Thursday, May 22, 2014

Middle Class, We Hardly Knew Ye

I have been saving up my pennies to purchase a copy of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. By all accounts, it is a game changing exposition of what Paul Krugman in his review of Picketty’s Capital calls “a second Gilded Age,” in which, again per Krugman, “the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/)

Pope Francis essentially said “Amen!” with his recent Tweet that “Inequality is the root of social evil.”

And while Picketty and the Pope do the heavy intellectual and spiritual lifting, the New York Times runs articles titled “The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World,” reporting the following:

“As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all… Investors have taken notice of the shrinking middle. Shares of Sears and J. C. Penney have fallen more than 50 percent since the end of 2009, even as upper-end stores like Nordstrom and bargain-basement chains like Dollar Tree and Family Dollar Stores have more than doubled in value over the same period.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html?_r=0)

When French intellectuals, the Pope and corporate America are all in agreement, the game is up; politicians and pundits are, of course, mouthpieces for the burgeoning family dynasties and can, as such, be tuned out when considering whether the truth is not only out there, but, more importantly, ready at hand to, as the saying goes, set us free. So, as long as we are willing to set aside e.g. Newt Gingrich’s appearances on Crossfire on behalf of the oligarchy, in which he lambasts the idea of increasing the minimum wage, we can happily report that the scales are beginning to fall from our eyes, much as they are in regards to climate change. I am reminded of Mr. Beaver’s line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Aslan is on the move.” Except there is no Aslan, just us chickens. We chickens are on the move!

As we move forward, salvaging the middle class as a first step towards, dare I say it, a classless society, we will need to figure out how we allowed all of this to happen in the first place. I believe that it has a great deal to do with the interplay between thought and language. Along these lines, structuralism has elucidated the tendency in thought to mark off the world in pairs of binary opposites. In reconsidering these pairings, e.g. male and female, straight and gay, white and black, much good work has been done in demonstrating that the binary opposites are inevitably coded re: power; in each of the three examples power accrues to the former. But binary opposites do more than establish a rigid hierarchy. Notice that hewing strictly to the listed opposites leaves no intellectual space for, respectively, the transgender, bisexual, and mixed race folk among us. Binary opposites are just as much about exclusion as they are about domination.

This comes into focus when we consider the binary opposites rich and poor. Don’t forget that the emergence of the middle class is a very recent, historically contingent event, and that the American middle class proper only ever truly existed between the twin founding events of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the end of World War II and the beginning of the end with the election of Ronald Reagan. (By “middle class proper” I mean that sliver of time when any American who worked earned a genuine living wage.) The world functioned for millennia based on the binary opposites rich and poor, and without a middle class, and would happily settle right back into that homeostatic groove if left to its own devices. Recall that Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” not “the middle class you will always have with you.”

If we are on the move, if we are going to save the middle class as the first step towards saving the world, we’ll need to pry apart the binary opposites that prevent us from even conceiving of a world minus dominance and exclusion. Perhaps the exclusive nature of binary opposites helps explain Slavoj Zizek’s observation that “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Movements like this need symbols. And note that binary opposites don’t just rule our minds, they also rule the marketplace. Think Crest/Colgate, Home Depot/Lowe’s, Walmart/Target, and Fed Ex/UPS, pairings which leave precious little space for Aqua Fresh, your local hardware store, Kmart and the US Postal Service, none of which will be in business in a decade. Of course, noticing that each of the listed pairings are actually much closer to clones than opposites leaves one wondering if our cherished freedom of choice is, at bottom, just another version of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous observation that rooting for one’s favorite baseball team is “actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.” Our way of life has come to consist of preferring Crest and Colgate to Aqua Fresh, which means we’ve built an entire civilization out of a Hobson’s choice, i.e. “a free choice in which only one option is offered.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_choice) That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for one particular unwanted third wheel. As we choose to create a world without outcasts, let’s all raise a glass of RC Cola!


Friday, May 16, 2014

Birds and Mosquitoes

I was pushing my three year-old, Yael, in a little red plastic car the other day, the one with the blue handle for the adult to push with, doing lap after lap in her Bubbie’s back yard. Each revolution took us past Bubbie’s birdbath, your standard white pedestal-sinky set-up. Every single time we passed the hammock and came upon the birdbath I had the very same thought, which was that although it was a lovely birdbath that was sure to attract even lovelier birds, it was, with its stagnant little pool, a perfect habitat for thousands of mosquito eggs. It is said that when the English colonists first arrived in Maryland the Chesapeake Bay was so plentiful they could they dip their hands in and pull out a fish; but while the Bay is now on life support, during Baltimore summers you can stick your hand in the air and pull out a mosquito. And while Baltimore’s mosquitoes aren’t known to carry malaria, one does have to worry about the mosquito bite equivalent of death by a thousand paper cuts.

By the ninth or tenth circuit it occurred to me that the birdbath cum mosquito nursery should have its own card in the Tarot, seeing as it encapsulates the inevitability that every human effort to improve the world be fraught with unintended consequences. Look, a cardinal! Ugh, mosquitoes. Writ large, this inevitability goes as follows: Look at the standard of living in advanced industrialized nations! Ugh, climate change.

There is a small but vocal movement, some of whom call themselves future primitivists, which asserts that everything went off the rails when we abandoned hunter-gathering and took up agriculture, i.e. when we established civilization as we know it. I would note that hunter-gatherers were no less proficient at having children than their corn-fed descendants, which, as every parent knows, rendered the hunter-gatherers vulnerable to the greatest source of unintended consequences the world has known: no one ever knows what the hell their children are going to get up to.

The first law of thermodynamics holds that, in a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just changed from one form to another. The universe is an infinitely large version of just such a closed system, meaning that the total energy in the universe is constant. I’d like to suggest that the amount of good in the universe remains at a similar eternal equilibrium. The idea of such an equilibrium isn’t new, of course, and is at least as old as China’s yin and yang, the symbol for which suggests that there can only ever be as much light in the universe as there is dark. And the mechanism that keeps light and dark, good and evil in balance in our universe may very well be unintended consequences.

This balance is maintained when intentionally bad acts have unintended good consequences. To wit, Desmond Tutu’s remarkable assertion in a speech I heard him give that “Europeans brought apartheid with them to South Africa, but they also brought the Bible. We got a good deal!” But since most people, most of the time, are trying to make the world a better place, even if only for themselves or those they care about, most of the unintended consequences that keep light and dark in balance are, in fact, dark. This goes a long way towards explaining why winning the lottery is almost sure to ruin your life, and why there are so many miserable successful people, e.g. biographers for John Wooden and Bill Walsh, respectively the greatest basketball and football coaches ever, have reported that each was exceptionally insecure amidst and because of their fabulous and consistent success.

What about the unintended good consequences of good acts, when people “pay it forward,” when love spreads, not to mention the unintended bad consequences of bad acts? Perhaps unintended consequences flow out of every single act, whether malevolent or benevolent, like waves from a stone dropped in a pond. The peak of every wave is the crest of the unintended good consequences, and the trough of every wave is the nadir of the unintended bad consequences. Peak and trough mirror one another in length, and the balance between light and dark is maintained. Some quantum physicists hypothesize a universal wave function, i.e. “the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction) If the universe is, in fact, an infinite ethereal wave, then maybe the idea of waves of unintended consequences keeping the universe aligned isn’t so very far fetched.

If doing the right thing leads to as much bad as good, whither social justice? I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech:

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Like Churchill, those engaged in the fight for social justice shall never surrender. But, unlike Churchill, we shan’t go on to the end, because there is no end. Victory in one battle only assures the next. Nevertheless, we can, and must, make this better. Even if the law of unintended consequences makes the fight for social justice into a high stakes game of Whac-A-Mole.

I would close by suggesting that if you have trouble accepting the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, consider the fact that it is a world that can’t be improved upon. And if the yin-yang symbol were a glass, would it be half full or half empty?

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Goodbye Selfie, Hello Thumbie!

When selfie was named Word of the Year for 2013 many folks understood it as the moment when narcissism officially became the new normal, correctly sensing that in the age of the selfie the world is diminished to background for my eternal Big Moment. Ironically, in shrinking the world down to background in order to make room for our inflated egos, the selfie diminishes the self while appearing to enlarge it. Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson sheds light on this tragedy of egos grown too big for the worlds they find themselves in:

“I claim that if you went in there (the planetarium) with no ego at all and then you saw the grandeur of the universe, recognizing that our molecules are traceable to stars that exploded and spread these elements across the galaxy, then you would see the universe as something you participate in, as this great unfolding of a cosmic story. And that, I think, should make you feel large, not small.” (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=283443670)
How, of course, can you see the grandeur of the universe when you are too busy looking at your phone for your close-up?

What we seem to have lost is the art of being part of a larger story, insisting instead on being the whole story. It is perhaps not entirely our fault, as we watch the grand narratives of democracy and equality fast approaching what feels dangerously like a point of no return. What larger story remains for us to inhabit? But still.

So, for now, the path forward is retreat, maneuvering ourselves out of the foreground. In Brian Browne Walker’s translation of the I Ching, the text corresponding to hexagram 33 opens thusly: “It is inherent in the design of life that forces of darkness and disruption come into prominence from time to time. This hexagram indicates that this is such a time and advises you to respond by quietly retreating.”

To retreat is not to remove one’s self from the picture altogether. Just so, to accomplish the retreat from self(ie)-absorption, I propose a transition to the thumbie. There are a number of crucial differences between the selfie and the thumbie, beginning with the fact that the gaze in the thumbie is once again focused outward, towards the world, such as it is. Looking out, we are incapable of staring at our navels. (If the selfie accomplished anything it was the reorganization of our anatomy, displacing the third eye from its accustomed spot with the navel, which migrated up from the belly to the middle of our brows so that we could stare at it on the screens of our smart phones and in the selfies we post to Facebook and Instagram.) Because the thumb in a thumbie can, of course, point up or down, the thumbie restores the ego from its current debased status as permanent carnival barker, “Look at me!”, to its sacred role as the seat of conscious awareness. A world of which I approve or disapprove will always be a world which pushes back, a world with too much backbone to ever play background. A world worth fighting for, which ever seems to be the only reason we were put here. Which reason was not, assuredly, to star in our own private cinema.

So take thumbies endorsing the fabulous view from the room in your historic Boston hotel. Take thumbies of your heaven sent children watching The Empire Strikes Back for the very first time. Consider giving Sy the Dog a big thumbs down for pooping in the house yet again, but then give Sy the Dog a big thumbs up because you love him anyway. Save those thumbs down for chance encounters with Dick Cheney. Most importantly, take a thumbie and tell its story without using any of the five following words: “Me, me, me, me, me.”