I think the idea is fairly simple: we prefer a painted picture to a blank sheet of paper. When in the mood for music, we prefer a musical composition to silence. And so on. So that the divine has limited itself and severely diluted itself into the components of this universe because "something" is more interesting than "nothing." The limitation is critical so that the divine can explore its self without being bored - without always knowing what's around the next bend.
What are the implications for regular life? Regular life is full of suffering and instability. Why not create a perfectly stable situation? Actually an omniscient God would easily impose stability on an unstable system. But that would ruin the game. It would be like taking back your last move in chess after you see that it puts you in a rather dangerous check. So that we are fighting a continual battle against instability as a condition to staying lost (i.e. not realizing that we are the divine). We have limitations precisely because of this (and possibly, because if our thoughts could instantly produce results, we would inadvertedly (or purposely) introduce horrific instability: quick, try not to think of a nuclear holocaust. Try not to think of your leg being chopped off. You see?). The fight against entropy is a precondition to the continuance of the game, and it is our challenge to figure out how to produce and maintain stability in the midst of all the diversity, social and natural, which make the painting colorful and the musical composition beautifully interesting.
How do we find what elements favor stability? It's quite simple: food, clothing, shelter, physical and mental health, peace, love, family, safety, and creativity. These, across the board, are what people desire. Relativism exits only in the manifestations - for instance, most societies have some sort of private property or private possessions system, and when a thief violates those standards, the responses may be: chopping off a limb, imprisonment, probation, or intake into a shelter system. The point is to identify the standard, not attach oneself to how the community or culture deals with violations to the standard. So that if we can find these elements of stability that are universally desired, we introduce structures that maximize that stability.
We must always be wary of the tension between stability/order and freedoms. The impulse towards freedom is a result of the colorful painting. If all people were the same, if we all conformed to the same ways of behaving, a great deal of the rich interestingness of existence would be lost. Further, nonconformity can often show us how to increase stability. So the hippie movement was a reaction to the suburbanization, commodification, and mass consumptionist lifestyle from the 1950s. But in granting hippies freedom to organize the way they wanted, they showed many people that greater stability may be found in working together cooperatively rather than competitively, as is the value in the capitalist system. Thus an element of instability (the hippie reaction) may someday prove to have been a turning point towards a more stable, cooperative society. Therefore, we should not always support those actions that ostensibly maximize stability (the police state, for instance) because acts of instability often will have latent stabilizing tendencies.
Let's finally look at how and why people introduce instability into their own lives. If the human impulse is towards stability, why then do we see, on an average episode of Jerry Springer, people hurting themselves and their loved ones? Why is there widespread alcohol abuse, a drug that overwhelmingly tends to produce high instability and unpredictability. This too is a manifestation of the creativity principle. People living what they perceive to be boring and meaningless lives, devoid of creative outlets, or devoid of whatever it is they need to explore life as an interesting creative thing of which they are a part, will introduce instability into their lives in an attempt to find that element and so to create stability.
Alternatively, the bored alcoholic writer with a good marriage, a home that he owns, money in the bank, good health, etc. - he has stability, so what else does he need? So, real stability depends on a Zenlike satisfaction with life precisely as it is, lacking that, he might introduce the destabilizing element in an attempt to stabilize, just as revolutionists destroy the old order so as to create a newer and more stable one.
A last point regarding free will: Do we live in a Christian paradigm, in which God has enabled us to explore the world hoping we will turn to him, and those who do not are lost? In other words, does God want us to live stable and happy lives? Or is all prescribed? Somewhere in between, I think. The first question is meaningless in a world in which we are all purposive manifestations of the divine mind. who are here to explore the world. Actually, God does not want us to live completely stable lives because that would put an end to the game. However, it cannot be completely prescribed, because that would imply an intrusive Brahman that is directing everything, therefore an awareness. This is only possible if it is an awareness we know absolutely nothing about, which seems sort of pointless. If the Brahman wanted that, it wouldn't have split itself into the ten thousand things.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Information education
Perhaps the field should actually split into three:
1. Library science education: this should be supremely focused on the issues of libraries and the skills and training, precisely as it was in the mid 20th century. The information paradigm is useful, but not dominant. This is more of a trade school model with higher level thinking and reading about the nature of knowledge and information in society, and how libraries fit into that society. Digitization is naturally broached, but towards the technical realm (training in digital preservation, digital metadata, issues in electronic serials, hypertext and the user, nature of reading and using digital texts, etc.)
2. Information science: Let's keep this a science, or perhaps give it over to computer science - make it a segment of computer science. Writing algorithms, information retrieval, usability, information architecture: the quantitative aspects of information science. These largely do not have to focus on sociological and humanistic impulses, as engineering does not, but on the mechanistic and technical aspects.
3. Information studies: related closely to library science, but broadening the field considerably. This will be a philosophical and sociological journey; that is, theoretical, without having to be tied to libraries. This would be as if law school split: one division trained specifically to practice law (basically as it does today) and one division focused completely on pontification on the nature of law in society, philosophy of law. Information studies would look at ontology, epistemology, theories of taxonomy. It would also look at the philosophy of information society: technological determinism, information access as liberating, the history of information society (from early futurology in the 60s and 70s to the development of information technologies and finally to contemporary futurology).
It is my opinion that cramming these into one degree, as it currently does, it unjust to all of them - the information field has become overgrown, and it's time to untangle the roots and put each tree far enough so that they can develop unhindered. They are all still related, and will reference each other continually, but they call for such different skillsets upon graduation, and are focused on such different issues that they really should be different degrees.
1. Library science education: this should be supremely focused on the issues of libraries and the skills and training, precisely as it was in the mid 20th century. The information paradigm is useful, but not dominant. This is more of a trade school model with higher level thinking and reading about the nature of knowledge and information in society, and how libraries fit into that society. Digitization is naturally broached, but towards the technical realm (training in digital preservation, digital metadata, issues in electronic serials, hypertext and the user, nature of reading and using digital texts, etc.)
2. Information science: Let's keep this a science, or perhaps give it over to computer science - make it a segment of computer science. Writing algorithms, information retrieval, usability, information architecture: the quantitative aspects of information science. These largely do not have to focus on sociological and humanistic impulses, as engineering does not, but on the mechanistic and technical aspects.
3. Information studies: related closely to library science, but broadening the field considerably. This will be a philosophical and sociological journey; that is, theoretical, without having to be tied to libraries. This would be as if law school split: one division trained specifically to practice law (basically as it does today) and one division focused completely on pontification on the nature of law in society, philosophy of law. Information studies would look at ontology, epistemology, theories of taxonomy. It would also look at the philosophy of information society: technological determinism, information access as liberating, the history of information society (from early futurology in the 60s and 70s to the development of information technologies and finally to contemporary futurology).
It is my opinion that cramming these into one degree, as it currently does, it unjust to all of them - the information field has become overgrown, and it's time to untangle the roots and put each tree far enough so that they can develop unhindered. They are all still related, and will reference each other continually, but they call for such different skillsets upon graduation, and are focused on such different issues that they really should be different degrees.
Friday, August 13, 2010
The state & public good
Inspired by Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library (D'Angelo), p. 34-44.
Market players initially were supposed to follow the rules of the common good - the state was a collection of individuals who were charged with determining the public good. Because the public didn't know what was good for them, public education was instituted so as to align their wishes with the state's policies, as the state's policies were by default good for the public.
Markets could only be fair if market players played fair. Thus Victorian morality was supposed to be injected into market competition - restraint not only would help keep markets fair, but capitalists who weren't consumerist would reinvest their money into capital, which is good for economic growth and prosperity and which is then good for the public. To Mill, free markets will leave the individual to pursue his own wants and needs, and these are he presumes their better natures, i.e. moral character over physical pleasures. Implicit in Mill's model is the requirement to restrict the liberty of those who are preoccupied with the lesser goods (children, barbarians, and the working class (the poor)) until they can be fixed: they must adopt Victorian morality, including individual self-reliance, and they must use the institutions of the classical liberal state (education, banks, and eventually public libraries)
In reality, market players cared not a whit for the public good, but for the private good. The state in attempting to prevent the market from failing to provide for (intangible) public goods, tried first to educate the public so they would do it, and when that failed it became an instrument of the economic interests it sought to curb. Thus liberalism lost its moral corrective force, lost its drive to serve the public good, and redefined the market itself as the servant of the public good. "The relation between the public and private realm of the state is reversed and obliterated, as the public realm of the state is made to serve the private economic interests of the market" (40).
Markets were supposed to be a large number of individuals competing on level ground, which means little profits for individuals (they're spread around), which of course means that model must be rejected in favor of the illusion of free markets with big firms making huge profits.
****Of course the capitalists of today don't want a genuine Christian morality to reign, as that would be in contradiction to their obscene profits, and would rile the public to revile the corporation's disregard for public welfare. Thus the modern disregard of religion and religious sentiment seems to have been largely engineered by a state and private sector that don't want to be regulated by a public morality!
So state/corporate propagandists of today preach a watered down, nonrevolutionary Christianity. They also revile all aspects of the state that provide for public goods: welfare, health care, education, libraries. They only want a state where it will crush competition so that they can keep reaping profits. The market is not (or can not) serve a moral purpose.***
ENTERTAINMENT
Coney Island was an early example of pure spectacle entertainment that contemporaries feared was unleashing man's id (inner animal) unrestricted by reason or spirit. What happened was not an out of control animalistic mob that has been created by lunatic entertainment, but instead an entertainment that reinforces dominant capitalistic values: pandering to desires to make money rather than induce states of madness, liberate the id, invert social order, or threaten authority. It actually reinforces discipline and authority and conformity - people are always consumers. [If they threaten to actually become rebellious, the rebellion is sold back to them without the substance (***From grunge to emo, From revolutionary to hippie, etc.)]
So genuine liberals (progressives) sought still to squeeze some public good out of entertainment, and did so by opening parks, gyms, community centers and libraries to instill common purpose, democratic faith - people are still the product of their environment and this extends beyond education to society as a whole. Thus they object to an institution (Coney Island) that does naught but profit the owners and pleasure the patrons - solely entertaiment without education or edification.
What it was was the early stages of a shift from industrial asceticism/morality/productive work/savings to post-industrial impulse buying and mass consumption.
p.48
If capitalist markets do not provide information to consumers for the purpose of educating them then they cannot be called populist.
Market players initially were supposed to follow the rules of the common good - the state was a collection of individuals who were charged with determining the public good. Because the public didn't know what was good for them, public education was instituted so as to align their wishes with the state's policies, as the state's policies were by default good for the public.
Markets could only be fair if market players played fair. Thus Victorian morality was supposed to be injected into market competition - restraint not only would help keep markets fair, but capitalists who weren't consumerist would reinvest their money into capital, which is good for economic growth and prosperity and which is then good for the public. To Mill, free markets will leave the individual to pursue his own wants and needs, and these are he presumes their better natures, i.e. moral character over physical pleasures. Implicit in Mill's model is the requirement to restrict the liberty of those who are preoccupied with the lesser goods (children, barbarians, and the working class (the poor)) until they can be fixed: they must adopt Victorian morality, including individual self-reliance, and they must use the institutions of the classical liberal state (education, banks, and eventually public libraries)
In reality, market players cared not a whit for the public good, but for the private good. The state in attempting to prevent the market from failing to provide for (intangible) public goods, tried first to educate the public so they would do it, and when that failed it became an instrument of the economic interests it sought to curb. Thus liberalism lost its moral corrective force, lost its drive to serve the public good, and redefined the market itself as the servant of the public good. "The relation between the public and private realm of the state is reversed and obliterated, as the public realm of the state is made to serve the private economic interests of the market" (40).
Markets were supposed to be a large number of individuals competing on level ground, which means little profits for individuals (they're spread around), which of course means that model must be rejected in favor of the illusion of free markets with big firms making huge profits.
****Of course the capitalists of today don't want a genuine Christian morality to reign, as that would be in contradiction to their obscene profits, and would rile the public to revile the corporation's disregard for public welfare. Thus the modern disregard of religion and religious sentiment seems to have been largely engineered by a state and private sector that don't want to be regulated by a public morality!
So state/corporate propagandists of today preach a watered down, nonrevolutionary Christianity. They also revile all aspects of the state that provide for public goods: welfare, health care, education, libraries. They only want a state where it will crush competition so that they can keep reaping profits. The market is not (or can not) serve a moral purpose.***
ENTERTAINMENT
Coney Island was an early example of pure spectacle entertainment that contemporaries feared was unleashing man's id (inner animal) unrestricted by reason or spirit. What happened was not an out of control animalistic mob that has been created by lunatic entertainment, but instead an entertainment that reinforces dominant capitalistic values: pandering to desires to make money rather than induce states of madness, liberate the id, invert social order, or threaten authority. It actually reinforces discipline and authority and conformity - people are always consumers. [If they threaten to actually become rebellious, the rebellion is sold back to them without the substance (***From grunge to emo, From revolutionary to hippie, etc.)]
So genuine liberals (progressives) sought still to squeeze some public good out of entertainment, and did so by opening parks, gyms, community centers and libraries to instill common purpose, democratic faith - people are still the product of their environment and this extends beyond education to society as a whole. Thus they object to an institution (Coney Island) that does naught but profit the owners and pleasure the patrons - solely entertaiment without education or edification.
What it was was the early stages of a shift from industrial asceticism/morality/productive work/savings to post-industrial impulse buying and mass consumption.
p.48
If capitalist markets do not provide information to consumers for the purpose of educating them then they cannot be called populist.
Market populism is especially problematic when the product being sold in the market is information. In the classic liberal capitalist model of the marketplace, consumers bring their beliefs and desires with them prior to their market transaction. B ut what if the consumers' beliefs and desires are shaped by or originate in their market transactions? In that case buyers and sellers are no longer independent actors and we can no longer speak of a 'voluntary exchange' between them. Instead, the consumer becomes an instrument of the marketplace. Thus, although it is true that consumers desire the products they consume, in the act of consuming those products their desires may change in ways they did not choose. This is especially true when the product being consumed is information because information has the power to change consumers' beliefs and desires. Mreover, since information, like any other commodity, is produced for profit in a capitalist economy, consumers beliefs and desires will be transformed not for the purpose of iproving them but for the purpose of maximizing profits.
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