Nice work, America!
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/27/a_historic_decision_tim_wu_father
Friday, February 27, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Don't Bring the Language Unless You Know What the Words Mean; What Would John Maynard Keynes Do?
Nobody ever reads this blog. I'm not complaining: I hardly ever post. I'm nowhere near as eager to talk about my ideas as I was when I started it way back when. I have nowhere near the following that Tim Morton, who I generally hold in very high esteem, does...and since many of the things I say here tend to be slightly if not totally derivative of his ideas these days--for a good reason: I think he talks a lot of sense--some of my stuff is really only good for different takes on what he or other OOO thinkers are already saying.
However...
There are occasions when I have very developed ideas of my own: ideas that are backed up with a good deal of serious research. Occasionally, this means I get revolted at some of the sophomoric blather I hear quoted about certain theories and historic figures. Very rarely, this brings me into the position of having to refute things said by people I otherwise like. This is one of those times.
John Maynard Keynes was never a particularly influential or well-known economist, even in his heyday, when a beleaguered and otherwise quite pro-Fascist President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reluctantly but desperately adopted an actually rather anaemic, watered-down, cherry-picked selection of the remorselessly bold and iconoclastic economist's policies to stave off the economic cataclysm of the Great Depression in about 1937.
That cherry-picked and watered down list of economic policies almost got us out of the Great Depression. If things had carried on the way they were, the Roosevelt administration might have had to apply Keynes' policies more rigorously. Had that happened, the mainstream money-grabbing, quasi-Fascist theories and mystical mumbo-jumbo about the Invisible Hand of the Free Market put about by the Chicago School and other illustrious hives of American scum and villainy would perhaps be given a lot less credence than they are in administrative political circles today. Why? Because, I claim, such a robust adaptation of the Keynes formula, while it would not have necessarily eliminated poverty, would certainly have all but caused unemployment to vanish and resulted in much higher standards of economic welfare and industrial production than currently exist. We will never know for sure, GODDAMN IT, because before that could happen, a short, ugly little Austrian mysticism hobbyist in Germany with no talent for anything but romantic nationalistic pontification and his cadré of National Socialist (Nazi) gunsels were threatening to get their military ass kicked badly by Russia under Stalin...which was bad news for poor old FDR, who then had to pretend to join the Alliance against Hitler, whose economic policies the President favored highly, so that we could grab as much control over the planet's resources as possible before the Soviets got a hold of it.
It's questionable whether or not the administration knew about the concentration camps. It is easily available knowledge that the USA refused to allow the immigration of (I can't remember if it was three or four) huge shiploads of Jews attempting to escape from countries directly and clearly threatened by Nazi Judenrein (ethnic cleansing of Jews from communities). We sent them back to Europe.
That's not what this post is about. The reason I mention it is this: Anyone who thinks that FDR was any kind of "liberal" president, on any level, should try to imagine what that boat ride back across the Atlantic must have been like for those Jews. I think you will agree it had to be a pretty long trip. Their life expectancy on arrival? I wouldn't give much, though I don't know for sure.
But this is about economics. I'm not saying FDR hated Jews. There are politics, and there are economics, and sometimes they're not the same. One thing FDR liked--a lot--was right-wing economics of a particular kind. If I had walked up to him in 1935 and said, "Mr. President, with all due respect, sir, can't you see what dangerous people Hitler and Mussolini are, and the threat they pose to liberty in their own countries and around the world?!" his response would probably have been, "No, sir, as a matter of fact, I cannot, sir! Just what our own country needs, for that matter: big business running the country, and plenty of it! What's your fuckin' problem?"
But after a few years of trying to prop up his big buddies in business, totally convinced that it would rescue the disastrous national economy, the President grudgingly invited John Keynes to the Oval Office and allowed himself to be reprimanded as if the eagle on the carpet at his feet were a badly-cooked crow on his dinner plate.
"I told ye before, Mr. President," the already curmudgeonly 54-year old economist might have said, possibly shaking his cane at the former Rough Rider helpless in his presidential wheelchair, "ye been listening to the wrong people. Tax breaks only help the wealthy; they do about as much for industry as a dog turd in a can o' Shinola does for yer damned shoes. Ye can't keep on with this blah blah blah..."
The President, desperate to halt the economic miasma that not even the very wealthy could any longer ignore, and to get the irritating Keynes out of his office, was able to stop banging his head on the presidential desk long enough to listen to some of what the man was saying.
The government, among several other things too wordy to go into here, finally levied a 97% tax on the upper income bracket, using the resulting revenue to kickstart industry (literally paying work force straight out of the government coffers, and also footing the bill for product research and development) and fuel public works to build bridges, roads, schools, libraries...and prisons, unfortunately, but that's what we do in the USA. The next bracket down was taxed scarcely less than that, though I can't remember the exact number. The pump was primed. Things started to improve immediately. When the rich complained, threatening their former buddy in the White House politically, Roosevelt told them very politely and publicly to go fuck themselves. "How many votes can you get?" he smirked to the Wall Street tycoons, as a teary-eyed woman at the front of a cheering crowd recently saved from abject poverty held out her baby for the great man to kiss. The tycoons, besides knowing they were defeated, were human beings, and the Depression was so horrible for everyone that they didn't put up much of a fight. They just cried a bit. Can't blame them. Their mansions were being turned into hospitals.
Again, I say that we can't know what the country would be like today if things had continued that way. Enter the Second World War, and huge swaths of private industry were essentially drafted into the war effort. Our Alliance won, and the recent movie about Alan Turing deservedly credits the ill-fated mathematician with the immensely important cracking of the German Enigma code that cripplingly compromised Nazi military strategy...which sucked, Enigma aside. Whether or not the barbaric bombing of German civilian targets by America and Britain (much worse than anything similar the Germans had done to their foes in the earlier part of the war) made more of a difference than mathematics and the invention of the computer is a matter for argument.
Which is to say: FDR was no saint, and he certainly was no liberal. He did have courage, and the intestinal fortitude to admit when he was wrong and to finally do the right thing for the working class, no matter how Wall Street screamed and howled. For that, he deserves a lot of respect: I'd like to see the West Wing occupied by a President with half his guts today. But in my opinion, he is given way too much credit for helping the USA out of the Depression. How much credit does Keynes get for it?
None. Have you even heard of him? When people simplistically throw his name around in connection with President Obama's "liberal" (or according to some Republicans, "socialist") economic policies, or the Syriza party of Greece, or the quantitative easement proposed tepidly by the European Central Bank, do you even know what they're talking about? If not, I'm here to say that such ignorance is easily forgiven: these people don't know what they're talking about either. Keynes is little known, almost untaught in schools of economics, and when American economists do talk about him, he is usually reviled...for obvious reasons. Just look at who runs the country. Even Paul Krugman, canny left economist who writes for the New York Times, seems to mention him only once in a blue moon, and is very spare in his descriptions of Keynes' formula. Teachers at the Chicago School often sound like they'd love to bring him back from the dead just so they could hang him from a tree and set fire to him.
While QE (quantitative easement, essentially light national debt relief) is one component of the Keynesian formula (and kind of an obvious one if you just think about it for a minute), that's kind of like saying that paint is a component of a car. You can't just go around calling any piddly little debt relief "Keynesianism": it puts you in the same camp with reactionary right-wingers you probably wouldn't waste spit on if you passed them on the street. It's also a gift to the rampant anti-intellectualism virally infecting this country, where I have to essentially write comedic historical fiction to even have a chance of sneaking any economic knowledge into people's minds.
When we start taxing the shit out of the rich (and for the new rich of today, the top 0.01%, 97% income tax is way too light) and using the money to change our schools from a tragic joke to sleek, shining and well-equipped institutions with empowered teachers and brilliant, physically fit, artistically gifted and well-fed students, then say the name of Keynes. When an engineer wants to develop a machine that can make life better for people (say a renewable and safe energy generator of some kind) and a government office buys his stock in advance of production and gives him research and development money to boot, then say the name of Keynes. When the infrastructure that is now falling apart is updated to cutting-edge industry standards and gleams in the sun...in Detroit fucking Michigan, where not a soul goes without a job that pays them at least $15 an hour, then say the name of Keynes. When a cancer patient's medical bills are handled by taxes, the hospital is a former Vegas luxury hotel seized by the government, and the brilliant and peak-skilled oncologist drives home in a Beemer to tell his/her family that once again American medical technology--with more money than the Pentagon--has reached a point he/she can be proud of, then...
I'm not saying that JM Keynes himself would have gone that far. I'm just talking about the kind of modern policies that his formula might have influenced, if the country hadn't gone so crazy the way it has...and maybe went a little crazy the other way, for a change. But when you consider the amount of money that exists in this country--albeit in very few hands--the above visions are by no means far-fetched. You don't want Socialism? Fine. It's not even necessary! We have all the money we need, and taking it won't even hurt the very rich...except maybe their feelings. Their kids will still go to the best schools...and those schools will be better, because all of them will be. They'll still eat in the best restaurants, and the food will be better, because agriculture...
Sigh. I can't stand to talk about it anymore. I've been grinding my teeth for sixteen years, ever since I first grasped the implications of the possibility of Keynesianism applied according to present need and existing money. What I really can't stand is to hear suggestions that Obama's center-right, tepid little wimpy easements and blatantly unnecessary gifts to the rich are even anywhere on Keynes's radar screen.
And if you're someone who says they are, I hope he comes back from the dead and whacks you a good one upside the head with his cane.
Please read about John Maynard Keynes. Everyone should know about his ideas. Read also the ideas put forward by economists who have carried his ideas further, into the 21st Century...if you can find them. If you can't, become one of them, and run for office, and travel to Spain, and Greece, and Iceland, and everywhere else the working class cries for relief, and don't be afraid to suggest what you think may be impossible. It's not. The money's already there. The government just has to take it.
However...
There are occasions when I have very developed ideas of my own: ideas that are backed up with a good deal of serious research. Occasionally, this means I get revolted at some of the sophomoric blather I hear quoted about certain theories and historic figures. Very rarely, this brings me into the position of having to refute things said by people I otherwise like. This is one of those times.
John Maynard Keynes was never a particularly influential or well-known economist, even in his heyday, when a beleaguered and otherwise quite pro-Fascist President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reluctantly but desperately adopted an actually rather anaemic, watered-down, cherry-picked selection of the remorselessly bold and iconoclastic economist's policies to stave off the economic cataclysm of the Great Depression in about 1937.
That cherry-picked and watered down list of economic policies almost got us out of the Great Depression. If things had carried on the way they were, the Roosevelt administration might have had to apply Keynes' policies more rigorously. Had that happened, the mainstream money-grabbing, quasi-Fascist theories and mystical mumbo-jumbo about the Invisible Hand of the Free Market put about by the Chicago School and other illustrious hives of American scum and villainy would perhaps be given a lot less credence than they are in administrative political circles today. Why? Because, I claim, such a robust adaptation of the Keynes formula, while it would not have necessarily eliminated poverty, would certainly have all but caused unemployment to vanish and resulted in much higher standards of economic welfare and industrial production than currently exist. We will never know for sure, GODDAMN IT, because before that could happen, a short, ugly little Austrian mysticism hobbyist in Germany with no talent for anything but romantic nationalistic pontification and his cadré of National Socialist (Nazi) gunsels were threatening to get their military ass kicked badly by Russia under Stalin...which was bad news for poor old FDR, who then had to pretend to join the Alliance against Hitler, whose economic policies the President favored highly, so that we could grab as much control over the planet's resources as possible before the Soviets got a hold of it.
It's questionable whether or not the administration knew about the concentration camps. It is easily available knowledge that the USA refused to allow the immigration of (I can't remember if it was three or four) huge shiploads of Jews attempting to escape from countries directly and clearly threatened by Nazi Judenrein (ethnic cleansing of Jews from communities). We sent them back to Europe.
That's not what this post is about. The reason I mention it is this: Anyone who thinks that FDR was any kind of "liberal" president, on any level, should try to imagine what that boat ride back across the Atlantic must have been like for those Jews. I think you will agree it had to be a pretty long trip. Their life expectancy on arrival? I wouldn't give much, though I don't know for sure.
But this is about economics. I'm not saying FDR hated Jews. There are politics, and there are economics, and sometimes they're not the same. One thing FDR liked--a lot--was right-wing economics of a particular kind. If I had walked up to him in 1935 and said, "Mr. President, with all due respect, sir, can't you see what dangerous people Hitler and Mussolini are, and the threat they pose to liberty in their own countries and around the world?!" his response would probably have been, "No, sir, as a matter of fact, I cannot, sir! Just what our own country needs, for that matter: big business running the country, and plenty of it! What's your fuckin' problem?"
But after a few years of trying to prop up his big buddies in business, totally convinced that it would rescue the disastrous national economy, the President grudgingly invited John Keynes to the Oval Office and allowed himself to be reprimanded as if the eagle on the carpet at his feet were a badly-cooked crow on his dinner plate.
"I told ye before, Mr. President," the already curmudgeonly 54-year old economist might have said, possibly shaking his cane at the former Rough Rider helpless in his presidential wheelchair, "ye been listening to the wrong people. Tax breaks only help the wealthy; they do about as much for industry as a dog turd in a can o' Shinola does for yer damned shoes. Ye can't keep on with this blah blah blah..."
The President, desperate to halt the economic miasma that not even the very wealthy could any longer ignore, and to get the irritating Keynes out of his office, was able to stop banging his head on the presidential desk long enough to listen to some of what the man was saying.
The government, among several other things too wordy to go into here, finally levied a 97% tax on the upper income bracket, using the resulting revenue to kickstart industry (literally paying work force straight out of the government coffers, and also footing the bill for product research and development) and fuel public works to build bridges, roads, schools, libraries...and prisons, unfortunately, but that's what we do in the USA. The next bracket down was taxed scarcely less than that, though I can't remember the exact number. The pump was primed. Things started to improve immediately. When the rich complained, threatening their former buddy in the White House politically, Roosevelt told them very politely and publicly to go fuck themselves. "How many votes can you get?" he smirked to the Wall Street tycoons, as a teary-eyed woman at the front of a cheering crowd recently saved from abject poverty held out her baby for the great man to kiss. The tycoons, besides knowing they were defeated, were human beings, and the Depression was so horrible for everyone that they didn't put up much of a fight. They just cried a bit. Can't blame them. Their mansions were being turned into hospitals.
Again, I say that we can't know what the country would be like today if things had continued that way. Enter the Second World War, and huge swaths of private industry were essentially drafted into the war effort. Our Alliance won, and the recent movie about Alan Turing deservedly credits the ill-fated mathematician with the immensely important cracking of the German Enigma code that cripplingly compromised Nazi military strategy...which sucked, Enigma aside. Whether or not the barbaric bombing of German civilian targets by America and Britain (much worse than anything similar the Germans had done to their foes in the earlier part of the war) made more of a difference than mathematics and the invention of the computer is a matter for argument.
Which is to say: FDR was no saint, and he certainly was no liberal. He did have courage, and the intestinal fortitude to admit when he was wrong and to finally do the right thing for the working class, no matter how Wall Street screamed and howled. For that, he deserves a lot of respect: I'd like to see the West Wing occupied by a President with half his guts today. But in my opinion, he is given way too much credit for helping the USA out of the Depression. How much credit does Keynes get for it?
None. Have you even heard of him? When people simplistically throw his name around in connection with President Obama's "liberal" (or according to some Republicans, "socialist") economic policies, or the Syriza party of Greece, or the quantitative easement proposed tepidly by the European Central Bank, do you even know what they're talking about? If not, I'm here to say that such ignorance is easily forgiven: these people don't know what they're talking about either. Keynes is little known, almost untaught in schools of economics, and when American economists do talk about him, he is usually reviled...for obvious reasons. Just look at who runs the country. Even Paul Krugman, canny left economist who writes for the New York Times, seems to mention him only once in a blue moon, and is very spare in his descriptions of Keynes' formula. Teachers at the Chicago School often sound like they'd love to bring him back from the dead just so they could hang him from a tree and set fire to him.
While QE (quantitative easement, essentially light national debt relief) is one component of the Keynesian formula (and kind of an obvious one if you just think about it for a minute), that's kind of like saying that paint is a component of a car. You can't just go around calling any piddly little debt relief "Keynesianism": it puts you in the same camp with reactionary right-wingers you probably wouldn't waste spit on if you passed them on the street. It's also a gift to the rampant anti-intellectualism virally infecting this country, where I have to essentially write comedic historical fiction to even have a chance of sneaking any economic knowledge into people's minds.
When we start taxing the shit out of the rich (and for the new rich of today, the top 0.01%, 97% income tax is way too light) and using the money to change our schools from a tragic joke to sleek, shining and well-equipped institutions with empowered teachers and brilliant, physically fit, artistically gifted and well-fed students, then say the name of Keynes. When an engineer wants to develop a machine that can make life better for people (say a renewable and safe energy generator of some kind) and a government office buys his stock in advance of production and gives him research and development money to boot, then say the name of Keynes. When the infrastructure that is now falling apart is updated to cutting-edge industry standards and gleams in the sun...in Detroit fucking Michigan, where not a soul goes without a job that pays them at least $15 an hour, then say the name of Keynes. When a cancer patient's medical bills are handled by taxes, the hospital is a former Vegas luxury hotel seized by the government, and the brilliant and peak-skilled oncologist drives home in a Beemer to tell his/her family that once again American medical technology--with more money than the Pentagon--has reached a point he/she can be proud of, then...
I'm not saying that JM Keynes himself would have gone that far. I'm just talking about the kind of modern policies that his formula might have influenced, if the country hadn't gone so crazy the way it has...and maybe went a little crazy the other way, for a change. But when you consider the amount of money that exists in this country--albeit in very few hands--the above visions are by no means far-fetched. You don't want Socialism? Fine. It's not even necessary! We have all the money we need, and taking it won't even hurt the very rich...except maybe their feelings. Their kids will still go to the best schools...and those schools will be better, because all of them will be. They'll still eat in the best restaurants, and the food will be better, because agriculture...
Sigh. I can't stand to talk about it anymore. I've been grinding my teeth for sixteen years, ever since I first grasped the implications of the possibility of Keynesianism applied according to present need and existing money. What I really can't stand is to hear suggestions that Obama's center-right, tepid little wimpy easements and blatantly unnecessary gifts to the rich are even anywhere on Keynes's radar screen.
And if you're someone who says they are, I hope he comes back from the dead and whacks you a good one upside the head with his cane.
Please read about John Maynard Keynes. Everyone should know about his ideas. Read also the ideas put forward by economists who have carried his ideas further, into the 21st Century...if you can find them. If you can't, become one of them, and run for office, and travel to Spain, and Greece, and Iceland, and everywhere else the working class cries for relief, and don't be afraid to suggest what you think may be impossible. It's not. The money's already there. The government just has to take it.
Monday, January 19, 2015
Descola & Latour on Object-Oriented Anthropology in the Anthropocene
The Nature/Culture split is utterly useless as a concept for understanding reality or how to deal with the ecological problems of our age. I've been saying this for decades, long before I ever heard of Tim Morton or Object Oriented Ontology, long before the word "blog" was even invented...but not before I gave up my studies in anthropology in favor of ecology. I felt that it was more important at the time to try to usher in a new, more ecological way of thinking.
I needn't have bothered. OOO and ecological thought are happening in ALL fields, with or without my help. I'm about to post a video that demonstrates this. By the way, I found this on Graham Harman's blog, "Object Oriented Philosophy". He's great: I've been reading his books on HP Lovecraft and Harman's early formulations of Speculative Realism, and I highly recommend these.
I needn't have bothered. OOO and ecological thought are happening in ALL fields, with or without my help. I'm about to post a video that demonstrates this. By the way, I found this on Graham Harman's blog, "Object Oriented Philosophy". He's great: I've been reading his books on HP Lovecraft and Harman's early formulations of Speculative Realism, and I highly recommend these.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Ecopsych, part II
Hi Lee. Thanks! Um...let's see...
1)
-Precisely. The Web of Life IS Nature. A web is a whole (the web's structure) with parts (the strands) that it is more than the sum of. Or that's how we think it, and that image is really dependent on a lot of Hollywood mood music and lighting. There seems to be some likelihood that actually living things aren't these mechanically nested fitting into fitting into fitting into... , but actually are just sort of mashed together whether they happened to fit or not, and they're all (or mostly) making the best of it. Artificially. Intentionally. Spontaneously. Deliberately. Both out of choice, and because they have no choice. A lot of it isn't beautiful, and it doesn't "just happen", which is what Nature and industrial capitalism both mean: "just existence", or "merely existing", or "environmental".
- Yes. Everything nurtures, just like everything gardens. It was actually Permaculture that helped me to understand this point about Dark Ecology (if this IS Dark Ecology that I'm talking about and not just my own totally weird spinoff on Tim Morton's idea). But the fact that nurture is not just an anthro phenomenon is the easy part to get. The hard part is that animals and plants and Ebola and termites actually all exist on THIS side of reality, with us, in human social space. We're starting to get it, with this incredible extinction we've got happening, but they didn't all just come over here when we started recognizing their presence among us; they've ALWAYS been in our space with us, we just thought we were in a different space (nurture or culture or non-nature or techno-world or humans only or whatever), while they were all over there in Nature. See, they were safe when they were over there. We didn't have to worry about being responsible for them, because Nature is like a modernized factory or "the market": it just takes care of itself, automatically.
2) A conscience is a good thing to hear evidence of. Unfortunately I also hear evidence of future "zoning". Precisely who will be at the centers (or apexes) of these self-sustaining "zones"? This is why I wish everybody would read Naomi Klein. Look, just because you've got a good heart and want to see the best thing done doesn't mean the structure of your politics isn't steeped in the same ideology that gave us agriculture. Seeing everything in terms of concentric circles (something my PC teachers actually encouraged me NOT to do) with us at Zone 0 and "the rest" in ever widening distances is the same mistake that leads to a belief in "self-sustaining" systems. There is no such thing! Not even among objects we think of as non-living. For any object X, X is only X because it is not not-X, and the only reason not-X is not-X is because it is not X. This means that X is made of not-X. Everything is dependent on everything else, and nothing comes from nothing. Of course you're meant to think that people will "have to" use sensible methods (sensible meaning you like them) or else resort to cannibalism. That's the kind of thing people who are invested in an idea have to believe. In fact, people tend not to eat each other in a crisis (PLEASE read Naomi Klein), so I don't think we really have to worry about people not adopting "self-sustaining" systems. People will build systems that sustain each other...basically just like they already do; it'll just look different from our dead old perspective that won't matter anymore. I just think it's weird to look forward (even with horror) to a future where "Omigosh, it's so sad and everybody's suffering," but also enjoying that a little bit, because it leads to more people using more sensible methods of living. We actually have no concept of how bad it can get, and we're not the ones who get to decide how to deal with it in most cases. I think it's actually quite likely that we might just keep doubling down on resource extraction and preserving (human) life at all costs, including quality of life. You ask with what funding? With what funding do you imagine we're doing it now? You realize we haven't been on the gold standard in over a hundred years, right? The Market is as made up a thing as Nature. The funding will be decided by those who define what's valuable. Who will make those decisions? That's up to people to decide collectively. So far our decisions have been pretty crap. I'm not blazingly optimistic.
3) They ARE actualizing the theory correctly; I just don't agree with the theory! Utilitarianism always ends up being about utility to humans, or at least utility to nonhumans in a way that's useful or pleasing to humans in some way. Things aren't "for" anything except being things and playing around and with other things.
4) Well, that's the trouble: how do you KNOW you're adhering to a non-anthropocentric philosophy? Isn't that kind of like saying "I am now speaking to you from a position outside the universe?" One of the things I actually loved about permaculture was it's open anthropocentrism! At least it's not deep ecology, where the anthropocentrism is all in the closet and the best thing humans are supposed to be able to do for the planet is go extinct. I approved of people having an active and deliberate role in ecology! That is openly anthropocentric, with no attempt to hide the ugly fact that we're a species, and that species act like species. Do you think walruses aren't walruspocentric? I don't even know why you're interested in permaculture if you're not interested in humans participating in intentional ecological relationships with other beings; it's just important to understand that the quality of those relationships will always be judged according to what people want, not something from outside human social space. There is no outside. Not even for walrus-space. Don't worry, I'm not interested in influencing permaculture as such. I'm more interested in influencing individuals to build different collective systems that may more or less resemble something like and also unlike permaculture. People who would get so offended by what I say that they couldn't learn from it really aren't in my audience, you know? The development of established permaculture isn't what I care about. I don't care about being excluded from a group which takes itself that seriously, and I actually am glad to hear criticism, particularly the intelligent variety, so thanks, Lee.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Reza Negarestani's "Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials"
Holy Crap!
This book is blowing my mind more than I'm even ready for. Object Oriented Horrific Speculative Fiction that's Actually True if You Look at It a Certain Way...
I am not able to read this book. All I can do is drown in it while blasphemous pipelines penetrate my lungs through the story's plot holes, keeping me artificially alive and unable to drown.
I can't even tell you what it's about. I'm more than halfway through and I don't know yet! You just have to read it...but you can't. You'll drown. Buy it anyway.
I don't know whether it's a revolution in literature, or the END of literature.
This book is blowing my mind more than I'm even ready for. Object Oriented Horrific Speculative Fiction that's Actually True if You Look at It a Certain Way...
I am not able to read this book. All I can do is drown in it while blasphemous pipelines penetrate my lungs through the story's plot holes, keeping me artificially alive and unable to drown.
I can't even tell you what it's about. I'm more than halfway through and I don't know yet! You just have to read it...but you can't. You'll drown. Buy it anyway.
I don't know whether it's a revolution in literature, or the END of literature.
Ecopsychology; the Myth of Natural Balance; "Dark Permaculture"
Ecopsychology is a
very interesting field with some very important things to say about ecological
and psychological trauma. Unfortunately, it's a pretty young field.
Fortunately, that means there's lots of room for it to grow. Unfortunately,
we've got a lot of growing to do. Fortunately, ain't nothing to it but to do
it.
This article was brought to my attention via Tim
Morton's blog. Like Tim, and lots of other people (actually, the entirety of
Western Civ, I suspect), I suffer from depression, much of it connected with
ecological trauma and the sociopolitical denial-blowback that resists
recognition of the trauma and muddies up the clarity of our decisions about how
to deal with it on a political level.
One of the most
depressing realities to face is that the agrilogistical methodology identified
by Tim as the source of most of our ecological problems is the very same
methodology resorted to by those who wish to counteract it. For more on this,
wait with bated breath for Tim's upcoming book, "Dark Ecology", and
in the meantime just visit his blog.
But the article
linked above is unfortunately rife with the very same mistakes we have been
repeating for the last twelve thousand years and change ("change" as
in dollars and cents, the only kind it's ever achieved so far). Being familiar
with established permaculture (I was very active in it for years until I saw it
was being realized as basically fetish capitalist fantasy-sale), I'm equipped
with the tools with which to criticize this; others--including people much
smarter than me, like Tim--are likely to continue to be lulled by it.
Even so, I'm really
surprised Tim liked the article, as full as it is of the kind of passive
apocalypticism I learned to expect of USA permaculture and peak oil ideologues,
something Tim incessantly criticizes. Not to mention the ontotheology of the
"Web of Life" that will magically repair itself when the
"low-energy future" forces us to leave it alone over there in the
exo-human "Zone 5" of untouched wilderness.
Sorry to be
ungentle. If my own failure to heal from trauma is any excuse, them I offer it
as such. But the above is an example of how established American permaculture
will have to be scrapped in favor of methodologies that are not quite so glibly
sure of their own goodness if caring people are ever to be equipped to face the
challenges that exist. Some offshoot of established permaculture might work,
but only if/when it deals with the following problems:
1. Lovelockian webs
of life in which everything happens by itself and for its own (good) reasons.
Smart theologians might take a leaf out of the Book of Job at this point (God
visits Job at the end and says, "You were right, I DON'T exist!").
I'm advocating the reverse of the sociobiologist perspective here: it's ALL
nurture, it's ALL culture, it's ALL artificial, and we are subject to responsibility
for ALL of it. Awful as it may seem, we have to learn to deal.
2. Myths of a happy
future prompted by resource scarcity. This is basically passive apocalypticism
and a kind of compensatory sadist fantasy reacting to the very same social
rejection that is cited in the therapy article. I know this assertion is likely
to generate horror and disgust among activists who cite all kinds of data from
all kinds of scientistic sources, but resource availability is best seen as an
economic issue, and I know enough about economics to be pretty convinced that
"peak oil" is essentially a meme-tool for the shaping of consumer
purchasing attitudes ("Hey, it's running out, you gotta be
careful...") so that prices will stay just high enough to be profitable.
Resources (as commodities) DON'T peak, they just get more expensive and then
governments have to subsidize production, as with agriculture for the last
century or so. Was anyone talking about tar-sands 15 years ago? No, because
mining them wasn't cost-effective. And oil is in everything: you could squeeze
it out of the keyboard I'm typing this on if you thought it was worth spending
the money to do it. "Peak oil" is meaningless. So is the
"low-energy future" (Is the present high in energy? No, the cost is
just subsidized, and it will continue to be, because of government-corporate
collusion, unless this is brought under control through adequate politics). In
general, the idea that we will adopt better ecological policies "when we
have to", is the sound of a scorched fiddle in the charred ruins of a dead
Rome. The article even briefly promotes the kind of disaster capitalism
("catastrophe as opportunity" or some such callous invocation) warned
of by Naomi Klein in her excellent book on the subject. ("The Shock Doctrine".)
3. Utilitarianism.
This is something permaculture has always been confused about. Though it adopts
some vestige of an object-oriented view, this view remains essentially
holistic-communal (chickens are "for" scratching, poplars are
"for" windbreaks, sheep are "for" eating grass, deer are
"for" herbivorous grazing, humans are "for" design and
management and eating sheep and deer, etc.). Though some concession is made to
the "intrinsic value" of objects in the basic principles, this is
almost totally forgotten in the design implementation modeling phase. Which
leads into:
4. Zoning. There is
nothing wrong with the permaculture zones at all, provided that we remember
that every object is the center of its own "Zone 0" (objects are not
fitted into human-conceived zones; they exude their own zones, and it is as
important that we "fit in" with their influence as the reverse, if
not more so), and also that even "Zone 5" (what we call
"unotouched" wilderness) is actually very touched and exists over
here, with us, on THIS side, within the sphere of human responsibility, as was
well understood by Native Americans and other indigenous folk.
Will this changed idea
of permaculture (we could call it "Dark Permaculture") ever be
realized? I find it unlikely, given my own very disappointing history with
American permaculture. The "movement" (as it calls itself
meaninglessly) appears to be far too socially homogeneous and class-centered.
But I don't believe it's impossible. Something like permaculture may have a
significant part to play in the creative acceptance of human ecological
responsibility. The answer is in our collective hands.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Looks like I'm a writer!
You've probably all forgotten about me (I hardly know who "you" might be at this point!) because I've written nothing of interest for a long time and nothing at all for almost as long. I have ample justification for not posting anything: I had nothing interesting to talk about.
I attended the Willamette Writers' Conference last week and very, very good things happened. I don't want to say too much yet, but let's just say that hopefully others will soon be able to journey with me into the world of the story I've written...and pay for it!!!
Archer, as I originally titled the story (and can no longer, for obvious TV-related reasons), is now not one, but THREE novels. That's right: I counted the words, and it came out to more than three times the allowed word-count for a first novel (yes, there IS a convention about these things). Meanwhile, there is almost nothing to be removed and some little bit to be added. However, NO PROBLEM! There is a perfect ending point almost exactly at the end of each third of the story! I didn't even have to try for that one. I guess I've just spent the last nine years writing three novels instead of one! That's a lot easier on my pride and conscience.
The first book in the Homestead Trilogy is An Archer of the Homestead Guard. Also, I've started up a correspondence with a leading journalist from Homestead and will be posting her articles in The Homesteader, a weekly local newsletter. Check back on Sundays...
I attended the Willamette Writers' Conference last week and very, very good things happened. I don't want to say too much yet, but let's just say that hopefully others will soon be able to journey with me into the world of the story I've written...and pay for it!!!
Archer, as I originally titled the story (and can no longer, for obvious TV-related reasons), is now not one, but THREE novels. That's right: I counted the words, and it came out to more than three times the allowed word-count for a first novel (yes, there IS a convention about these things). Meanwhile, there is almost nothing to be removed and some little bit to be added. However, NO PROBLEM! There is a perfect ending point almost exactly at the end of each third of the story! I didn't even have to try for that one. I guess I've just spent the last nine years writing three novels instead of one! That's a lot easier on my pride and conscience.
The first book in the Homestead Trilogy is An Archer of the Homestead Guard. Also, I've started up a correspondence with a leading journalist from Homestead and will be posting her articles in The Homesteader, a weekly local newsletter. Check back on Sundays...
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Elysium
I know I haven't been posting a lot, and I rarely think of anything to say these days, but I just went and saw the movie Elysium a few days ago.
I think it was brilliant that they decided to make it a kind of dark mirror image of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watch the beginnings of both movies: the opening shots of the space station and rockets leaving it look exactly alike in both movies, in a way that only a very serious sci-fi fan would catch. This means that an educated few in the theatre immediately have their breath taken away, practically before anything happens. Such viewers are forcibly induced to time-travel back to when Star Trek versions of the future were imagined, rather than Blade Runner or Children of Men (of which the latter comes to mind when viewing Elysium). As Naomi Klein says, the future we're now heading to isn't all clean and shiny; it's rusty.
In the future, Spanish is more common than English. For most people, the future sucks. The hero, once a proud hooligan, has been forced by financial circumstances to work in a factory building security robots, the instruments of his and everyone else's oppression. Very Marxist. And the Stalin, in this case, is a smartly-dressed and probably very nice-smelling yuppie executive type with high heels, a soft beehive hairdo and a philosophy of bigotry many Americans (sp?) could admire: the product, herself, of the society up in the giant space-wheel, where not a spot of rust of any kind is to be found.
Yes, Hollywood did get their grubby little hands on it in some ways. But it's a terrific story with very subtle imagery, and anyone who likes the stuff I've said in other posts will absolutely love it.
I think it was brilliant that they decided to make it a kind of dark mirror image of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watch the beginnings of both movies: the opening shots of the space station and rockets leaving it look exactly alike in both movies, in a way that only a very serious sci-fi fan would catch. This means that an educated few in the theatre immediately have their breath taken away, practically before anything happens. Such viewers are forcibly induced to time-travel back to when Star Trek versions of the future were imagined, rather than Blade Runner or Children of Men (of which the latter comes to mind when viewing Elysium). As Naomi Klein says, the future we're now heading to isn't all clean and shiny; it's rusty.
In the future, Spanish is more common than English. For most people, the future sucks. The hero, once a proud hooligan, has been forced by financial circumstances to work in a factory building security robots, the instruments of his and everyone else's oppression. Very Marxist. And the Stalin, in this case, is a smartly-dressed and probably very nice-smelling yuppie executive type with high heels, a soft beehive hairdo and a philosophy of bigotry many Americans (sp?) could admire: the product, herself, of the society up in the giant space-wheel, where not a spot of rust of any kind is to be found.
Yes, Hollywood did get their grubby little hands on it in some ways. But it's a terrific story with very subtle imagery, and anyone who likes the stuff I've said in other posts will absolutely love it.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Happiness is being a loser
This was brought to my attention by Tim. Oh my gosh, it's exactly what I've been feeling lately. Just what I needed to hear. Ahhhh. I'm so glad I'm depressed. (I LOL as I say it.)
David Suzuki on why the "Market-Based Solutions to Global Warming" people are dead wrong
This just in from Democracy Now! What he says about the so-called "green economy" is clear as a bell and true as a Zen arrow.
Why I've been out of touch for a while; Martial arts and Speculative Realism; Watch out for culty weirdos and don't make the same mistakes I did
It's very hard for me to make any promises these days, but I am going to try to start blogging regularly again. The reason why I stopped (practically everything, including writing, gardening, cooking, playing music, and physical training) has a lot to do with the "kung fu" or general martial arts aspect of this blog, and since it might be somewhat cathartic (and perhaps instructive to other martial artists or those thinking of becoming one) for me to talk about it, this is as good a time as any.
For some years (about six) I was involved in a martial art that I will refrain from mentioning by name, but I was really involved in it, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many sacrifices of other personal aspects of my life. I had begun working for the school as an instructor, arranged my life totally around the school, and breathed, ate and drank the art. For my loyalty, about a week before my black belt test, I was fired without notice (and without, in fact, the requisite motivation for such action or any real, transparent investigation into claims that were made against me) in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, and at a time when all my extra money was funneling back into the art itself. The reason I was fired was because of a very easy (and actually quite trivial) mistake to make on my part, and a sort of fear-based feeding frenzy of the kind that sometimes occurs in groups of people who aren't communicating very well. It resulted in a year of all but suicidal depression for me and considerable emotional hardship for my wife Debra (who, if I haven't mentioned before, is absolutely the most golden-souled and happiness-deserving person I have ever known), to say little of the financial hardships suffered by we who were already having no easy time in that regard. So that's why my last blog post was about a year ago.
Anybody interested in devoting themselves to a cultish group of people for the sake of adding some meaning to their lives should be warned that there is no pension or retirement plan at the end of an experience of the kind I had. You're out on your ear at the end of the whole thing. If you don't fall into step exactly with the behavior patterns espoused by your superiors, you might very likely find that you are suddenly not "family" anymore. And staying in step might prove harder as you learn more.
Not that I have been barred from further training in the art. I could go back, my ex-teammates say, any time I want: it's in my hands. I accept that, although how I was to continue to do that with zero disposable income for a year escapes my understanding, and I would have had to forgive everything that was done to me and just continue my training without any effort being made at resolution (to my satisfaction, at any rate). But I could have gone back if I had really wanted to so self-abnegate, that's true. So now I'm going to talk about why I'm not going back, and why I will be very careful about what martial art I decide to practice next.
At this point I am actually very tempted to mention the name of the art so as to warn people away from a tremendous waste of time. But scathing indictments of the art have already been made in other fora easily located online (which is something I should have paid a lot more attention to earlier on), and I don't say that everyone would necessarily have the same experience as I have. I will simply keep referring to it as "the art" here, and hopefully I will be able to recommend a different art by name some time in the future rather than denigrating a bad one now. In fact, I should keep this as brief as possible, and get on with my life. There are just a few points I should really make for posterity.
1. Most importantly: Thoroughly investigate (google, research, etc.) any group endeavor you are considering participating in, particularly a martial art. Many schools are steeped in cultish authoritarianism, with beliefs and social structures that would never stand the light of day if they were known by people at novice rank and are only gradually learned (usually nonverbally) as one progresses to higher ranks. Lonely people who struggle to find meaning in their lives (a fair description of yours truly) are particularly vulnerable to this process, and cults are aware of this and foster it for the sake of the school, so a martial art that seems from the outside to be about exercise, fun, fulfillment, peace, and constructive activities for kids may actually have a very dark and scary inner core, in which quite a few people are really unhappy and insecure but are even more afraid of finding themselves on the "outside" again. This is true of many religions as well, as we see from the Catholic scandals in recent years, as well as others which easily come to mind.
Above all, I think everyone should recognize the philosophical meditation that there is no "inside". We are all strangers, and it's really best to get used to the idea as gracefully as possible. I believe that my failure to be a good speculative realist in this regard had the effect of prolonging my involvement in a situation where I really did not belong.
2. The above being said, and the fact accepted that not all martial arts schools are bad in this way: The "supreme high teacher" (a loose translation) of the art I trained in and those immediately around her at the top echelons of the art are really bad people to be involved with if you're a free thinker. They coerce obedience and conformity by instilling fear of exclusion and push a lot of very hokey metaphysical beliefs on students, who are then in many cases required to teach the same nonsense, and I know for a fact that many instructors have no real belief at all in what they're saying. This is a philosophical and somewhat subjective statement, but I think that those who do are foolish and misguided. I was one of these, but was starting to wake up long before the incident that cost me my job.
Martial arts should be about exercise and fun. That's it. Form is the only "content" anyone really needs. As with ecological gardening such as permaculture, if your form is correct (your basics and technique efficient, practical and beautiful) then any "content" ("energy", spirituality, etc.) happens by itself, without having to really even be talked about, much less deliberately instilled. As soon as anyone starts talking about any content-like thing (any "energy" or "force" other than the E=MCsquared variety), I would advise you to immediately ask yourself, "But what's wrong with just form? Why isn't form good enough?" If your teachers are not teaching form as the end-all-and-be-all of the art, then they are not focusing on what's really going to get you there. Form is beautiful, matter is great, and every bit as mysterious and wonderful as any idea of "god" or "spirit" or any such thing, with the added benefit of being actually REAL. Also, stay away from any situation in which you are not allowed to ask questions. In the art I trained in, if you asked questions you were said to be "stinkin' thinkin'", or "coming from ego" or "a know-it-all". (One of my favorite quotes is "What is is, what is isn't"; meaning, "anything the teacher tells you is always true until it's convenient for her to say otherwise".) You should always ask questions about anything you don't understand, don't let anyone tell you different: it's a universal entitlement. If they're going to throw you out for asking questions, they're doing you a favor, as you shouldn't be there in the first place, nor should anyone. Of course talking too much wastes time in class, but a good teacher who is really practicing the art of being at peace should know that some time was just meant to be wasted. Like Roy Batty said in Blade Runner: "like tears in rain".
3. Some people have criticized the art I trained in as being useless for dealing with real combat situations (see websites like bullshido.com). While I understand that there are many different kinds and degrees of martial arts training, I am a fighter, and I trained in the art long enough to have more experience with it than most (though not all) people who level this criticism. I do not share the opinion that the art is physically useless...far from it. Aside from being very dangerous on the fighting side (I have had many minor injuries and two near-maimings, for one of which I had to undergo ACL surgery, and these happened in training exercises, not tournaments or street fights), the art offers much competence in avoiding fights altogether. Also, the forms are so beautifully elaborate, fast and dance-like (and there are so many of them) that people who train in this art are grouped, as athletes, with people who go out for the triathlons and such: real high-endurance stuff. Therefore it offers unparalleled opportunity for physical fitness and a general sense of physical self-assuredness that would be very valuable to anybody, and without which the human body and psyche are sadly impoverished. For self-defense situations and others in which physical skill in combat might decide the outcome, I would say this art is not useless at all.
This makes it all the more tragic that its flaws are what they are. There is another avowed purpose the art has, separate from fighting, for which it is entirely useless, and that is "world peace". Like any martial art in a capitalist country, its membership dues are significant, and over time this has the effect of limiting membership to those with gradually more and more disproportionate wealth as the economy declines. (There is a "foundation" that purports to provide money for low-income students to train, but having worked on its board, I find it hard to call anything so inefficient and ineffective a "nonprofit" except in the sense that it is no profit to anyone at all, other than perhaps in some tax-related way.) So hardly anyone in the "world" (notice the W word; why do we want to identify with fake objects that we make up in our heads?) is probably going to hear of the art, much less be brought peace by it. In seminars students have talked about using "principles" of the art to climb the corporate ladder. I should have left as soon as I heard about that. It was a good thing I did soon after, despite how much it hurt. The "peace that begins with the individual and spreads out into the community" (I'm paraphrasing the lingo) is not fostered by such a social environment. It's really a joke to believe otherwise.
But what did I expect? It's a cult. As another person who trained in the art and got even higher in rank than I did (I won't mention his name) recently told me, "to expect reasonable behavior from people in cults is itself unreasonable". So why did I stay so long? Well, I'm not proud of it. An individual can be very smart, but groups of people are often not, and it often takes serious self-deception to continue to be part of a group. I only hope my experience can be of value to someone, and that I've gained some wisdom along with my sadness.
4. One more thing: Children. The art is full of people who are weird about kids, for personal reasons of their own on which I will not speculate. Kids are objectified and romanticized, and there is a schizophrenic juxtaposition in the art between teaching kids to be self-reliant on one hand and treating them like perfect little angels to be protected and hidden from anything "inappropriate" on the other. Of course, it's always one person sitting in a room and deciding what might be "inappropriate" for others, which brings several problems immediately to mind, but leave that aside for the moment. It is of course almost any martial arts school's bread and butter to have kids' classes, as many parents can no more afford not to have their kids in an activity after school than they can to take martial arts classes themselves (not a joke: believe me, I know)! But you can't teach that many kids the real martial art, for the simple reason that learning the real martial art is not why most of the kids are there. They are mostly there so that their parents don't have to stop working at 3:00 in the afternoon. Most of them would be better placed in an activity that suited their own actual interests, but it is an unfortunate reality that a great many parents similarly objectify their children and do not listen or pay attention to their children's interests, and many more who might can't afford to do much about them. So the result is that the school gets a huge influx of kids for whom the martial art has to be watered down. The school, in this respect, has become more of a daycare center than a martial arts school, and this is by no means an exaggeration.
I have trained with highly skilled, dedicated, formidable martial artists who happened to be as young as 12, 10, 8, and even 6 years old. At least two of them were stronger fighters (by which I mean they were simply better at it) than I was. But for every kid who seriously wants to train, there are about a hundred who are simply there to be babysat.
It is my strong opinion that training in martial arts is not for babies. What babies need is parents who train, and who can do the fighting until the kids are old enough to be really apt and inclined for it. The schools should not have "kids' classes"; they should just have "classes", and allow individual kids with aptitude to train at the adult level. Anything that dilutes the seriousness of the martial art is potentially dangerous to its students, who might find themselves in a situation they think they can handle, but really can't. Also, anything that lumps individuals under a label like "kids" and assigns them special classes limits all the individuals' training to the lowest common denominator, which ruins prospects for kids who are actually serious. I have seen this happen more times than I like since the school started focusing on kids' classes so much, and there's nothing good about it. All of the new crop of junior-high age black belts that I've seen should never have been tested. They are irresponsible, disrespectful, boastful, and incapable, and as instructors they teach similar behavior to their peers in age.
That's it, I'm way out of time. I need to get back to writing my novel. Lance Shaw is standing around and tapping his feet at me in impatience. "I told you that martial arts bullhonkey was stupid," he says. "Any of those freaks come around here, I'll make them a broadhead shish kebab, toot sweet."
For some years (about six) I was involved in a martial art that I will refrain from mentioning by name, but I was really involved in it, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many sacrifices of other personal aspects of my life. I had begun working for the school as an instructor, arranged my life totally around the school, and breathed, ate and drank the art. For my loyalty, about a week before my black belt test, I was fired without notice (and without, in fact, the requisite motivation for such action or any real, transparent investigation into claims that were made against me) in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, and at a time when all my extra money was funneling back into the art itself. The reason I was fired was because of a very easy (and actually quite trivial) mistake to make on my part, and a sort of fear-based feeding frenzy of the kind that sometimes occurs in groups of people who aren't communicating very well. It resulted in a year of all but suicidal depression for me and considerable emotional hardship for my wife Debra (who, if I haven't mentioned before, is absolutely the most golden-souled and happiness-deserving person I have ever known), to say little of the financial hardships suffered by we who were already having no easy time in that regard. So that's why my last blog post was about a year ago.
Anybody interested in devoting themselves to a cultish group of people for the sake of adding some meaning to their lives should be warned that there is no pension or retirement plan at the end of an experience of the kind I had. You're out on your ear at the end of the whole thing. If you don't fall into step exactly with the behavior patterns espoused by your superiors, you might very likely find that you are suddenly not "family" anymore. And staying in step might prove harder as you learn more.
Not that I have been barred from further training in the art. I could go back, my ex-teammates say, any time I want: it's in my hands. I accept that, although how I was to continue to do that with zero disposable income for a year escapes my understanding, and I would have had to forgive everything that was done to me and just continue my training without any effort being made at resolution (to my satisfaction, at any rate). But I could have gone back if I had really wanted to so self-abnegate, that's true. So now I'm going to talk about why I'm not going back, and why I will be very careful about what martial art I decide to practice next.
At this point I am actually very tempted to mention the name of the art so as to warn people away from a tremendous waste of time. But scathing indictments of the art have already been made in other fora easily located online (which is something I should have paid a lot more attention to earlier on), and I don't say that everyone would necessarily have the same experience as I have. I will simply keep referring to it as "the art" here, and hopefully I will be able to recommend a different art by name some time in the future rather than denigrating a bad one now. In fact, I should keep this as brief as possible, and get on with my life. There are just a few points I should really make for posterity.
1. Most importantly: Thoroughly investigate (google, research, etc.) any group endeavor you are considering participating in, particularly a martial art. Many schools are steeped in cultish authoritarianism, with beliefs and social structures that would never stand the light of day if they were known by people at novice rank and are only gradually learned (usually nonverbally) as one progresses to higher ranks. Lonely people who struggle to find meaning in their lives (a fair description of yours truly) are particularly vulnerable to this process, and cults are aware of this and foster it for the sake of the school, so a martial art that seems from the outside to be about exercise, fun, fulfillment, peace, and constructive activities for kids may actually have a very dark and scary inner core, in which quite a few people are really unhappy and insecure but are even more afraid of finding themselves on the "outside" again. This is true of many religions as well, as we see from the Catholic scandals in recent years, as well as others which easily come to mind.
Above all, I think everyone should recognize the philosophical meditation that there is no "inside". We are all strangers, and it's really best to get used to the idea as gracefully as possible. I believe that my failure to be a good speculative realist in this regard had the effect of prolonging my involvement in a situation where I really did not belong.
2. The above being said, and the fact accepted that not all martial arts schools are bad in this way: The "supreme high teacher" (a loose translation) of the art I trained in and those immediately around her at the top echelons of the art are really bad people to be involved with if you're a free thinker. They coerce obedience and conformity by instilling fear of exclusion and push a lot of very hokey metaphysical beliefs on students, who are then in many cases required to teach the same nonsense, and I know for a fact that many instructors have no real belief at all in what they're saying. This is a philosophical and somewhat subjective statement, but I think that those who do are foolish and misguided. I was one of these, but was starting to wake up long before the incident that cost me my job.
Martial arts should be about exercise and fun. That's it. Form is the only "content" anyone really needs. As with ecological gardening such as permaculture, if your form is correct (your basics and technique efficient, practical and beautiful) then any "content" ("energy", spirituality, etc.) happens by itself, without having to really even be talked about, much less deliberately instilled. As soon as anyone starts talking about any content-like thing (any "energy" or "force" other than the E=MCsquared variety), I would advise you to immediately ask yourself, "But what's wrong with just form? Why isn't form good enough?" If your teachers are not teaching form as the end-all-and-be-all of the art, then they are not focusing on what's really going to get you there. Form is beautiful, matter is great, and every bit as mysterious and wonderful as any idea of "god" or "spirit" or any such thing, with the added benefit of being actually REAL. Also, stay away from any situation in which you are not allowed to ask questions. In the art I trained in, if you asked questions you were said to be "stinkin' thinkin'", or "coming from ego" or "a know-it-all". (One of my favorite quotes is "What is is, what is isn't"; meaning, "anything the teacher tells you is always true until it's convenient for her to say otherwise".) You should always ask questions about anything you don't understand, don't let anyone tell you different: it's a universal entitlement. If they're going to throw you out for asking questions, they're doing you a favor, as you shouldn't be there in the first place, nor should anyone. Of course talking too much wastes time in class, but a good teacher who is really practicing the art of being at peace should know that some time was just meant to be wasted. Like Roy Batty said in Blade Runner: "like tears in rain".
3. Some people have criticized the art I trained in as being useless for dealing with real combat situations (see websites like bullshido.com). While I understand that there are many different kinds and degrees of martial arts training, I am a fighter, and I trained in the art long enough to have more experience with it than most (though not all) people who level this criticism. I do not share the opinion that the art is physically useless...far from it. Aside from being very dangerous on the fighting side (I have had many minor injuries and two near-maimings, for one of which I had to undergo ACL surgery, and these happened in training exercises, not tournaments or street fights), the art offers much competence in avoiding fights altogether. Also, the forms are so beautifully elaborate, fast and dance-like (and there are so many of them) that people who train in this art are grouped, as athletes, with people who go out for the triathlons and such: real high-endurance stuff. Therefore it offers unparalleled opportunity for physical fitness and a general sense of physical self-assuredness that would be very valuable to anybody, and without which the human body and psyche are sadly impoverished. For self-defense situations and others in which physical skill in combat might decide the outcome, I would say this art is not useless at all.
This makes it all the more tragic that its flaws are what they are. There is another avowed purpose the art has, separate from fighting, for which it is entirely useless, and that is "world peace". Like any martial art in a capitalist country, its membership dues are significant, and over time this has the effect of limiting membership to those with gradually more and more disproportionate wealth as the economy declines. (There is a "foundation" that purports to provide money for low-income students to train, but having worked on its board, I find it hard to call anything so inefficient and ineffective a "nonprofit" except in the sense that it is no profit to anyone at all, other than perhaps in some tax-related way.) So hardly anyone in the "world" (notice the W word; why do we want to identify with fake objects that we make up in our heads?) is probably going to hear of the art, much less be brought peace by it. In seminars students have talked about using "principles" of the art to climb the corporate ladder. I should have left as soon as I heard about that. It was a good thing I did soon after, despite how much it hurt. The "peace that begins with the individual and spreads out into the community" (I'm paraphrasing the lingo) is not fostered by such a social environment. It's really a joke to believe otherwise.
But what did I expect? It's a cult. As another person who trained in the art and got even higher in rank than I did (I won't mention his name) recently told me, "to expect reasonable behavior from people in cults is itself unreasonable". So why did I stay so long? Well, I'm not proud of it. An individual can be very smart, but groups of people are often not, and it often takes serious self-deception to continue to be part of a group. I only hope my experience can be of value to someone, and that I've gained some wisdom along with my sadness.
4. One more thing: Children. The art is full of people who are weird about kids, for personal reasons of their own on which I will not speculate. Kids are objectified and romanticized, and there is a schizophrenic juxtaposition in the art between teaching kids to be self-reliant on one hand and treating them like perfect little angels to be protected and hidden from anything "inappropriate" on the other. Of course, it's always one person sitting in a room and deciding what might be "inappropriate" for others, which brings several problems immediately to mind, but leave that aside for the moment. It is of course almost any martial arts school's bread and butter to have kids' classes, as many parents can no more afford not to have their kids in an activity after school than they can to take martial arts classes themselves (not a joke: believe me, I know)! But you can't teach that many kids the real martial art, for the simple reason that learning the real martial art is not why most of the kids are there. They are mostly there so that their parents don't have to stop working at 3:00 in the afternoon. Most of them would be better placed in an activity that suited their own actual interests, but it is an unfortunate reality that a great many parents similarly objectify their children and do not listen or pay attention to their children's interests, and many more who might can't afford to do much about them. So the result is that the school gets a huge influx of kids for whom the martial art has to be watered down. The school, in this respect, has become more of a daycare center than a martial arts school, and this is by no means an exaggeration.
I have trained with highly skilled, dedicated, formidable martial artists who happened to be as young as 12, 10, 8, and even 6 years old. At least two of them were stronger fighters (by which I mean they were simply better at it) than I was. But for every kid who seriously wants to train, there are about a hundred who are simply there to be babysat.
It is my strong opinion that training in martial arts is not for babies. What babies need is parents who train, and who can do the fighting until the kids are old enough to be really apt and inclined for it. The schools should not have "kids' classes"; they should just have "classes", and allow individual kids with aptitude to train at the adult level. Anything that dilutes the seriousness of the martial art is potentially dangerous to its students, who might find themselves in a situation they think they can handle, but really can't. Also, anything that lumps individuals under a label like "kids" and assigns them special classes limits all the individuals' training to the lowest common denominator, which ruins prospects for kids who are actually serious. I have seen this happen more times than I like since the school started focusing on kids' classes so much, and there's nothing good about it. All of the new crop of junior-high age black belts that I've seen should never have been tested. They are irresponsible, disrespectful, boastful, and incapable, and as instructors they teach similar behavior to their peers in age.
That's it, I'm way out of time. I need to get back to writing my novel. Lance Shaw is standing around and tapping his feet at me in impatience. "I told you that martial arts bullhonkey was stupid," he says. "Any of those freaks come around here, I'll make them a broadhead shish kebab, toot sweet."
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