229. Crime’s Value Chain

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Thor

The per­sis­tent objec­tion of many Amer­i­cans to their black eth­nic minor­ity is prob­a­bly not at bot­tom the prob­lem that these folk are black. It is not even their per­ceived incli­na­tion to crim­i­nal­ity, which after all is a uni­ver­sal human trait. The prob­lem seems to be that not enough of them have moved fast enough up the crim­i­nal value chain. Crim­i­nal bankers of ran­dom skin tints can hold the coun­try to ran­som and still keep their con­do­mini­ums. Cap­tains of indus­try can poi­son mil­lions slowly and bask in ‘exec­u­tive bonuses’. Patri­ots can wrap them­selves in the flag and mur­der with impunity. Bemedalled gen­er­als can fling whole armies to rav­age the poorest, most god­for­saken peo­ple on the planet. Well paid aca­d­e­mics can nour­ish their van­ity in clouds of obscure pre­tense. Politi­cians can be lying front-men for all of the above on the way to golden retire­ment. But hell, damna­tion and life in an out­sourced prison waits for the black teenager who mugs a pedes­trian on their way to the cin­ema (that is, you and me). So the real solu­tion to the ‘race prob­lem’ seems to be get­ting these black guys to put their con­sid­er­able tal­ents into a more advanced type of skul­dug­gery.

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228. Creative Destruction

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Thor

Exer­cise is the man­aged destruc­tion and regen­er­a­tion of liv­ing tis­sue for increased strength. With­out that destruc­tion of tis­sue, there can be no improve­ment. Learn­ing is the man­aged destruc­tion and regen­er­a­tion of knowl­edge for increased insight. With­out that destruc­tion there can be no improve­ment. Dogma and ide­ol­ogy always have the smell of putre­fy­ing knowl­edge about them. Schools, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties are often very smelly places, but the air is rarely fresher in cor­po­rate and bureau­cratic habi­tats.

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227. A Vocation

Posted on October 3, 2010 by Thor

The good face of orga­nized reli­gion is that it cre­ates a social space. This is a space which at its best lies out­side the thrall of daily eco­nomic con­test and role play, a place where peo­ple regard­less of sta­tus, race, gen­der or occu­pa­tion can meet and reflect on their human­ity. We all know that “at its best” is a frag­ile con­di­tion, and in the case of reli­gion has had a bumpy his­tory. The com­pe­ti­tion from other social spaces nowa­days is fierce. Orga­nized reli­gion also has crip­pling neg­a­tives. In most cul­tures, it has rou­tinely been con­trolled by old men, in indi­vid­ual cases with wis­dom and tol­er­ance, but in the aggre­gate over time, as a power tool of social con­trol and sex­ual con­trol, enforced by exclu­sion, per­se­cu­tion and war. In the aggre­gate over time, the evi­dence is over­whelm­ing that reli­gion has never made good men and women from bad men and women. Its moral parade has been a pre­tense for other agen­das. The ani­mal rou­ti­nes of strut­ting, preen­ing, fight­ing, feed­ing and breed­ing don’t need a reli­gion to sanc­tify them, and sec­u­lar cul­tures have been per­fectly capa­ble of man­ag­ing them. We need to respect our biol­ogy, but it is not what defines us as human. Surely it is time to grow up and find our proper human voca­tion. If peo­ple must talk of a god, and many seem to feel the need, then that voca­tion, the godly role if you like, is our choice to make. The care and man­age­ment of a small planet, with all the liv­ing things upon it might not be a bad choice.

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226. Learning, Value and Making a Dollar

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Thor

Learn­ing, we can prob­a­bly agree, is a good thing. That is a huge prob­lem. Peo­ple will not pay for good things. They will pay a king’s ran­som for vice. Thus, to pro­mote learn­ing we have to dress it up in van­ity and greed. No group in soci­ety is more vain, as a group, than aca­d­e­mics (except per­haps the mil­i­tary), and no houses of learn­ing are more enthu­si­as­ti­cally received than those that are mar­keted with all the spin of the drug com­pany cartels.The man or woman who is to spend their life research­ing the age rings in fish’s ear bones or the use of modal verbs in medieval Eng­lish may have much to con­tribute to the weft of civ­i­liza­tion, but it is a con­tri­bu­tion hid­den to all but the ini­ti­ated. To sus­tain their lonely and often mocked pre­oc­cu­pa­tions they may have to per­suade a small group of fol­low­ers that they are indeed spe­cial, and wrap their pub­lic faces in deep, or should we say, pompous mys­tique. Once this tem­ple of mys­tique is built, of course it attracts swarms of wannabes, refugees from cubi­cle slav­ery, who have nei­ther the curios­ity of a true sci­en­tist, nor the cun­ning of a street mer­chant. They sim­ply want a com­fort­able and respected life, which is an expen­sive wish. They there­fore hire the mar­ke­teers. Meet mod­ern edu­ca­tion.

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225. The Outside Track

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Thor

A slice of life: a city in cen­tral China where I knew almost no one. That was OK, I’m a free spirit. But then, you never know who will come knock­ing. So one Sat­ur­day morn­ing, here was a rather attrac­tive woman at my door with her young daugh­ter in tow. My fame, appar­ently, had to do with the magic of speak­ing Eng­lish. A tiger mother? Want­ing a father? A vis­i­ta­tion from the Chi­nese secret police? Any­thing and noth­ing was pos­si­ble in a place like this. I invited them in, together with their “uncle”, an engi­neer, who could proudly speak some kind of Eng­lish. An hour of chit chat later, the mis­sion was still unclear, but the next week­end the engi­neer invested in tak­ing us all to lunch. We had a nice bot­tle of wine, then alone for a moment, the engi­neer wrapped his arms around my shoul­ders and slurred “I’ll take you to a place that has some girls”. Hmm, this mis­sion was look­ing even more clouded. He meant, of course, a brothel and became offended when I declined. Our cross-cul­tural friend­ship hit the rocks, if it was friend­ship we had been trad­ing in. Yet this estrange­ment was not really about a taste for work­ing girls. In another time and place, it could have been about pray­ing to this god or that, to belong­ing to one aca­d­e­mic clique or another, to being a will­ing par­tic­i­pant in some ‘com­pany cul­ture’ (regard­less of whether it was cor­rupt or hon­est), or even to shar­ing a cig­a­rette. By tem­pera­ment, a strange few like me are forever out­siders. That’s OK, out­side is the place I know best. It has the friendly famil­iar­ity of fresh air. Oth­ers crave con­verts to their cause, co-con­spir­a­tors in their crime, or fel­lows in shared weak­ness (this last, the foun­da­tion for many a mar­riage). An orgy of shared back­slap­ping, a haze of shared tobacco smoke, is as close to truth and cer­tainty as a nor­mal per­son ever wants to come. That’s fine too – for them.

 

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223. Innovation is not Problem Solving

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Thor

Inno­va­tion is the habit, or the knack, or find­ing new premises. It is prob­lem quest­ing rather than prob­lem solv­ing. Our best schools and uni­ver­si­ties hone prob­lem solvers of a cer­tain kind. Give the finest grad­u­ates of these places a prob­lem with well-defined premises and they are awe­somely effi­cient at find­ing a solu­tion that fits the premises. In fact, their edu­ca­tion is largely a mat­ter of fit­ting their brains out with a list of accept­able premises. They are clever twits. His­tor­i­cally uni­ver­si­ties have been hold­ing pens for clever twits, but the high pay­ing habi­tats of cor­po­ra­tions and gov­ern­ment depart­ments have attracted them in increas­ing num­bers. Wit­ness Wall Street’s finan­cial whiz kids for a recent con­se­quence. Most human prob­lems have long been famil­iar, espe­cially the social and eco­nomic kind. That is, their premises have been defined, typ­i­cally by cul­ture and tra­di­tion. In each cul­ture, the local clever twits enforce their solu­tions based on accepted premises. Yet the human social and tech­ni­cal matrix, mix­ing and whirling ever faster, also crashes repeat­edly. Injus­tice is rife, incom­pe­tence endemic, hap­pi­ness elu­sive. When things fail utterly, the clever twits in des­per­a­tion seize, in the most ama­teur­ish way, upon any stray propo­si­tion thrown into the ring, In such unsta­ble envi­ron­ments the clever twits fre­quently have nei­ther a moral com­pass, nor a skeptic’s trained eye, nor the eccen­tric habits of inno­va­tors who can cast old premises through a new prism, and find the hid­den cat­a­lyst in an unsus­pected premise, the key to unlock those old prob­lems that we thought we knew so well.

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222. Of Robots and Humans

Posted on September 5, 2009 by Thor

The threat from robots is already amongst us. It is not that robots are aggres­sive. It is that human beings for the most part are over­whelm­ingly lazy. Humans will kill to claim a park­ing space instead of walk­ing a hun­dred metres. They will stuff them­selves stu­pid with drugs instead of tak­ing a lit­tle trou­ble over a decent diet. They will recede to a zom­bie immo­bil­ity in front of the first avail­able TV. And of course they will glee­fully sur­ren­der what­ever auton­omy they have to any robot that offers a hint of assis­tance. Thus we already have the curi­ous phe­nom­e­non of super cars with every avail­able safety tech­nol­ogy gen­er­at­ing as many acci­dents as a 1930s jalopy. The dri­vers sim­ply hand over their duty of care to the machine.

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