonsense at its most popular and nonsensical. “Well!” you can sense writers implying, “if you take astrology seriously, then I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn you’d love to buy.” Withering contempt is almost built into the word.

But let me suggest an astrological proposition that, in principle, could be investigated scientifically. It is the proposition that there is some unspecified correlation between the position of the planets in the sky relative to the earth at the time and place that a person is born, and the character, interests and personality that that person develops as they grow and live their life. I would suggest nothing further. I propose no mechanism.

That seems to me testable, if formulated as a prediction open to falsification. The prediction could be something to the effect that astrology is not true, that no statistically significant correlation between, say, Venus in Taurus and musical ability, will be found. See if there is a variation from randomness. If there is, then the prediction that there won’t be is falsified, and there is a phenomenon, a problem, that needs explanation. A whole series of such propositions could be formulated and tested, as hypotheses emerge and are proposed. Something similar has in fact been done the other way round, by the Gauquelins in France, where time of birth has been universally recorded for a long time. They found correlations that were significant and clear, but had almost no similarity to traditional astrology. Their conclusion would seem to be that there is something there, but traditional astrology has it all wrong.

Some years ago in London, I attended a lecture by H. J. Eysenck arguing the scientific testability of astrology, and I was amazed at the animosity that poured forth from almost everyone there, far beyond anything justified by what I felt was a rather trivial topic. (I essentially recapitulated his argument above – it is possible to formulate astrological propositions that are objectively testable, and therefore open to scientific investigation.) But people were angry, insulted that he should even suggest such a thing. Some were truly furious. And this is the depressing part: the most common argument against him was this:
it cannot be true because it is impossible.

I found this very discouraging. People assembled to uphold the superiority of rational inquiry over blind prejudice were defending prejudice with the most infantile of arguments, easily paraphrased as "I cannot imagine an explanation, so the phenomen cannot exist."

There are many things that we cannot explain, but that does not stop them from existing. We cannot explain consciousness yet, but the LA freeways would be a real mess without conscious drivers. Scientists prefer the measurable, quite rightly, and invent calculi when needed to bring more things into the scientific fold. Newton tells us very precisely how to land a projectile on the moon, while astrology tells us that the moon makes us dreamy. This is not something that lends itself easily to mathematical analysis. However, if we should soon become able to detect ‘hope’ by some sort of brain monitoring, then great! That will make it much easier to count the sorts of things astrology talks about, such as ‘a hopeful outlook on life,’ and statistical investigation is, after all, all I am asking for.

In the meantime, poo-poo away. But astrology is a very elegant medieval system of character analysis, of great subtlety, great beauty, with as large an imprint on the world around us as, say, the tradition of painting female nudes, studies of the Madonna, gothic arches, or the rise of counterpoint. A resilient part of our culture, it may not be beyond the reach of science. What do the rationalists fear?

My Home Web Site

My Agent

Sacred Texts

I am told that Socrates thought that writing was a thoroughly bad idea, and he certainly did not commit that error himself. Neither did Jesus, nor Buddha. The omission does not seem to have reduced their influence on the world. Rather the reverse, if anything. Socrates felt that it would perpetuate lies, and give lazy people a way to avoid seeking the truth.

The advantage of writing won out, though, and I do not contest it. By writing something down we turn it into a concrete thing that we can share, knowing that we are all looking at the same thing. We can revise it and make it better in a way not possible with improvised speech. By writing we can make complex mathematical procedures concrete, perfect a poem, notate a symphony.

And the tendency to canonize certain written documents is easy to understand too. Suppose you did get to hear Jesus or Buddha or one of those, and the value and superiority of what they were saying was absolutely clear to you, but you didn’t feel quite clever enough to be entrusted with the message to humanity yourself. Suppose, moreover, that you traversed mountain ranges and canyons to bring the message to people who had never met the great leader, and were unfamiliar with his style. Perhaps, when you tried to explain your enthusiasm, your audience might completely misunderstand you, or argue from a point of view you hadn’t thought of, and leave you confused, fearing that the central message was being lost. What to do?

A written orthodoxy would be a great insurance against the corruption and drift of the idea. You could write down the great sayings of the teacher, and then, when the conversation seemed to lose direction and focus, or when your memory failed you, or even after you had died and someone who never met the GT had to carry on, there would be something to go back to. The teaching, the art work, could be transmitted authentically down through the ages. The Four Noble Truths; we could go back to them when confronted with a dilemma such as whether it was OK to trade a camel you didn’t actually own yet, but felt sure you would when delivery was due. A fixed form of words could be the harbor to go back to when we seemed to have lost our bearings, or entered an area the great teacher never specifically addressed.

But the danger is already apparent; if the sacred text was created to preserve one thing, and we search it for answers to quite another, we are simply looking in the wrong place. But if we use the text precisely because we have no other source for the original teaching, or none that we trust, then how can we know whether we are looking in the wrong place? Perhaps we just did not understand the book deeply enough. And even if we suspect we might be looking in the wrong place, where else should we look? Once we, the book-wielding guardians of the truth, start saying “Ur, I don’t know. Never thought of that. Don’t think Jesus ever told us what sort of car he would drive,” then our authority is suspect, and there is no real reason to pay attention to us when we try to correct the heterodox by telling them to return to scripture.

The tendency to over-stress the importance of the book also arises because of what I call the “Ladder of Disbelief.” I think this is most simply shown by a series of pronouncements in the first person, followed by reports of them in the third. Thusly:

I am totally certain that this is true.
He believes it. But I am not sure why.

I believe that this is true.
He thinks it is true, but suspects it might not be.

I really do think that this is true.
He obviously has doubts about it.

I think, on balance, this is probably true.
He clearly doubts it.

I suspect this may not be true.
He doesn’t think it is true.

I don’t think this is true.
He seems sure it is not true.

Definitely not true.
He denies it. I wonder why.

Goddam it. It’s a total lie!
He did it.

At every level, people who hear you, or who report you, add a level of skepticism to what they claim you said. How, then, can you convince them of the utter truth, certainty, and importance of the thing you are so certain about? How can you overcome the ladder of disbelief, the inevitable doubt by transmission?

It’s a toughie, and many ways have been tried over the ages. One of the most effective, simple, common and convenient is simply to announce that the Book is the Word of God, and then kill anybody who says otherwise. Other, slightly less drastic methods are to shout at people, intimidate them, threaten them, bore them to death, jump up and down like TV evangelists in fake ecstasy, trying to argue by outrageous emotional displays what you cannot get across by logic.

The corollary of the “Word of God” technique, of course, is to denounce anybody who disagrees with you as a mouthpiece of the devil, whom other people need to kill in the event that you yourself do not have time. These techniques all work pretty well as far as appearances are concerned. Killing people who say they disagree drastically reduces the number of people who say they disagree, and most of them don’t actually have to be killed. Since the ladder of doubt arises in the first place because we have nothing but appearances to go by, then the appearance of agreement would seem to be enough to claim success.

But we all know it isn’t. The text, in the first place, was a makeshift solution to the problem of how to fix truth in a world that flows, and how to avoid corruption and error in a world that is always disputatious. Nobody, at the beginning, thought of the book as the Truth Itself, merely as a practical gadget to make the truth transmissable and preservable. Jesus didn’t write, and decades had gone by since he died/disappeared/ascended/whatever, and history did not wait, and the people who remembered him had to get something down, both to remember, and to be sure of what they agreed about, pooling what their memories had in common. And so the Gospels were written, obviously not to be Idols to be Worshipped in themselves, (that would be, and is, idolatry), but to gather together the wisdom that was in danger of fragmenting. And so the authors wrote down the important bits, the things that made as clear as they could the things that they thought most important. And to keep it comprehensible, if you were such an author, you would try to keep it consistent and simple. You’d say Christ’s life was perfect, and wouldn’t go into the incident when he was 15 behind the ass shed with Rachel. It wasn’t relevant anyway.

Move on a generation, and we have no eyewitnesses left; the Book is all we have. Then it becomes an object of veneration in itself, and the “death if you disagree” policy puts a lot of pressure back onto this book, in a sort of feedback loop. You have to back up such draconian policies with some pretty outrageous claims for a bit of writing. You have to proclaim not just that it is right, but that it is without fault, and that it is complete. All truth is contained in it. All questions that can be asked can be answered by reference to your book.

You might think that I wrote this to object to the Gospels. Not at all. I just think that is a place to start where the danger and the damage done throughout centuries by the mere notion of the “sacred text” is so obvious that it can hardly be denied. After that it will not seem so far-fetched, in later postings, when I move in to attack my real quarries: the American Constitution and electoral college, and the pedantic respect demanded for scores of musical compositions.

In particular, my goal is to attack, at the very source, the whole philosophy of musical performance as put forward by Gunther Schuller in his book “The Compleat Conductor” where he proclaims that his guiding principle is to regard the score of, say, Beethoven’s 5th, as a sacred text.

God help us, say I. A score is no more than a makeshift solution to a practical problem. It is a reductive document that reduces a piece of music to a catalog of the notes that need to be played to realize it. Claim that all, and exhaustive, truth lies therein and you are, I submit, dead wrong.

Bet you didn’t see that coming three paragraphs back, huh?
I shall continue, jumping up and down ecstatically to prove how right I am.
©2004 AJM

My Home Web Site

My Agent

Mornings and Nights After Christmas

The merry little Santa verse, and the 12 days, have been removed to my general web site in order to restore the deep solemnity of this blog.

I shall archive all these notes there eventually, categorized according to topic.

Feel free to post comments, especially if you radically disagree. Those are always the most interesting comments. My purpose is to float trial balloons, as it were, towards longer articles and revised thoughts, so alerting me to errors is the best thing. I should come clean and admit that I am a proponent of Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism, as exemplified by his comment:

"You may be right, and I may be wrong, and by rational discussion we may both get closer to the truth."

Comments will not initially be visible to all browsers, so have no fear.

My Home Web Site

The web site is crude at the moment. Upgrading that is my next task.

Sappy Christmas Song

I haven't quite finished my little musical offering for this year yet, so here, since I didn't get all that many out in the mail, is my Sappy Christmas Song for last year.

Good for Christmas Eve.



You can find a version large enough to print HERE

Darwinism was created. Creationism evolved.

“Darwinism” was created by an intelligent designer – Darwin.
“Creationism” evolved by natural selection through the countless ages of human thought. Pretty ironical, huh? Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Although exasperating to both sides, as well as to observers, I am afraid the tussle between evolution and creationism will continue, pointlessly. It isn’t a discussion between comparable things, and neither side seems to understand either what the other side is talking about, or even the nature of the belief they themselves hold dear.

A fight between scientific fact and religious belief? Not really, but that assumption often accounts for which side people take. People who believe in the validity not just of science, but of the scientific method and discipline of thought – these people will choose Darwinism. People who make sense of life by investing in belief, belief in a loving God who created them with a personal mission for their life – these people will more probably embrace creationism. In neither case, (unless you happen to be a professional evolutionary scientist) is this choice of allegiance ultimately based on truly comprehensive knowledge of the topic, and careful skeptical scrutiny. It is more likely based on exasperation, frustration, and the fear that your opponent's view is not merely wrong, but undercuts and threatens the very basis of your life.

Creationists fear that Darwin reveals the world and their own lives as a mockery; a pointless, accidental joke thrown up by an uncaring mechanical universe in which the gradual progress towards decay and death is all that there is. It is a universe in which purpose and accomplishment seems to be impossible, and there is no reason for our existence. This has to be wrong. Any such view is unbearable. Intolerable. It just doesn’t fit with the joyous experience of life, in which everything we value comes about through purposeful action. Purpose is the key to the universe as we experience it. Apart from that, being monkeys is demeaning.

Darwinists insist that taking Creationism seriously at face value is putting blinkers over our eyes and returning to the dark days of superstition and compulsory, irrational belief. To place creationism alongside Darwinism, even as an alternative, let alone actually believing it, is to trash all the hard-won knowledge of how the universe really works, who we are, and the miraculous power of nature left to itself to produce conscious living beings of spiritual depth and potential. It is to throw out all the explanatory power of science over mysterious things that have led to civilization – to farming, writing and culture, medicine, metallurgy, ship and plane design, communications, safety from disease and violence, and freedom from the sort of tyranny that rages and ruins lives in theocracies around the world.

But each side makes the mistake of thinking that the other side is listening. They are not. Instead, they just keep shooting at their stereotypical imagined enemies: Darwinists, presumed to be claiming complete truth; - Creationists, presumed to be refusing to think. Not so.

Science, including evolutionary science, is not “an especially secure form of knowledge” as people often think, but a system of hypotheses that constantly opens itself up to being proven wrong, both in details, and in the grand conception. That is the strength of science – when it finds it is wrong, it changes. The search for truth is more important than loyalty, and vastly more important than worrying about what the consequences of truth might be. Science is doubting things that are obviously true.

Creationists are not interested in risking their faith in the Lord; they seek a theory that counters the atheistic dangers of Darwinism; robust enough, secure enough, reasonable enough, and backed up by enough evidence and confirming instances that it can withstand any attack that the Darwinists might come up with. It is the creationists who seek certainty, with a theory so watertight that it can explain everything that might ever be discovered, and thus can fully encompass all creation. Faith is being certain about things that are obviously false.

So, ironically, each side ends up suffering from the flaw it condemns in its opponent. The Creationists claim to be guided by faith, but are really grasping at absolutist certainty. Scientists claim the rigor of open thought and constant doubt, but don’t care to admit that science is precisely the project of trying to find explanations for things without involving God. That is just the basic rule of the game. God is ruled out a priori. And that is an article of faith. A choice.

It’s as if the Darwinists are playing cricket against the Creationists who are playing baseball, and every time anyone does anything, the other side cries “foul!” It really doesn’t get us anywhere.

I do wish they would leave each other alone. The two core propositions – that life evolved through natural adaptation and selection by the transmission of genes, all the work of nature without external interference - and that the world exists because there is a loving God who decided that it should exist and can fill our hearts with joy – you know, folks; - these are not incompatible. They arise from adopting different methods of enquiry. It’s when each side tries to imitate the other in order to discredit it that they make asses of themselves.

©2004 AJM

My Home Web Site (a bit primitive)

My Agent

A Pastoral Revolution

continuing Beethoven's finales,

In the search for a finale that binds a whole monumental work together rather than merely saying, “that’s it!”, ending with a bang seems promising, especially if you have real substance to offer. Mozart understood the options. His 38th Symphony, (Prague) ends with a nice confection of froth, 39 and 40 are both elaborate versions of the “showing-off” solution, but the 41st (Jupiter) is quite new. The Jupiter’s finale is a monument all by itself, owing not a little to Bach in the combination of slow and fast ideas. Even at the very end, in the coda, the music is again suddenly unveiling levels of complexity and intensity not even hinted at before.

And here lies the secret – the need to reveal something unanticipated, relevant, and new. It’s not enough simply to reassert your opening idea louder, faster, and three times over. A big choral dance number with all the cast on stage, all the loose ends tied up, and the dash for the cloakrooms and parking lots launched – ritual only; no guarantee of substance.

Beethoven’s first prototype whole-work finales were based on the “triumphant” strategy, what Michael Steinberg calls the “victory symphony.” In #3, the Eroica, his finale begins with a rush and a dash, and ends with total assertiveness. But these bookends have nothing much to do with the meat of the movement. The fifth symphony is more organic, with a finale emerging seamlessly, and ending generously enough to engulf the entire symphony. It even reverts back and quotes the third movement for a bit, which is a great idea, a gesture informing us that success is not yet complete. Good move. Mahler caught on and did that too, ineptly in the 1st, powerfully in the 5th, to the point of genius in the 6th, vacuously in the 7th.

But a triumphant ending is only one option, not necessarily the most convincing. Isn’t magnificence rather a cheap trick? One of the most startlingly original and influential of finale-inventions was Tchaikowsky’s – the utter despair of the slow ending to his Pathétique Symphony. But that still lies in the future.

With his 6th Symphony, Beethoven moved away from simple victory, and took a step towards what might be called the “text-symphony”. There is a static, masque-like story behind the Pastoral, a series of tableaux. Not yet an organic psychological unfolding in the manner of Wagner or Mahler, but at least an added dimension of emotional propositions underlying the music. By means of his simple sequence of static moods – happiness on arriving in the country – soothingly contemplating the brook – simple rustic company – the exhilaration of a storm, - Beethoven is able to set up an agenda for the finale which has not even been embarked upon yet. The movement is called the Thanksgiving after the Storm, but it is much more than that. After all, there was nothing very terrible about the storm; it interrupted a dance in mid-jump (memories of the disruption of the scherzo in the 5th symphony) and gave us the most energetic fun so far, but otherwise seems to have done little harm. So the thanksgiving called for isn’t like the gut-wrenching panic/relief of having survived a tornado or a hurricane. Rather is the finale an integration of the whole disparate rural experience; the initial relaxation, the more intense entry into the mood of peace, the frivolity, the exhilaration, and all these leading to a new mood, a mood of gratitude and contentment and confidence – a sense of having had a truly life-changing experience which needs time to consolidate precisely because it is not “in your face” as it starts out. It is, in fact, somewhat unconvincing initially, and needs time to earn our trust. By this means, the finale of the Pastoral is able gradually to get under our skin, and finally become so persuasive that it can risk falling almost silent before closing quietly with a sort of “QED.”

I may add, as a footnote, that this is a particularly difficult movement to conduct, since it is harmonically vague to start with, giving you no clear spot to nail the tempo, and the whole thing tends to slow down anyway – all too realistic a musical representation of falling asleep!

Despite being so different in effect, this literary, philosophically sustained music points directly to the finale of the 9th symphony – the true, undeniable birth of the text-symphony.

Yet more to come!
©2004 AJM
wavewillow@earthlink.net

Bruckner's 9th Symphony. Saved by the Bell.

I am so glad that Bruckner did not ruin his 9th symphony by adding a last movement, a finale, to it. Finales were never Bruckner’s strong point, and the 9th benefits greatly from not having one. After all, does anyone feel short-changed after the Schubert “unfinished.”?

The reason Bruckner’s finales are so poor harks back to his desire to live up to Beethoven’s example, and ties in with what Wagner did as a composer of Symphonic Operas, and Mahler as a composer of Operatic Symphonies. Brahms was rather different.

The problem, simply put, is this: How do you finish a long piece of abstract music, with no story to it, and no words, and make the ending really feel like the end of the whole thing, as opposed to just the end of the last part? Before Beethoven, this didn't really arise, since a symphony was essentially a set of pieces, like a set at a jazz club, where you would make sure the ending made a good ending, period. What you did half an hour before was beside the point. But Beethoven tried something more ambitious: pieces of music that might last up to an hour, and that felt like a giant single thing. How could you make that work, when you didn’t have a story as you would in a Shakespeare play? Let’s take a look at what Beethoven did in his finales.

Symphonies 1, 2, 4, and 8 don’t really count. In 1 and 2, he had hardly got going. The 4th is a wonderful old-fashioned Mozartian effort, in which the finale is a flashy pops number for the first fiddles. A sort of Viennese Hoe-down. Symphony 8 is odd. It gets very silly from time to time, the sort of silliness that comes in handy in opera, thus becoming a useful warm up for the 9th.

But suddenly, in the first movement of the 3rd, the Eroica, POWEE!! Never mind Schoenberg’s 2nd string quartet, THIS is the piece where music suddenly “breathes the air of a different planet.” Who knew that an abstract piece of music could be erected into such a huge, single-span arch without falling over? The second movement, the Funeral March, is heavy-duty stuff too, with a mind-crunching climax unnervingly similar to that of the first movement. The scherzo is peppy, fun, has no climax, and is generally inoffensive. A lesser matter. We can see where Beethoven is going now. The scherzo presents itself effectively as a lead-in to the very necessary, much looked forward to, deeply needed, cathartic climax: the Crowning Finale - worthy of balancing that epoch-shattering first movement. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. The finale of the Eroica is a patch-work affair of no real substance. For conductors it is irritating and unrewarding, as you have to keep memorizing those awkward bits of fugue that really contribute very little. It suffers from the affliction we shall find often in Bruckner: To make a worthy finale for a big work, it has to have a certain heft, as Aristotle pointed out. It’s got to be big enough to do the job. It mustn’t be trivial. But what do you do if you don’t really have anything to say, because all the important stuff has already been laid out in the early movements?

Beethoven’s 5th is probably the most influential symphony ever written, therefore justly famous. Yet eminence does not exempt it from difficulties, even though Beethoven worked really hard on the finale-problem in this one. He carefully made all three preceding movements brilliant, substantial, and inconclusive. The first movement has drive (everybody mentions that!) but it also keeps stopping! In fact, the very first thing it does, before you can possibly have a clue what the key, the tempo, or the meter is, is STOP. Then, next, it STOPS again. It keeps on doing it. So its ending, though driven, has a quality of puzzled, unreleased energy. Big question mark. The second movement is ethereal and Apollonian, except for those vacuous trumpet fanfares which sound so lame that I cannot help thinking we must all be playing them the wrong way. Beethoven couldn’t have meant that! But I don’t know what the right way is. And, confusingly, triviality is what ends the movement. So again, a giant question mark. The third movement, the scherzo, is a very clever part of a brilliant strategy. Just as the first movement kept switching from stop to go, this one keeps switching from quiet to loud. As it ends, the quiet takes over and gradually, mysteriously, evolves through a secret passage into the loud finale. Very clever. It makes the finale, without question, the outcome of the previous movements, organically welded to them; a triumphant outcome.

Unfortunately, its reason for existence is completed with its very first chord. The whole symphony became a journey leading to the finale, and a very successful one. But the end result is that the whole thing ends up like New Year’s Eve. We all sit around waiting for that stroke of midnight, and then, when it comes, there really isn’t much to do except pack up and go home to bed. So we kind of hang around for a while so as not to appear rude. Once again, as in the Eroica, the finale is sound and fury, signifying little except Beethoven’s sense of proportion in knowing how long it ought to last. The very end of Beethoven’s 5th is almost a joke. It’s as if Beethoven thought that by banging the home chord often enough, and redundantly enough, the sense of finality would somehow stretch backwards in time and magically encompass everything played since the beginning of the piece. Strategy rather than tactics. It almost works, but still adds nothing that was not spelled out the moment the finale began. Definitely an advance on the finale of the Eroica, but not really a success.

The 6th, the Pastoral, is where he really starts to get somewhere.

To be continued.

©2004 AJM

Packing to travel

Traveling light? Not me. Even going to the dentist is a problem, since my motto for even the most trivial of trips is – if you can’t take it with you, don’t go. How long might I have to wait? Should I take my journal with me? (I always get good ideas when writing in public.) Maybe I’ll look silly writing on my knee. And how many extra ink cartridges should I take in case my fountain pen runs out? Can’t use ballpoints, they give me hand cramps. And the pen might leak in my pants, unless I take a whole brief-case to hold it, which looks a bit ostentatious in a dentist’s office. Read, perhaps. How big a book can I get into my little purse? I don’t like paperbacks; the print is too small. Have you noticed how the instructions on medicines is always so small that only the truly young and healthy have even a fighting chance of finding out precisely how this particular pill will kill you?

Going on the road for work is, as you might guess, an enormous “what-if” project. The general procedure is as follows; I pack everything I could possibly need in the event I should unexpectedly be cast adrift on a desert island for 10 years or so (a desert island with AC power, DSL, but no TV - I aspire to a connected, yet pure, life) check and recheck constantly, leave a day late, and make sure I have double supplies of crucial things like felt paint-pens in that particular color I prefer for highlighting obscure bass trumpet parts. I take enough works of philosophy to finally crack Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Who knows, a rehearsal might be cancelled and I could use the gift of an evening to finally nail Wittgenstein, in a context of K and S. It wouldn’t take much self-discipline, since I’d have everything handy.

I arrive, get into the hotel room, and immediately turn on the TV. I might unpack my clothes, and put all the philosophy books on an exposed shelf so that I won't forget them when I pack to go home. Now that I have all the deep things of life sitting around me ready to be immersed in, I can safely snooze. Snoozing takes an unexpectedly central place in my routine, as I am able to snooze when I feel like it, which has to be good and beneficial, since I am responding to my deepest and most authentic urges. But I keep CNN on quietly, in case anything I really ought to know about happens.

I grab a book of philosophy, but there are only 4 hours till the rehearsal, so I really should be honing my knowledge of the repertoire. I don’t feel quite ready to do that, though, so I set the philosophy aside and imagine what it would be like to be studying. Doesn’t seem all that appealing, so maybe a cup of coffee would work the miraculous transformation. There are three sorts of coffee packet. Which should I choose? I could go online to check them out, but I am having a hard time getting connected. Better solve that problem before an important email comes in. I’m not going to shell out $10.95 for one day of Ethernet, but I don’t have an access number for earthlink. My cell phone battery is dead, so it will be an hour or two till I can call to get one.

This is when I unpack everything, since it is essential that I find the charger for the cell phone. It turns out to be loose in the car, but at least I got unpacked, and can now organize things in a more logical, productive, way.

After rehearsal I completely deserve a glass of wine and a Law and Order. Then, the day before returning, I sort all the papers I never looked at, to make sure I can deal with them when I get home. When I do get home, since they are so well organized, I don’t need to actually deal with them, since they are all under control. I have gained some insight as I go through the mail though. The heating bill is, after all, more urgent than the difference between the two books of Wittgenstein. For the moment. But I can take him with me next time.

©2004 AJM

Schoenberg. Why?

It seems paradoxical that Arnold Schoenberg was simultaneously the originator of the most relentlessly dissonant style of music, 12-note serialism, and also a person with the most comprehensive mastery and knowledge of every permutation of tonal harmony.

I admire Schoenberg, take every chance I can to perform his music, and love doing so. I am in no way an opponent of his music. But that does not prevent my ears from understanding how Schoenberg’s music is baffling and hateful to most lovers of classical music. Not all; but his admirers are a distinct minority.

For such perceived hostility in artworks to endure for 100 years is a prodigious achievement. Most new music becomes familiar after a while. Sooner or later Stravinsky and Bartok don’t sound so bad; nor do Berio or Ligeti, Berg or Webern. Even Stockhausen has a sort of quaintness, and Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître is positively yummy. But people in general do not get used to Schoenberg. As Philip Larkin put it, writing of Charlie Parker, it sounds crazy when it is new, and then after you get used to it, it still sounds crazy.

To achieve that, Schoenberg must have hit upon the very taproot of normal musical meaning. The chromatic scale of 12 notes is the universe from which music from Monteverdi through Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, and Schoenberg is drawn. It is a product of nature, derivable entirely from the two intervals of octave and 5th. That is all you need, the ratios 1:2 and 2:3, plus a little practical fudging. The glory that is western harmony, (pre-Schoenberg,) involves selecting from these 12; never having all 12 of them in play at the same time. Chords, scales, modes; all these arise from excluding some of the notes for a while. Hence “wrong notes.” Schoenberg’s inspired depth-charge was to require that all possible “wrong notes” be in play all the time. That very quickly shatters any emerging harmony of a tonal or modal type. Why did he do this? It seems odd, perverse, especially considering his huge harmonic skill, as demonstrated in Verklärte Nacht, Gurrelieder, etc.

The standard explanation is historical determinism: - the argument that musical style inescapably evolves through time, and tonal music was “worn out”, not valid any longer.

A moment’s reflection shows that all this is pure nonsense. If tonality doesn’t work anymore, why do musicians and listeners (and even composers) still adore Mozart and Bach? Is Mozart a clear advance on Bach? Why do Wagner’s Music Dramas leave ever-increasing audiences spellbound and emotionally transported? Why are Schubert’s melodies still so perfect? Why does the three-chord trick still win hearts, and the chain of 7ths, effective in Corelli, still make us swoon in Mahler’s 6th?

From the point of view of a composer, however, there are pressures to innovate of quite a different type. It is not because we need to advance the art, but because, on a personal, private level, repeating things we already know everything about is boring. A cook changes the menu, a painter wants to paint new things. We take a walk along a different path. And these impulses are personal; normal needs of any individual. A creative artist is an explorer, and you cannot explore a place you already know too well.

My conjecture is that, although for most of us, tonal music still holds unplumbed mysteries, Schoenberg had, as a result of his unique talent, so internalized and codified virtually every procedure in tonal harmony that it was all, for him, cliché. For him! But he was convinced that his private diagnosis of cliché was a cosmic perception about the entire art of music, and its state in history. Not all that surprising perhaps, mixing in Vienna with Mahler, Zemlinsky, Strauss, at the assumed epicenter of Art Music. And he was a powerful polemicist, author, and teacher.

Historians and critics jumped on the bandwagon since, whatever proletarian audiences may have thought of the new music, it perfectly meshed with the evolutionary theory of music, and soon the standard doctrines of: - this is the music of the future – composers are ahead of their time – Beethoven was hated at first – listen to it more and you’ll grow to love it – music will die if we do not support living composers - : all these tired old propaganda slogans, clichés every one, started to swirl. I humbly submit that all these slogans are patently untrue. I also believe that Schoenberg was a composer of genius.

©2004 AJM

The Value of Valuable Values

What a slippery and sneaky notion! Values are valuable, and we surely value them, else we would not call them values. Things of value that we value must be good, else why would we value them so highly? So a person who shares our values, as a matter of tautology, agrees with us about all those things that are, as the founding fathers put it, self-evident in their goodness, desirability, and moral dependability. Moreover, if people share our values, that means that the things we agree about must perforce be good and valuable.

But why are they ‘values’ rather than conventions, or laws, or customs, or traditional ways of doing things, or cultural norms? I’ll admit that all of these alternatives sound emotionally neutral and unappealing – boring - beside the enfolding and uplifting comfort of values. But that is a fraud. Just calling them values does not make them good, desirable or benevolent. The thing that makes them ‘values’ is that they are not offered up for criticism, not put into the arena of ideas; they are a matter of emotional faith, often quite belligerent. And faith is not as innocuous as those who praise it suppose.

There are many people who hold to their faith, and believe it comes from the Church, and thus from Jesus Christ, and thus from God himself. But often there is not much examination to see if there is actually any support for the details of their faith either in scripture, or in revelation, or in the theological history and development of the church. Nor is there any rigor among many of those who claim scriptural authority. (I shall comment on the damage done by sacred texts another time.) It’s an overused point, I know, but the Bible does recommend the stoning of women and selling them into slavery under certain circumstances, so if Christians choose not to do that, then the door is open, and the choices they make between the scripture they obey and the scripture they ignore is something they must take personal responsibility for. You cannot hide behind scripture as a matter of selective convenience, then, when convenient, say you have no choice and are compelled to do what scripture tells you. Not if you choose not to stone adulterers.

I’ll take responsibility for my own values. I do think it is important to raise children safely and with love, to care for our families, to obey the law and be kind, honest, ethical and generous. I do not consider it a valuable value to be homophobic, to execute people as a state enterprise, to enrich the rich at the expense of the poor and to assure the rich that this is a gift from God, to use sophistry to impose an inviolable division between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’, (All ‘pro-choice’ people are pro-life too) to be racist, sexist, gun-toting and contemptuous of animals. Yet all these attributes can hide under the protection of un-spelled-out ‘values,’ protected, if push comes to shove, by selective reference to the two sacred texts: the Bible and the Constitution. Best not to mention the Koran, the Upanishads, the Vedas. Maybe we’ll kind of turn a blind eye to the Book of Mormon too.

So what does it mean when Ralph Reed says people vote for someone because he “shares their values?” It means that they vote for him because they think he holds the same good and Godly beliefs that they do. Exactly what those values are, it is best not to ask, in case you find out that they are not good, or Godly, or wise, or even that he does not in fact share them. It means you can rest assured that your attitudes will not come up for scrutiny, whether your attitudes are generated by anger, or are those of a saint, a wise man, a wise woman, a person of true spiritual depth, or, more probably, an uncomfortable mixture of both.
©2004 AJM

The Land of First Impressions

Buying groceries at Meijers.

Having come back to the city for a visit, I notice a form of heraldry in the way people present themselves; how they dress, behave, avoid direct eye contact, go about their business. In my small town in Vermont, everybody knows most of the people they meet on any given day, and most of us know quite a lot about each other too. So when we meet, it doesn’t matter much how we dress, unless it is an occasion that calls for some particular manner of dressing. We always have an archive of knowledge within which we can set each other. So I can be grumpy or peppy or taciturn, without fearing that anyone will think that that has anything central to do with the real me. The real me is more varied and complex, and has been seen, in varying aspects, by people over time.

When I worked in this city, I worked with a small, constant group of people, and so a similar accumulated history was built up around each of them. But now I am just visiting, and most days, as I go shopping, walking, doing my general chores, the people I encounter in stores and on the streets are people I have no recollection of having ever seen before. Indeed in most cases I probably never have seen them before, and since I do not plan to stay long, I expect I shall never see them again.

And so the social intercourse, trivial and functional, is conducted entirely on the basis of first impressions. I can tell who the check-out clerk is by the uniform and where they stand. The fellow purchasers treat me, as I treat them, partly as a stereotype, and partly according to these first impressions, broadcast by the heraldry I speak of. They don't seem to pay any attention to me, but I have no doubt they scan and assess me to the same degree that I monitor them. There are ugly fat people, dress-for-success young women, middle-aged men whom I completely ignore. People who look poor, and people who look bored. Pre-occupied business people and people with a certain hauteur. And, of course, the not yet self-conscious little children, some charming, some pestilant, with their attached adults trying to keep them within the rules and trying to mask the fact that they are doing so.

And all of us are aware of the artificiality of this general anonymity. You can see that from the extreme glee people adopt when they do, unexpectedly, encounter someone they know. The greeting is as if something quite astonishing had happened - almost as if meeting someone socially whom you had not seen in years. It seems to call for more intensity of greeting than a mere acknowledgment of the familiar, such as happens at home as you pass a family member in the hall.

And perhaps this vigor of greeting is to undo the heraldry. To say to the ‘real’ person “Don’t pay attention to my exhausted appearance, or my embarrassingly expensive neatly pressed trousers, or the monstrous wrist watch” All these now irrelevant messages can be cancelled out by a display of genuine, slightly overdone, particular pleasure in the meeting.

And this serves to emphasize how clearly, once the familiarity has closed again, the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the way of holding yourself, the air of purpose and competence and organization, is a necessary act, put on to impress, or merely keep at bay, an unpredictable flow of human beings you really have no dealings with, except for a civilized non-aggression pact. Passing each other safely and unharmed is all that is needed. But that is a lot, and it is very much needed. Unless of course anyone makes such a strong and particular impression that you go out of your way to collect further impressions. Corroborating evidence. A relationship, perhaps. And that, of course, is also one of the possibilities being advertised.
© 2004 AJM

Down with Bad Language.

Jacques Derrida died recently.

Never been very keen on academic obscurity myself. Two words I would like not to see any more are “heuristic” and “hermeneutics”, simply because every time I come across them I look them up, but, for the life of me, I can never remember what they mean from one occasion to the next. [ I'll grant a provisional pass to "hieratic". Maybe I suffer from h-word deficit.] Have you ever heard any of those words in conversation? If people like Bertrand Russell can be clear in what they are saying, I think the rest of us should pay attention to that virtue as well. Clarity is hard, but worth striving for, even if ambiguity is an inescapable companion. With many impenetrable writers I can't figure out whether they are trying to focus in on particular details of complex things, or point out that simple things are more complex than you thought.

The talisman of the 20C academic: obfuscation = profundity.
So here is my little light-hearted parody:

In Memoriam – Jacques Derrida.

Clarity? Derrida gets an F in that.

But of course, an "F" is both a symbol and a judgment, and cannot be understood fully outside the social context of the interpersonal, yet unstated, modification of relationships that are produced by our inter-generational memories and experiences of the significance of receiving (or bestowing) an F in earlier stages of life, in various different contexts, most of them entered into under compulsion, and all deeply judgmental, thereby intrinsically threatening the fragile sense of self; this situation (or "context"), of course, giving further power to the pressure to re-interpret ourselves as purely social beings; i.e. defined solely by being compared to others in our peer group in terms of common attributes, goals, characteristics and accomplishments, which inevitably renders unique individuality worthless in the process of self-assessment, as it lies outside the de facto normative range of characteristics. We are thus rendered without significant individual existence, and distrust our own authentic perceptions of both the world outside and the world of our inner conscious experience. Thus the mere presence of the written symbol "F" in a discourse inevitably brings in the culturally transmitted continuity of shame that has, throughout civilization, been intended as a motivator in the other, but only through the psychological failure of the F-inflicting self to recall the experience of shame, and thereby empathize with the experience of the F-receiving “self”, thus also failing to make a more insightful prediction of the actual existential outcome of the quasi-solipsistic encounter with the subjective experience of being the recipient of an "F". That effect will be one of psychological injury, weakening the capabilities for action, either physical or intellectual, initially within the internalized conceptual framework current at the time of the assault, and thus by extension within any ensuing discourse, much as physical injury does.

Or, to put it another way: Getting an F sucks.
©2004 AJM

Less Light on Relativity please.

I was recently reading a book about Einstein's Special and General theories of relativity - which was rather good I may say. One of the conclusions I came to after reading it was that in the attempt to explain relativity, (setting aside the question of whether it is right or not) physicists create a problem in the minds of laymen by always defining c as 'the speed of light', when in fact there is nothing very special about light, except its familiarity. I am sure it does not mislead the professionals, but, for laypersons, it seems to give light some special place in the order of things - to privilege it in some way, which is really quite wrong. Gravity too is supposed to travel at c. All electro-magnetic waves; indeed all information is limited by c (much of it travels much more slowly in fact, especially when encountering dense matter). So, in a sense, c is the speed of reality - the speed with which existence makes itself known. There are, perhaps, two sorts of thing; matter - thingy things, that essentially stay put, and move about a little bit, but not very much compared with c, and also things like photons and neutrinos and gravitons which can only exist by moving at c.

Static things and fleeting things.

Or to put it another way, as if in answer to some of Kant's antinomies, the universe does in fact come with limits. Things may hypothetically be forever subdivided, and may be smaller and smaller, but in reality nothing can be smaller than the Planck length. The Planck length is, in effect, the reality of the colloquial "infinitely small". Similarly movement comes up against c, which is, in effect, the real form that "infinitely fast" takes. The time dilation effect of relativity (slowing down time on a ‘ship’ that moves closer and closer to c, relative to me) certainly makes something solid moving at c relative to me seem to behave in the way that you would expect something traveling infinitely fast in classical mechanics to behave.

There is nothing special about light, or its speed. Light just happens to be one of those things that is immediately distributed, as near as dammit, instantaneously, while the shining object sits motionless in the middle of the room.
To me, thinking of it that way made it seem somewhat less implausible.

By the way, if gravity is transmitted by gravitons, how do gravitons escape from black holes? And if they do not, how does a black hole exert its gravitational field? Whether or not it is gravitons, how does gravity escape from black holes?
© 2004 AJM

Mahler's stick in the sticks.

Mahler in the Wild

I saw that a fairly small orchestra, not in a big city, was going to perform the Mahler Second Symphony – The Resurrection. So I asked to go to rehearsals and offered to hang around as a cover. Hey, if this guy couldn’t cut it, I’d be ready!

So I went down to the rehearsal, and the conductor was really strange. He knew the score well enough, and was conducting from memory. But, as usual, this meant he was not so much rehearsing the orchestra, as practicing conducting it. He’d do huge stretches, never correcting near collapses, then eventually stop and ask the second harp to play a little louder 132 measures ago, and tell anecdotes to the chorus about where Mahler liked to have them stand. The only thing he talked to the orchestra about was ensemble; playing together. He got quite angry about poor ensemble and, in every case, it was HIS FAULT.

He had the most bizarre technique - a variant of the upside-down choral style. For the ictus at a big climax, instead of arms in the air, he would drop his arms to his waist, pull his elbows behind his back, and then with clenched fists, violently punch the stomach of a large, imaginary stuffed Panda right in front of him. Since this gesture was so low down, it was totally invisible to 80% of the orchestra. He didn’t give upbeats in tempo either. How the cellos knew how to come in at the beginning I have no idea. Critical mass, I suppose. For delicate entries in the strings, he would raise a hand beatifically above them, smile, and freeze until they started playing on their own. No baton. All poetic shaping.

I went to a bit of the dress rehearsal, but had to leave early, certain that there was no way they would get to the end. I returned to the concert and sat in the front row, with a mixture of anxiety and glee. An interminable speech about sponsors and donors, ending with the mantra “This is YOUR orchestra. Please support it.” served instead of an overture to generate enough time before the big enchilada for latecomers to get to their seats. It was sold out.

Maestro came out in a sort of Thai satin shirt. No stick. Never looked at the score.

By God, it was a triumph! Rough, but a triumph. Total effortless recall, effortlessly relaxed; he conducted the whole thing with joy and sweep, which was highly infectious. His technical problems ensured that the orchestra got out of sync at all the usual places (like the coda of the first movement, and of course, the off-stage band bits) and there were plenty of split brass notes, but he had that supreme virtue: he made it look easy and fun. I really admire the orchestra for coping so well. The concert was on a Saturday. The first rehearsal had been the previous Thursday evening.

I still don’t quite understand it. Standing Os of course. Real enthusiasm. I didn’t have a cynical platelet left swimming in my veins. I’d be scared all over again, though, if I see he plans to do Stravinsky’s Symphony in three movements!

©2004 AJM

Ambivalence anyone?

Ambivalence.
I am really ambivalent about it.

It's alarming to contemplate the role of ambivalence in messing up relationships, jobs, political elections, (especially if you are a democratic candidate) - everything in life. You know, the old "can't commit" / "can't escape" / "putting up with bad for fear of worse" / "was that the worst mistake of my life?" stuff. It leads all the way to "is life worth living?" / "it really is all my fault, isn't it?" / "did I deserve that?" "maybe I should just scream at them" garbage.

Is decision-making possible for an ambivalent mind? Not sure. It makes bold mistakes less likely. But how can you tell whether enough evidence is in to make an informed choice? How reliable is your gut? Should you trust your gut more than your mind? What does your gut tell you about that? Intellectually, it's a close call.

Seriously though, folks: Is ambivalence a matter of seeing real dilemmas, or a cramping habit of wearing 'dilemma' glasses all the time? Got me to thinking of this gnawingly bad strategy in a humorous light. So how about a few 'ambivalence' aphorisms?

==================================

Are you ambivalent?
.....Not sure? Can't decide?
.....You might not be!

Ambivalence: the perceptive way to destroy your life.
Resist temptation and miss all the fun.
Avoid mistakes and avoid all wisdom.
That which is fool-proof is also genius-proof.
Be Open-Minded! See the Bad Side of Everything.
Stools come in pairs. Fall between them all.
There are two sides to every question, and I take all three.

Embrace Ambivalence and escape the Agony of Choice.
Choose! But remember:
.....There are good reasons for both sides
.....So everything you do is a mistake.
Refuse to choose! Miss out on everything!

Ambivalence is the freedom to feel guilty about everything.
It therefore provides a good reason for every procrastination.
Can't commit? Don't! Just say you do and feel guilty about lying.

======================================

Ambivalence may be uncomfortable,
but certainty is always wrong, especially when you are really really really sure.

Perhaps the problems associated with ambivalence come from trying to escape it. Or do they?

If ambivalence makes you feel guilty about everything, maybe religion tries to help assuage this by choosing for you - telling you what to feel guilty about, and what you can and must do that is right and guilt-free. It doesn't work though, as you feel guilty about not doing the guilt-free things enough. On the other hand, it works in a sneaky way by making the guilty things so much more fun.

Why do people find certainty attractive, desirable, or appealing? Maybe because it removes, forbids, the need for thought. It relieves us of the burden of being alive. Why do those religious hucksters smile so much? Because they are happy to have escaped the messiness of life. I saw a preacher on TV this morning who said, in essence, that when life is terrific, that is what God wants for you. When life is shitty, that is what God wants for you too, so that you can learn and have even more terrific life soon. Boy, that's handy. Everything is great - even when it is shitty. And it all turns out in the end to be for my own personal benefit. Such a relief, like George Bush's confidence.
(Hold on! Isn't "terrific" derived from the word "terror?" Isn't this positive-attitude thing just seeing the whole world as part of my personal optimistic wish-world? That seems awfully narcissistic. Nice TV program, but I feel cheated.)

On the other hand, maybe (not sure) they have escaped paralytic ambivalence, and thus can do stuff - like social work, watching out for others, and comforting the afflicted; actually doing it while I just agonize over whether I should. Hmm. There's not much to be said for ambivalence really, so which way out, other than dogmatism and stubbornness, should I choose?

Make plans and ignore them?
Make plans and change them?
Have no plans but act with passionate lack of direction?
Trust to luck, constantly complaining about being unlucky?
Change my mind all the time, especially when asked to repeat an opinion I just expressed really clearly?
Always dislike the status quo?
Regret every change anybody just made?
Maybe these are all bad. How can I tell?

An opening greeting, though not very merry.

I have no agenda, but I begin at a time when our civilization is being challenged. That sounds like the sort of hysterical thing everyone is saying these days, but I mean something quite specific by it; nothing hyperbolic.

Civilization depends on the powers of language, such as discussion, including the consideration of actions that may not yet have happened, sharing our expectations and fears, pooling our partial wisdoms, seeking to avoid dangers before they actually occur.

In passionate pre-civilization, it was a fight to the death: competing tribes and warriors, armies fighting for supremacy, wild beasts fighting to the death, Darwinian struggles to survive. But, as Popper puts it, with civilization we "let our ideas die in our stead". By parliamentary democracy we put forth our ideas, preferences, and requests, even our most deeply cherished beliefs, and let the IDEAS compete. If our own beloved idea is defeated by debate and election, we accept the loss of power, but walk away unscathed, with no physical injury, and all our faculties intact to consider how our opponents may have been right in ways we had previously not understood, and how we may change and enhance our own understanding of the world, so as to be able to present stronger, more robust ideas, next time the democratic question is asked.

This was a great advance: no longer defining who is right by seeing who is left after a slaughter, but acknowledging, from the beginning, that WE MAY BE WRONG, choosing life, and increased, unexpected, wisdom, rather than 'death with honor.' Certainty is no virtue. It is the nectar of evil.

With the full flowering of the Bush administration, the USA is now under the control of people for whom such ideas are either unknown, forgotten, or despised. They only accept, as a sign of greatness, wisdom, and moral courage, complete refusal to change one's mind. Refusal to learn. Refusal to explore the divergence between reality and our naive ideas. Far greater than the danger from any particular stupid decision or ignorant pronouncement or dishonest act, is the danger of the belief that it is better to let our people die than to back down in an argument we have lost, or even simply to admit changing our minds.

Bush announces, as he did in Canada yesterday, that he stands firm and is resolute and has never made any wrong decisions. He believes this is a sign of his greatness. It is not. Meanwhile, Iraqis and American Troops and others are dying by the thousands - sacrificial victims on the altar of Bush's "unwavering faith."