It’s a girl documentary explores gendercide in China and India: Is this genocide?

http://www.thestar.com/life/2012/11/14/its_a_girl_documentary_explores_gendercide_in_china_and_india.html

As horrible as this is, I resist calling it genocide. There was an attempt in Nazi Germany to kill all the Jews. In the Rwandan genocide, one tribe attempted to entirely kill off the other. On the other hand, no one in China or India, neither families nor the government, wants to rid their country of women altogether. Men are not killing women in order to create an ideal society by removing a group of people unsuitable for membership. Genocide is the attempt by one large group of people to utterly exterminate another large group of people. No one in China or India is trying to rid the world of newborn girls in an attempt to find a final solution to the woman problem. I resist expanding the definition of genocide to include collateral damage in time of war, vigilante action by the Klu Klux Klan or other such atrocities because I think it important to preserve a label specific to what happened in Rwanda and in Germany under the Nazis. Gendercide is horrible and labeling it with a name derived from “genocide” is a good move rhetorically. Extreme Pro-choicers in the USA are making the same good rhetorical move when they define every abortion as “murder”.    

In China, the social and economic threat that was seen as being so dire that something as extreme as the one-child policy could be justified as the only effective response to over-population. Girls only became the victims of this policy when families, forced to decide which gender their one child should be, showed a traditional preference for boys greatly strengthened by the limitation of being allowed only one child. Girls were not the threat that the policy addressed. The premeditated murder of millions of new-born females by their parents was an unintended consequence. Perhaps this consequence was inevitable given the preference for boys but getting girls murdered was not the result the policy sought to achieve; it was anti-girl in practice but not by design or intent.

I would call female infanticide in India and China both sexism and premeditated murder. Girls are valued less than boys and are seen as more of a liability than an asset by families who want sons to carry on the family name and work to support their parents in old age. The adage “a son is a son forever but a daughter becomes a wife someday” sums up the exact nature of the sexism involved in a way that also makes clear why murdering their daughters seems simple rationality to the millions of families who do so every year in both China and India. The practice is so wide-spread in both countries that it would have to be thought of as normative. These families are not rare deviants at odds with their culture. They are doing something, murdering their daughters, which evokes no more moral outrage in their culture than getting paid in cash for doing the thing you do professionally for some of your acquaintances and not reporting that income does in our culture. They are ordinary people doing something that would be seen as so horrible in our culture that it would be hard to conceal and as severely punished as the law allowed when discovered. Understanding how and why ordinary parents can “murder” their girl children tells us something about how and why genocide can happen. Extreme pro-choicers in this county would claim that understanding how and why expectant moms can “murder” their unwanted children tells us something about how and why genocide can happen.   

As David Moshmon points out, we have a need to preserve our own self-image be seeing people responsible for genocide as being very different from ordinary people (Moshmon, 2005). We want to see them as motivated by a burning hatred of not just one person but of a whole large group of people more intense than anything sane and normal people like us and our friends and neighbors could ever feel or understand. Most of the bystanders in Nazi Germany, the people who gave tacit consent by neither protesting nor intervening to protect the victims, were ordinary people no worse than the people in China who tolerate the mass murder of a significant percentage of the girls born there every year.

In both cases, they understood why the murders were happening. The one child policy made some parents, given the whole complex and tangled web of values and fears stirred up by that situation, know what they had to do if a girl child was born. Other Chinese understood that complex and tangled web well enough not to judge, well enough to know better than to forfeit their own tranquility by pondering too deeply on what was happening and why. Perhaps many accepted the one child policy as the only solution to over-population, the only road China could take to a better future, and accepted what needed to be done. Many Germans accepted Hitler’s conspiracy theory and saw the final solution as the only road Germany could take to a better future, and accepted what needed to be done.

Most Germans had been convinced to internalize a vast conspiracy theory that scapegoated the Jews as the cause of unemployment, the hyper-inflation that destroyed the value of everyone’s savings and all the other troubles that befell Germany after the loss of the First World War. People who had always been comfortable and considered themselves good respectable bourgeois actually went hungry after their savings and their jobs disappeared. Something was desperately wrong in their world. With the help of Hitler, the great instigator, they found the cause of it all and made sense of what was happening to them; the Jews were to blame. In this situation, everyone who has inclined to strike out violently when frustrated struck out at the Jews viciously, not just unchecked by public disapproval but, in so doing, violently expressing the general public’s opinion of the Jews. People who did not hate felt it their duty, sometimes painful and sometimes not, to follow the orders that had to be given and obeyed to achieve a final solution to Germany’s problem, the problem of the Jews.

The Rwandan genocide began when the plane carrying the county’s president, a Hutu, was shot down (Rwanda: The wake of a genocide, n. d.) It was later established that the missile was launched from a Rwandan Army base by radical Hutu seeking to create a provocation. Rwanda, at that time, was under attack by a rebel Tutsi force operating out of Uganda and attempting to overthrow the Hutu dominated Rwandan government. The Hutu population had largely been convinced by instigators broadcasting mostly on radio that the Tutsi were attempting to reestablish their ancient kingdom and enslave the Hutu. The instigators insisted that this was a real possibility and that the Tutsi were very close to achieving this objective.

The Tutsi rebels were blamed with shooting down the president’s plane. The key instigators then informed their Hutu listenership that the only way to preserve their freedom, perhaps even their lives, was to wipe out the Tutsi minority. The Rwandan Army and National Police along with two militant Hutu militias did most of the actual killing. But ordinary Hutu did, in some cases, slaughter their Tutsi neighbors, most with Machetes, and in many more cases cheered on those who did or at least made no protest. Moderate Hutu were also being killed; perhaps as a warning to other Hutu not to protest or interfere. Apparently, ordinary Hutu pointed out where Tutsi were hiding and otherwise aided and abetted the slaughter in various other ways more often than not.

70% of the Tutsi population, comprising 20% of Rwanda’s total population, was murdered in roughly 100 days. An environment of intense fear and foreboding had been created and maintained for a long period of time by the instigators; they now used the shooting down of the plane to trigger absolute panic and to channel it into murderous rage against the Tutsi. This was easy given that they had previously convinced most Hutu that the Tutsi were plotting to enslave them. All that was required was to announce that the Tutsi were close to success and that it was now, for the Hutu, a matter of them or us. Most of the Hutu, both the bystanders and the perpetrators, were reacting as if this were true. The instigators, both those on the radio and those who actually shot down the president’s plane, probably were motivated initially by a murderous hatred of the Tutsi and working from the beginning to create a situation where genocide was possible. The vast majority of the Hutu bystanders and even most of the perpetrators were not. They were ordinary people, no more insane, sadistic or lacking in empathy than the general run of people in your neighborhood.

Moshmon, D. (2005). Genocidal hatred: Now you see it, now you don’t. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.) The psychology of hate. (pp. 185-209). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Rwanda: The wake of a genocide. (n. d.). Retrieved from http://www.rwanda-genocide.org/  

Wittgenstein, Myth and Math

The marriage of math and art in 3D printing

http://www.3ders.org//articles/20140206-the-marriage-of-math-and-art-in-3d-printing.html

This is really nice. it allows those of us who do not grasp even algebra very well to see that the beauty of the world is mathematical and that the beauty of the world is a reflection of the beauty of mathematics in the same way that the brightness of the moon reflects the light of the sun, the same light that feeds, directly or indirectly, everything on earth that grows and blossoms.

I think that statistics served this same function for me. I wondered for a long time why I was good at statistics but weak in math. I think I know now. Statistics looks at the patterns in nature without ever going so deeply into the reasons these patterns are there that the explanation is anywhere nearly as remote from everyday life as E=MC2. Nate Silver’s predictions of the outcomes of elections and sporting events always refer at only one or two removes to something one can see or some aspect of social life that anyone with the ability to read other people’s minds well enough to interact with others about as skillfully as most of us do will grasp. Examples might be how high a wide receiver can jump or what the typical human response to someone who is obese or a bully says about Chris Christie’s political future.

You have to imagine, as Einstein could but most of us cannot, what it would be like to be pushed through the universe by the edge of a beam of light tucked neatly under your butt to really get relativity. String theory and the rest of theoretical physics sit several removes more distant from everyday experience than even this. Nothing I ever encountered earning graduate degrees in English and Psychology was ever so remote from human experience that I could not give examples. I could always tell a story about myself or someone else that illustrated the point I needed to make.

All of literature from Homer to Nietzsche to Michel Houellebecq is finally nothing more than made-up stories that illustrate what the human life-world does to all of us who, being human, all too human, have no place else to live or go. Some of the stories describe a world that looks like the place we find ourselves. We call that realism. Others describe what the world would look like if appearances were not deceiving. We call those myths. Both are fascinating and both, if we dive deep enough, are based on a few basic patterns endlessly articulated as variations on these themes.

 These themes themselves are almost certainly based on deeper patterns which are almost certainly based, in turn, on even deeper patterns. Yet, if we keep diving deeper and deeper, we will eventually come to patterns that cannot be told as stories but only written in abstract mathematics that describe patterns we cannot imagine because they exist at so many removes from anything we could directly live. These are the patterns that Eugene Wigner, who came of age one generation after Einstein, earned his own Noble Prize describing. They cannot be told as story, even as a story as fantastic as Einstein’s story about riding a light beam. 

Wigner expressed where the exploration of the deepest patterns we could describe using the most abstract symbols available in his lifetime left us when considered as a story about our world when he said that we had reached the point of knowing that the truth is not just stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. The advent of computers has made the search for truth easier by doing math for us that we could never do ourselves but the task of telling the deepest truth we know as story even more hopeless. Wigner also once said:” It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too.” For more Wigner, go here:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

"I shall try again and again to show that what is considered a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention"  (p.22 in Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge 1939 - 1976 University of Chicago Press)

"The mathematician is not a discoverer; he is an inventor" (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, appendix II, #2.

"The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena" (Tractatus, #6.371)

"Laws ...are about the net and not about what the net describes" (Tractatus, #6.35)

"What a Copernicus or Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but a fertile new point of view" (Culture & Value, p.18).

All these Wittgenstein quotes have in common the idea that mathematics is as little a product of nature and as much a product of the creative imagination of human beings as Greek mythology. This makes “-1” real in the same sense and only in the same sense that a “wood-nymph” is real. I take that idea for granted. That said, the most intriguing of the Wittgenstein quotes is: "The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena." The thing that makes this quote intriguing is the unanswered question that must occur to anyone who takes the point of view assumed by all these quotations for granted as I do.

I always use the same example when I talk about this issue because this example is paradigmatic; answer the question about this example and you have answered the question in all cases where the question could be meaningfully asked. The square root of a number is the number which when multiplied by itself equals that number.  Square root as a mathematical concept is so old that no one can say who invented it; the concept was part of the established tradition of mathematics that would have been taught to Euclid, Pythagoras or any other schoolboy in ancient Greece who was being shown how to count and measure things. Draw a square made of dots. If the number of rows is equal to the number of columns, the diagonal will be the square root of the number of dots contained in the square. This is simple, easy to demonstrate with a diagram and requires no leap of faith or flight of imagination to grasp for anyone of reasonable intelligence who can count.

 Greek math had its roots in practical problems involving physical things that needed to be counted, measured or built. Negative numbers came much later when some mathematicians began using them to solve math problems that were purely intellectual exercises. They were driven by their own abstract curiosity to solve problems that even the people solving them never thought had any practical application to counting, measuring or building anything. At first, the people using -7 or -9 to solve these intellectual puzzles never claimed that -7 or -9 were anything other than creations of their own imagination. No one had the audacity to claim that negative numbers and the wild flights of mathematical fancy that they made possible had any significance beyond the joy solving these problems or following their solutions gave to a very small group of people whose idea of fun was rather peculiar.

Anything involving negative numbers is already one remove in abstraction away from anything that can exist physically and be directly observed. Asking what the square root of a negative number might be takes us two removes away from anything physical. The invention of negative numbers was a flight of fancy as pure as the creation of any myth. The invention of i to represent the score root of a negative number was a second flight of fancy that could only start from the Never-never land where taking the first lands us. I can now ask, from where these two leaps of fancy put me, the question that truly intrigues me; if "the mathematician is not a discoverer; he is an inventor “ does this not mean that, for example, Lewis Carroll, was composing works of imagination every bit as much when he was doing logic as when he was writing Through the Looking Glass?

 Myth is not a realistic report of human experience. Myth is an imaginary place where you can stand to look back into human experience and see it more clearly, clearly enough to see that a factual report is not the truth of human experience because the facts are not the truth; what the facts mean is the truth and that is best seen not from inside the facts but from the perspective of myth, from the place one or more leaps of fancy and faith taken beyond the facts might leave you. This is all boiler-plate archetype theory straight out of Jung. Some leaps beyond the facts are useful, even necessary to our full development as spiritual beings having a physical experience, so we see those same leaps taken over and over again by many different people who describe the place they land in remarkably similar ways.

Mathematics is not a report of physical observables. Mathematics is an imaginary place where you can stand to look back into the physical and see it more clearly, clearly enough to see that physical observables are not the whole truth even of what is happening in the physical world because the observable is not the real; what the observable means is the real and that is best seen not from inside the physical but from the perspective of mathematics, from the place one or more leaps of fancy and faith taken beyond the facts might leave you. Some leaps beyond the physical are useful, even necessary to our full development as spiritual beings having a physical experience in a hypercube where the physical is but one slice, the slice that contains our bodies, so we see those same leaps taken over and over again by many different people who describe the place they land in remarkably similar ways.

I’m seeing Myth and Mathematics as two complimentary ways of seeing the physical as a profusion of signs and the real as what these signs indicate, the one based on narrative and the other based on numbers. This would make -1 and the square root of -1 necessary leaps of fancy and faith in the same sense as the dying god and building the temple on the very stone that the master builder rejected. The things we make up in our flights of fancy, either narrative or numerical, turn out to be real because imagination is a sense as much as sight or hearing. Imagination is not a physical sense but the sense that makes us aware of what we can know of the vaster real of which the physical is only one slice, only a profusion of signs that can mean the vaster real if properly read.

We can know through imagination and intuition because we are not just the bodies that exist in the physical but spirits who can see what the physical means from the perspective of the real. Our imaginings and intuitions tend to leap beyond the facts given by direct observation of the physical in the general direction of the real by reading the given facts as signs. We are pulled beyond the given by a search for larger patterns that do not fully manifest in the given, pushed beyond the given by a need both emotional and intellectual to see more than is there. The “more” we add feels right and true to the extent that this “more” makes the given into clues to something much more richly interesting and satisfactory than just what is there. They (mathematicians or, as I am thinking of them, number poets) were driven by their own abstract curiosity to solve problems that even the people solving them never thought had any practical application to counting, measuring or building anything.

Yet the world we have counted out, measured and built since, complete with nuclear bombs and computers, only works because the things they imagined turned out to be real enough to make possible the construction of these physical things. The question left unanswered by knowing that "the mathematician is not a discoverer; he is an inventor" and that "The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena” is the question of why when we act as if these “inventions” were discoveries about the real and construct nuclear bombs and computers under the influence of this “illusion” the damn things, for better or worse, work. I believe all the craziness I have written above about mathematics because this is the only explanation I can come up with for how and why this should be the case that really makes sense to me. Being able to converse with someone half a world away because a machine based on circuitry that can only be designed under the assumption that -1 has a square root is only slightly less astonishing to me than being sexually propositioned by a randy wood-nymph during a stroll through the park.

 

http://www.nuval.com/

We need to talk about modern capitalism in order to understand why Americans are the most obese people not just in the world today but in all of human history. The main thing produced by capitalism at this stage is the desire to consume (Galbraith, 1998). This desire to consume is created and maintained through a system of propaganda that permeates every aspect of modern life. It is called advertising. This propaganda does not exist to keep Americans well-informed or to encourage them to make decisions that are in their own best interest. This propaganda is skillfully designed, at great expense, by professionals as well versed in the arts of persuasion as anyone you would find at the best universities teaching Rhetoric, Mass Communication, Psychology or any other disciple that could contribute to persuading the consumer to consume.  

Go into any supermarket and look around. You will see relatively few raw foods in relation to the number of prepackaged or pre-prepared potential taste-treats.  These taste-threats are designed not to nourish but to satisfy a desire to consume created by advertising.  These taste-treats may be advertised as “healthy” or “nutritious” or otherwise marketed by appeal to their supposed value as food. It is important to keep in mind, however, that they are designed not to provide nourishment but to satisfy a desire to consume created by advertising. A product that provides little or no nutritional value but satisfies this demand will become a supermarket staple. Good food that does not will disappear. What is readily and easily available to consumers at this time is largely determined by this principle of natural selection as applied to supermarket shelf space. Survival of the fittest, in this context, has nothing to do with nutritional value and everything to do with satisfying a desire to consume that is created through propaganda.

The web-site that I would like to talk about is http://www.nuval.com/ . Many consumers who want to lose weight or lower their cholesterol buy products that claim to help them do so which in fact do not. These products continue to sell and to cheat the good intentions of consumers because most of the information about “nutrition” available to consumers is propaganda of the type discussed above. The problem basically is that lies and mis-information will be prominently displayed in “sponsored results” online and in advertising that is embedded in the public’s favorite TV shows like hooks hidden by the bait. Google and CBS are in the same business. They sell the ears and eye-balls of viewers who are also consumers. Their paying customers are corporations who want to convince all those viewers to desire and consume what these corporations produce.

The Nuval web-site is an attempt to counter this. They are a Consumer Reports for food. Capitalists are not evil but only greedy. They will gladly supply good, nutritious food to consumers who know enough to demand it and are willing and able to pay. Nuval exists to cater to such consumers and increase their numbers by making it easier to be such a consumer. This is the best way to increase the demand for good food. Capitalists are equally good at supplying demand whether they create it or consumers create it by doing the necessary work to educate themselves about what they ought to demand given what is really good for them. Nuval makes that necessary work a lot easier.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Recurring Dreams

Some of my dreams recur. This recurrence is not random but linked to events in my life at a given period of time. I will not have a particular dream for years and then this dream will recur. The recurrence is not always exact but individual iterations are always close enough to all the others that it makes sense to me to see them as versions of the same dream. They differ in exactly the way that one’s impression of a film might differ if one watched it again a significant period of time after the initial viewing. One of my dreams this week was a recurrence.

I earned an MA in English at the university of Alabama-Birmingham in the early 1980s. The degree was actually in creative writing and my specialty within the program was in poetry. During that time, I lived in an efficiency apartment so close to the UAB building where all of my classes where held that I could see that building from my tiny apartment. I worked at the time selling office supplies nation-wide over the phone for a company called West Brothers. The phone room I called from was also within walking distance of my apartment, as was everything else I needed. I called from a list of established customers to ask them which supplies they had used up since last I called. Describing what I did as “selling” was actually a bit of an over-statement. Turn-over was high because many people found the job painfully boring. I never did. 30 hours a week was considered full-time for this kind of work at the time. I fit two three hour shifts M-F into my life without stress. I read, wrote poetry and made enough during those 30 hours to pay my very low rent, buy food and have everything I really needed. I’m describing the least stressful time in my life and the happiest. I did something not unpleasant for 30 hours a week so that I could live a life built around reading and writing. I was a poet and I was not starving.

Later, when my life had become very stressful and very full of uncertainty and anxiety, I started having a dream about being in my old apartment in Birmingham. Nothing happens in the dream. I am just there floating disembodied through an apartment that is still empty of furniture, as if waiting for me to come back to a place and a life that I wondered away from in search of things I never needed, as if it were easy and logical to go back, after a wild goose chase lasting years or even decades, to the place that felt more like my place than anyplace ever had before or has since. I am so easily able to link these recurring dreams to issues that become highly salient in my life for a time and then recede that one of the many theories of the psychological function served by dreams put forward by psychology feels obvious and true in relation to these recurring dreams at least, though I am not sure that this explanation fits all my dreams.

These dreams recur when a pattern I can recognize from my past repeats as an episode or set of circumstances in the present. The recurrence probably serves to fit current experience into the thematic filing system (memory) created by previous experience while, at the same time, altering this thematic filing system in subtle ways necessary to the accommodation of unique aspects of my current reality. This would mean that these recurring dreams are triggered when a current experience or life-situation fits into a thematic pattern created by earlier experiences but not exactly, as when a current life situation can best be interpreted in light of these previous experiences but also presents the opportunity to learn something new that alters one’s basic orientation to experiences of this kind. The recurrent aspects of the dream are the past as context. The dream recurs when something new is learned that calls for the editing and revision of the thematic pattern itself as an interpretive context determining the felt significance of a current episode or situation that fits the pattern. This process deconstructs and reconstructs the remembered past in light of insights newly gained through current experience in ways that will alter the way future experiences of this type are felt when current and when remembered after the fact.

The surface content of the dream is what recurs. The latent content or felt significance of the dream changes with each recurrence. I would almost want to say that the dream recurs when the latent content or felt significance needs to shift to accommodate something current that drives a revision of past episodes which fit that pattern. The recurrence of this dream at this time in my life surprised me at first. The feel and texture of my life at present is as close to what it felt like to be living the life I enjoyed in that apartment as anything I’ve experienced since. This dream typically recurs not when one profoundly negative event occurs but when the routine stress of one ordinary day after another after another adds up to enough stress to make just another day like any other distressful enough that I have to numb out a little to keep plodding along. That is anything but my situation at present. I miss deadlines only because I am involved in too many projects all at once because I want to be and can’t bear to give anything up.

I think I understand why this dream needed to recur now in terms of a shift in the felt significance of the dream. The dream feels more peaceful now and less haunted by nostalgic longing. When I lived in that apartment, I was always preparing myself for something that was not yet, getting ready for things that would happen later and hoping to look back at where I was and who I was then as a humble beginning. I could never have imagined that I would ever want to go no further than back to that humble beginning where I had very little, only everything I ever really needed. I am at home again, and I know it this time. I never grew up or even decided for keeps what I wanted to be when I grew up. I only realized that today recurs like a dream until one day it does not, and that someday never comes.