November 2. Zeno effect verified: Atoms won't move while you watch. The article doesn't even touch the philosophical implications. We've learned to accept this kind of thing in the quantum world, but suppose it's happening in the human-scale world all the time. You could say there's no objective scientific evidence of that, but science and objective truth are methods for defining what happens when everyone is watching. And if macroscopic phenomena know who's watching, then they can reveal that they know who's watching when only a few people are watching, and increasingly hide the fact that they know who's watching as more people watch.
November 11. I've just sort of read the book A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. It has a lot of filler, so I recommend reading the first section on the San Francisco earthquake and skimming the rest.
The idea is, in the 21st century we still have a 19th century view of how people behave in a disaster: that they panic, run around aimlessly, are more selfish, and are unhappy. The evidence shows exactly the opposite: people calmly come together and self-organize to help each other out, and the experience of building a social system out of free action, driven by necessity to do things with concrete value, makes them much more happy than in their normal lives doing meaningless chores in a bureaucracy. Some people, like Dorothy Day, have been inspired to spend their lives trying to make ordinary society more like a disaster utopia.
Meanwhile the ruling powers become more dangerous, because they're threatened by people taking care of each other and making them irrelevant, and also because the chaos gives them room to push their top-down utopian visions. Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine is all about this.
I wish, instead of the boring obligatory sections on 9/11 and Katrina, Solnit had gone deeper into the question of why it's so hard to make a good society last. What exactly is stopping us from making a Rainbow Gathering permanent? If we had sci-fi food fabricators, and no interference from the authorities, would it still fail because of mass psychology? And could we remove that limit by changing our culture?
November 16. From last month, Terrorism is not about Terror. I would title it more precisely as: "Non-government organizations that attack civilians for political goals are not really acting for political goals, even if they think they are, because as political strategy their behavior makes no sense." Their real motives are social: to belong to a group that tells a good story about itself and performs actions that feel powerful and meaningful.
But now I'm wondering: if they were acting for political goals, what would be their best strategy? I think it would be to attack the technological infrastructure. There's no way all that stuff can be guarded, and one person can do a lot of damage with little risk of being caught.
Why are they not attacking the infrastructure? Because attacking humans feels more meaningful and theatrical, because culturally we're still in the stone age. A speculation: if immersion in technology changes global culture, and we all start thinking about things instead of people when we think about big systems, then sabotage will become the normal action of marginalized groups, which will place a limit on technological complexity. If the control systems want to prevent this, they have to make technology invisible, so that no matter how complex it gets, we still see the world in terms of people. And if you look at Facebook, this has already happened.
November 20. Back on August 31 I wrote this:
Humans have been extremely successful at hacking the external world, and it's strange, given how well we have mastered nature, that we have failed to master ourselves. This implies that God, the Tao, the metaphysical frontier, is not out there in the universe, but inside us.
The other day I put that together with some ideas from David Abram's book Becoming Animal, and came up with this: According to modern western metaphysics 1) the Self is the stream of words and pictures and stories and desires inside your head; 2) the Mystery is the physical world on the outside; and 3) you explore it through your senses. But try thinking this way: 1) The Self is your stream of sense experience, which is already grounded in the physical world; 2) the Mystery is toward the inside; and 3) you explore it by pausing your internal narrative, like holding open a curtain or stilling the ripples on a pond.
You can find that last idea in any book about meditation, but putting it together with the other stuff, I'm meditating better. Framing the practice as fully outside-in works better than framing it as inside to more inside.
November 30. A couple weeks ago a reader sent a speech transcript by Kenan Malik, Radicalization is not so simple. Focusing on middle class western Muslims who go fight for the Islamic State, he argues that they're not really motivated by religion or American foreign policy; those are tacked-on justifications of a decision they've made for psychological reasons. Like other young radicals, they are searching "for identity, for meaning, for belongingness, for respect."
In this blog post from last month, On the Eating of Lotuses, Timothy Burke makes a similar argument, that Muslims going to fight for ISIS are like young people in the 1930's who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Both are seeking...
the chance to really matter in the world, to put their lives on the line to shape the future in a situation where it seemed to genuinely hang in the balance. They did so in a context where the everyday world around them offered nothing more than stasis and passivity.
Both Malik and Burke have other axes to grind that don't interest me. But last week Anne sent this interview transcript, Can We Construct A Counter-Narrative To ISIS's End Goal? The interviewee, Scott Atran, has surprising strategic advice:
So far, the counter-narratives proposed in our societies have been pathetic. First, they preach things like moderation. I tell them, don't any of you have teenage children? When did moderation do anything? ... We've got to provide young people the possibility for some other mode of life that's hopeful, adventurous, glorious and provides significance.
I don't think that's something "we provide" -- I think it's something young people create for themselves, and society's job is to not fight them, to be flexible enough to roll with that creation.