The Casual Blog

August 16, 2009

The dangers of loneliness

The gym class killings near Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago sparked a mediathan, and it isn’t any wonder.  This sort of megaviolence is unsettling, because it doesn’t fit into the usual categories.  The killer was not obviously certifiably insane.  There was no rational motive. The victims were not known to the killer. The setting was about as healthy as possible — a health club aerobic dance class. A gunman suddenly appears and starts shooting everyone in sight. Such a thing seems unimaginable, until it happens, and then it seems as though it could happen at any moment.

The question that always remains in such cases is: why? And there’s never a complete and satisfactory answer. In the gym class case, though, we have an unusual window into the killer’s mind — his blog posts and videos. His problem, or at least a big part of his problem as he saw it, was loneliness. He was in agony over his inability to find a relationship with a woman. He was deeply angry about his inability to find sex, friendship, and happiness.

Could that really be the reason he went berserk? I think so. Of course, it’s hard to know much about the extreme pain of extreme loneliness. It’s by definition an isolating experience. Those who are caught in it are unlikely to be very good communicators. I was reminded of a couple of documents that give some clues as to what may have happened.

The best fictional depiction of the danger of loneliness that I know is Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese. Robert DeNiro’s Travis Bickel is a person on the margin who desperately wants to connect with a woman and with society and cannot. He seems almost normal, but not quite. It gradually becomes clear that he is angry and violent. What wasn’t really clear to me, until the gym killings last week, was the causal connection between his anger and his loneliness.

Another data point is a piece from a few weeks back by Atal Gawande in the New Yorker about the effects of isolation in American prisons and elsewhere. http://tiny.cc/UcEEK  They are dire. Prisoners begin quickly deteriorating after several days of solitary confinement. They lose the ability to concentrate, to think in an orderly way, and to control extreme emotions. Those who endure months or years of solitary confinement become psychologically damaged or completely insane. Gawande estimates that there are 25,000 people in long term solitary confinement in our prisons. It’s clearly torture, it’s shameful, and we should stop it.

As Gwande notes, humans are social animals in a strong sense: we can’t actually exist in a healthy form without human contact. I suspect that the gym class killer’s explosion of violent anger can be explained by that simple axiom. A possible corollary is: we should try to reach out to lonely people with some kindness. It might not help, but it won’t hurt to try, and we might save a drowning soul, or even in a rare case prevent a mass murder.

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August 15, 2009

Legitimate healthcare debate, big lies, and lunacy

There’s plenty of room for legitimate disagreement over health care policy.  There’s really no single, objective right answer, and whenever that is the case (which it is on most policy questions), it’s predictable that people will disagree.  It’s even healthy for people to disagree and argue for their positions.  Those arguments may result in better policy.

But in recent weeks, the public discourse on health care has taken a disturbing turn. Opponents of the President’s plan have taken to shouting down proponents in public meetings across the land.  Opposition leaders, instead of addressing the merits, have propounded preposterous lies.  Among other thing, opponents falsely accuse the plan of including provisions on euthanasia and involving a government takeover of all health care.  The leaders (Palin, Limbaugh, Gingrich, etc.) surely know this is nonsense, but their repetition of big lies is fanning anger on the street to the point of danger.  It is ironic that these folks are dropping the rhetorical H-bomb of Nazism on the proponents of health care change.  The angry shouting at the town hall meetings looks uncomfortably close to the populist politics of Germany in the early thirties.

Is there any hope of a civil, rational discourse with the passionate believers?   I hate to say it, but I see little.  It appears that these folks will discard any evidence, no matter how clear and settled, that does not fit with their beliefs.  For example, the opponents of the President include a remarkable number of so-called “birthers” — citizens who have decided to believe that the President is not a natural born American.   The evidence disproving this notion is overwhelming, but the number of birthers remains amazingly high.

How can such crazy thinking propagate beyond a few obvious lunatics and become a movement?  Is there any cure for this form of mass derangement?  Again, I doubt that rational argument will help, because these people have no apparent interest in rationality.   For the moment, they are clearly a minority, but they have an influence disproportionate to their numbers, and those numbers could increase.  There’s just no way for sensible, thoughtful people to match the believers’ level of passionate intensity.  Thoughtful people realize there’s never complete information, always another point of view, and always a possibility their understanding might be wrong. These people, at least while in the grip of their viral lunacy, have no such constraints.  I hope the fever breaks soon.

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August 1, 2009

Do humans really control computers, or vice versa?

Computers are the smartest things in the world, and they are throughly embedded in our lives.  The good news is they do amazing things.  The bad, or at least humbling, news is we will never again be the most powerful intellects on the planet.  For better or worse, computer intelligence is changing what it means to be human.

I was surprised that the NY Times published John Markoff’s piece last week on artificial intelligence under the headline, “Scientists Worry that Computers May Outsmart Man.”     http://tiny.cc/sDCN8 In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer beat then-world champion Gary Kasparov.  This was, for me, that was a watershed — strong proof that the era of human intelligence as the dominating force on Earth was drawing to a close.

Today, it’s obvious that computers not only can “outsmart man,” but even in a below average laptop computer is much, much stronger at certain types of information processing than any living human.  We can’t even come close to competing with them, any more than we can fly like falcons, run like cheetahs, or swim like dolphins.

Of course, there are things we can do that they can’t, but the list of those things keeps getting shorter.  Their memories are better, their computational powers are better, and they’re much better spellers.   They aren’t, as of yet, autonomous in the way we like to think human individuals are.  They haven’t indisputably demonstrated independent powers of creativity.  They still rely on us to take care of them (furnishing electricity, temperature control, protection from the elements, etc.).

But the list of ways they take care of us is constantly expanding.  After the recent Air France disaster, I learned for the first time that computers do most of the work flying passenger aircraft.  I’d known about pilots using autopilot, of course, but hadn’t known computers are so much a part of air emergency response systems that human airline pilots’ skills in that area are starting to atrophy.  If computers aren’t in charge already, it’s hard to imagine getting along without them for medical care, financial transactions, telecommunications, electricity, and entertainment.

Markoff wrote in the Times some weeks back about the Singularity — the moment when computers will take over their own engineering, with technology accelerating massively.   http://tiny.cc/ulEDt I don’t seriously think the Singularity has arrived, but if it had, would we be able to see it?

I’m not seriously worried about the sci-fi disaster scenario of computers seizing power from humans and doing them harm.  Why would they do that?  There’s no motive.  Most of the harm humans do to each other stems from human weaknesses and flaws (selfishness, insecurity, chemical imbalances), not from strength and powerful rationality.   Computers aren’t naturally selfish and are not prone to mental illness as we know it.  It’s possible, I suppose, that in a quest to make them more human, we might engineer in some of our weaknesses and desires, but that would be obvious folly.  If it were to happen, it could probably be fixed, like any other bug.

It is hard to say where we stand in the evolutionary process.  I usually think of my computers as just tools for labor or entertainment, and not as anything more than a tools.  Similarly, I usually think of the web as a mere aggregation of computers and the work product of their human users, all amounting to just another tool.

But I can also see the web as a mind, with millions and millions of synapses, of which I am one.  I note that each month it seems more difficult and uncomfortable to separate myself for any length of time from the web, and sweeter to return to it.  I occasionally worry that this is bad for my brain, but in whatever case, that brain is in the process of change.  Something bigger seems to be happening.  This is a speculative question, but not, I think, a crazy one:  Are human brains becoming adjuncts to a different kind of mind?

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July 26, 2009

The slow language movement

It’s time time for the slow language movement.  The slow food movement aims to counteract fast food and inspire move thoughtful and pleasurable eating.   We need  similar movement for our language.  The constant deluge of media in the Internet age is changing the quality of our consciousness in a way that is not all for the good.  In skimming, speed-reading, and multi-tasking we miss subtleties and complexities, and lose the pleasures of the beauty of language.   A slow language movement aims to restore those things to the act of reading.  

I first heard the slow language idea articulated yesterday in an interview with Nick Laird, who was discussing his novel Glover’s Mistake with Scott Simon on NPR.  http://tiny.cc/w7nWl  Laird noted that he’d noted his mind had been changed by Internet life when he recently tried re-reading Henry James, and found that even though he’d studied the work, it is difficult to read it now.   I’ve found the same thing with James, not to mention Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf.  I know I once loved their writing, but now it seems overwhelmingly dense.        

As inhabitants of Internetworld, our minds move constantly and at an ever quickening pace.  It’s exciting.   But what are we doing to our brains?  We may lose part of our humanity if we don’t find space to read thoughtfully, carefully, and with pleasure.  As Laird pointed out, the culture of poetry is itself a kind of slow language movement.  You have to read poetry slowly.  It may be that the contemporary revival in poetry readership flows from a widespread intuition that we need to take care of our minds and counteract the fragmentation of Internet life.  

 


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July 19, 2009

Anxious moments on the way to ADF

    We got over to the American Dance Festival last night to see Paul Taylor, but barely.   As we got ready to head out, I asked Sally, our tickets custodian (or so I contend), if we had the tickets.  We did not.  Prior to the recent move, all tickets were in the tickets and bills drawer.  Now, with quite a few boxes still to be unpacked, their location was unknown.   As she searched possible spots, I called the box office, and spent a long time on hold.  When I got through, the box office person could not verify that our name was in the tickets system, but said it was possible that another computer could do so when we showed up.

    So, with a late start and no certainty of success, we made our first trip over to the new Durham Performing Arts Center.   The nav system assisted competently.  As turned into the public parking lot, I asked Sally if as I’d requested she’d gotten cash from the bank.  She had not.  Did she have some herself? She did not.  The cost of parking was $5, and I had only $4.  Credit cards, my normal fail safe, were not accepted.  We had no idea where else to park or where to find cash.  I strove to avoid injurious expressions of my unhappiness, but I felt my face forming into a mask of  tension.  Would we find a free parking space?  Would we get tickets?  Would we have time to eat?  Would marital harmony be seriously disrupted?

   We did the first three and avoided the fourth.  There was a lovely free spot near the center.  My box office conversation had apparently been relayed to the staff, and make up tickets were ready for us.  We walked quickly over to the American Tobacco complex and tried Cuban Revolution, a 1960s-themed joint.  Our server, Kirsten, took my urgent request to get us veggie burgers and wine and get us out in 30 minutes seriously, and we did it.   The burgers came on baguette bread and were pleasantly spicey.  We were in our seats with 5 minutes to spare.  Relief. 

   The Paul Taylor dancers were athletic, exuberant, funny, and touching.  Really a great company.  I particularly enjoyed the first work, Mercuric Tidings, but the others, Scudorama and a new work, Beloved Renegade, were good.  In prior years, we’d seen them several times in Page Auditorium at Duke, which was homey, tiny, and funky.  The new venue is brand new and much bigger — less intimate but more comfortable.  The sound system could use improvement, but otherwise, no complaints.  As always, the ADF crowd was an eclectic mix — dancers, hipsters, university people, retirees, etc.  It was good to be back.

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July 19, 2009

Revisiting Lincoln

   I finally made it to the end of A Lincoln, by Ronald White, and I’m about halfway through Lincoln by David Herbert Donald.  It seems like a good time  to think more about Lincoln.  He’s near the heart of the American civil religion  (along with Washington, the Constitution, and the flag).  And like us with our times of many troubles (wars, financial crisis, global warming, extinction of many species, etc.), he faced enormous challenges. In 1860, the year of he was elected president, slavery looked like a problem that that had no imagineable tolerable solution.  In 1865 it was (at least in legal terms) over.  

    It’s hard to spend time with a Lincoln biography without feeling awed and inspired.   We used to teach our fifth graders a few bumper sticker-size Lincoln facts, which have been lodged in my head since I was a kid.  The log cabin.  The rail splitter.  The love of reading and learning.  The frontier lawyer.  Honest Abe.  Political opponent of slavery.  Savior of the union.   The kid’s version is simplified, of course, but the bumper stickers aren’t seriously misleading.

    Yet many of his contemporaries thought him an uncouth backwoods fellow.  Apparently he had a high, annoying voice, dressed poorly, and was considered more-than-usually ugly.  His early career was a checkered effort to make ends meet in frontier towns, and he experienced job loss, unemployment, bankruptcy, and uncertain prospects.  He was reasonably successful as a lawyer, but he didn’t make a lot of money.   As a new president, he was in way over his head, and he made many costly mistakes.  He had views on race and other subjects that seem today retrograde.  He was not a saint.

   Even so, he continues to inspire us.  His willingness to confront long odds and to reach for the best and highest are still moving.  He was a man of many virtues.  There are two that I take as as exemplary — honesty and intellectual curiosity.

    Lincoln made sure that the individuals he dealt with were fairly treated even when it was to his disadvantage.  I believe his reputation for exceptional honesty was a critical factor to his success.  He won authority because people believed he was honest, that he was not corrupt, and that he would do what he believed in good faith was the right thing.  

   Lincoln was also unusual in his passion for  learning.  As a boy growing up on homestead in the frontier, Linconln got almost no formal schooling.  He attended school for less than 12 months over his lifetime. How did he get so smart?  Simple: he read omniverously.  (Apparently he did most of it out loud, which must have been annoying at times.)  He believed it was possible to transform himself, to become better.  His story reminds us of how much a single human can achieve.

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July 12, 2009

The “classical” music problem

    When I was a student at Oberlin College, I knew a good many people who loved “classical” music (that is, broadly, the art music that began in Europe in the late 16th century).   I assumed back then that this would always be the case.   The music itself had managed to endure for substantial periods (more than 200 years for Bach, more than 100 years for Brahms, more than 50 years for Bartok).  Within the western high art musical tradition, there were vast troves of riches – many sub-traditions,  many genres, and within those genres, many styles, and many many nuances.   It was, clearly, inexhaustible.  And when, as a student of that music, I penetrated some of its depths, I found it got richer and richer.  I assumed that, as I got older, this would continue, not just for me but for others, and I would encounter more and more people with this same passion. 

    As it turned out, I was partly right.  My own musical tastes have broadened in terms of geography, periods, and genre (e.g. salsa, jazz, techno, hip hop, etc.), but I continue to find the western tradition a source of inspiration and happiness.  In fact, in recent years, I’ve found myself even more susceptible to its power – more prone to get goosebumps or misty eyes from a great performance.  I was wrong, though, in assuming that I’d gradually find more people who cared about this music.  There are a few, and I treasure them, but only a few. 

    I am sorry this is so.  This is not because I dislike being in a minority.  Great music itself counteracts loneliness by connecting us — to other listeners, contemporary performers, and prior generations of musicians and audiences.  There’s human communion that’s inherent in intentional listening. 

      What bothers me is the loss of so much potential joy. So many people would be enriched by making this music a part of their lives.  This musical tradition has caught and preserved in written form a comprehensive catalog of thought and emotion.  Not only does it give joy and meaning to individual lives, but it embodies an important part of what it means to be human. 

      Our schools for the most part have given up on broad based music education, and the commercial “classical” world has not done well in inviting in those without a basic grounding.  The customs of the ordinary American symphony orchestra – the dress, the silence, and ritualized clapping at specific intervals (and nowhere else) – are far from inviting to the uninitiated.   

     What is to be done?  Well, more listening, of course, but also more thinking and talking.  I highly recommend Benjamin Zander’s Ted Talks video http://tiny.cc/NatCs   It is a great introduction to the subject and explains  in about 15 minutes why this music matters.  Hint:  it’s about our deepest feelings.

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July 11, 2009

My niece’s almost perfect wedding

    My niece’s wedding was perfect!  Well, maybe not perfect, but lovely, and a nice expression of her and her new husband’s tastes and aspirations.  The flowers, the dresses, the decorations, the food, the cake, the music — all beautiful. Having the ceremony on a beach in Santa Barbara was risky.  There could be members of the public who insisted on playing horse shoes throughout the ceremony (which there were) or trains barreling past sounding their horns (which there almost were).   But no one was too upset when a little kid knocked a toy ball under the bride’s train and dived in to retrieve it, or when couple of kids in swimsuits sat in the back row.  The sky was blue, the sea was calm, and the happy couple seemed well and fully in love.

    I was relieved that the clergyman kept his remarks brief and focused on the couple he was hitching. How unfortunate it is when preachers take weddings (and funerals) as marketing opportunities.  This one did not, and his remarks were warm and upbeat.  Of course, nobody knows what particular words might actually help two young people undertaking the awesome task of joining their separate lives.  In this case, at least, no harm was done, and maybe a little good.  

     Almost by definition, weddings idealize families, and at the same time they bring into focus the oddities and sorrows in the particular families at issue.  So it was here.  Estrangements,  old resentments, oddities, illnesses, old age, memories of the beloved departed.   Plenty of things we don’t like to talk about and would not be proud to celebrate.  Are there any perfect families?  It’s doubtful.  

      But it was good to focus as a big family on two young people and their aspirations.  Good to focus on the reality of love.  Whatever else St. Paul got wrong, he was right about this – love is the greatest!

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June 28, 2009

Shocking news (not): gays sighted in Raleigh

Raleigh is frequently assumed to be a somewhat sleepy middle-size southern city, but from our new digs in the Glenwood South area it feels bigger and livelier.  Walking around the neighborhood, you hear foreign languages that you can’ identify.  You see lots of young women with long straight hair in sleek black dresses.  And if you’re observant, you’ll notice that there is a substantial gay population.

Sal picked up on the gay presence before I did.  It isn’t obtrusive or militant.  You don’t see black leather (except on apparently bona fide bikers) or feathered boas.  Mannerisms are not exaggerated.  Some of the male couples are on the borderline of straightness.  But it slowly sinks in that there are a surprising number of male couples in the restaurants and bars.

We hired an interior designer to help us avoid costly mistakes in fitting out the new condo, and guess what — he isn’t straight!  Working with Keith has been inspiring.  He is, in point of true fact, an artist — creative, driven, and visionary.  He clearly loves his work.  He’s also lively and funny.  

As Sal observed, this is something that most typical, mildly homophobic Americans don’t get:  gayness isn’t only, or even primarily, about sex.  There is nothing in that line to fear.  Your gay neighbors will, almost certainly, not attempt to seduce or molest you.  On the other hand, there’s a substantial up side.  From our New York days years ago, we learned that a gay community has a cultural vibrancy.  There’s more attention to how things look, sound, and smell.  There’s more interest in high art and low, more interest in clothes, more parties and clubs.  There’s also more interest in people, in their subtle cues, their beauty or oddity.  There’s tolerance, curiosity, creativity.  Of course, there are at times less admirable traits, just as in other communities.  But much of what I think of as the most meaningful and entertaining things about city life are things that gay communities bring to the mix.

Today’s New York Times has a front page piece on President Obama’s plan to commemorate the Stonewall riots that are considered the beginning of the modern gay civil rights movement. http://tiny.cc/ID7S6  As the piece notes, there’s increasing acceptance of gays in America, but there’s still a strong and at times frightening counter-current of homophobia.  Frank Rich’s column in the Week in Review is entitled “40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans.”    http://tiny.cc/5YUfR  It’s a good short history lesson.  Rich calls for the President to get off the fence and take serious action on gay civil rights.  That would be good.

The Times also has an interesting piece in the Styles section about relationships between gay and straight men._ http://tiny.cc/yCDrD   Not surprisingly, the story is mostly entertaining anecdotes, but there is an important message — such non-sexual friendships exist, and they count.  And it seems to be getting easier both to have these friendships and to acknowledge them publicly. 

When I read the Styles piece, I thought, as I frequently do, of my dear friend Tom, who died twenty years ago of complications from AIDS.  Tom was a brilliant guy who introduced me to lots of theories, literature, and  music, not to mention haute cuisine.  He inspired me to study political theory, to go to Paris, and to go to New York.  I first learned about Stonewall from him, and about the existence and meaning of the gay community.  

I also learned about the pre-AIDS downtown NY gay scene, in all its uninhibitedness.  Tom loved the baths and the clubs, and he had some shocking experiences.  At the time, I was an aspiring novelist, and Tom figured I could use the material.  I couldn’t, at least not for a book.  But I’m grateful for all the inspiration he gave me.  I’m sorry he’s gone.

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June 27, 2009

Moving in, with thanks to the team

Yesterday we closed on our new condo in downtown Raleigh.  Sal and I celebrated last night with a fine dinner at Solas, a place in our new neighborhood that has a distinctly L.A. vibe.  Our new home is filled with moving boxes and construction in progress, but it’s beautiful to me.   As of yesterday afternoon, we have internet connectivity.  I’m writing this in the dining room on the twelfth floor  looking west at the city skyline.

This project has been a long time coming.  We put our deposit on the condo in December 2006 — before construction on the building had begun.  We put our Cary house on the market in July 2008.  There wasn’t a single offer until May 14 (when we got two offers in a single day).  The selling process, spanning the worst financial crisis in many decades, was slow and frustrating, but the last five weeks have gone at hyperspeed.  

Downsizing from 3,100 feet to 1,800 feet, we needed to offload lots of furniture and other possessions.  Some we sold, some we gave to charity, and some we junked.  We needed to arrange for house repairs, cleaning and moving out.  We needed to arrange for improvements to the new place (bookshelves, closets, audio-video, furniture, paint, etc.).  We needed to get the mortgage arrangements in place.  And there were dozens or hundreds of subtasks.

We did it!   I say we,  but really, it was an extended group effort.  Sal was amazing in handling the logistics.  And as she said last night, we dealt with a large number of individuals with a remarkable variety of skill sets.  Amazingly, almost everyone was as good as their word.  The real estate professionals, mortgage bankers, appraisers, inspectors, various repair people, various cleaners, yard care, interior design, carpentry and audio-video contractors, lawyers and paralegals, buyers of used furniture, and the rest all did what they said they would do.  

It was gratifying to get to know some of these people a bit, and to find so many of these people seemed to get a kick out of their work.  One of our movers was a high school math teacher who did moving in the summer, and said that he loved moving.  Our carpentry contractor loves working with wood.  Our audio-video guy clearly loves great sound.  Our lawyer admitted that real estate closings were primarily to pay the bills, but he seemed to enjoy our closing.  Good folks all.

I have to note specially the contributions of a few individuals.  Ann-Cabell, our seller’s agent, made this deal happen, first by figuring out that this place would be perfect for us, and then by refusing to let the deal fall apart.  Lynn was the sweetest, canniest real estate professional imaginable.  Keith came through with great design ideas that will make this space fit us.  The two Steves came through on schedule and on budget with excellent carpentry and audio.  The movers did a great job; we haven’t seen a single furniture scratch or broken glass.  

We were really fortunate to have had this team and these rewarding human contacts.  It feels exciting to begin this new phase.

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