no one is an island

As I work on writing and editing my video series, I've been thinking a lot about the interconnectedness of people. One of the arguments that is central to my whole thesis is that no one is an island--no matter how hard you try in today's world, you will not be able to escape the impact of other people. It's an appealing fantasy, but it just won't work. 

Your freedom is everyone's freedom. As MLK put it, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Rufus J. Fears, at the very end of his lecture series "A History of Freedom," also makes a very eloquent argument that allowing some group of people to be disenfranchised, no matter how rich and powerful you are, will eventually come around to bite you in the ass (my words, not his).

Honestly, it's kind of amazing to me that this is something many people just refuse to accept. In this, the year of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, I hope more people are waking up to the fact that our fates are all intertwined. As if we needed another reminder, the air in Seattle right now is an orange-grey miasma. Even if you lived in a cabin in the San Juans, fishing for your meals and warming yourself by a wood fire, you would not be able to escape the impact of other people right now.

the right tool for the job

This blog is still active (I promise), but lately I've been putting all my writing energy into putting together the speech I'm giving at Toastmasters on August 6th. The working title is "The Rights of the Minority in a Democracy." I hope to record it and post a link here.

In the meantime, just a thought I had while working this morning. Last week was rough at work, and it's especially hard to unwind when your office is also your bedroom. It got me thinking about a conclusion I arrived at way back when I started my self-improvement journey.

In a lot of aspects of life, it's a good idea to think about the opportunity cost of how you spend your time. Is it worth playing video games for an hour when you could spend that time reading, or cleaning the kitchen, or practicing piano? But if you think about all of your time this way, constantly trying to make the most of your free time, you'll burn yourself out. Sometimes playing video games really might be the best way to spend your time if it's helping you relax and unwind. The frame of mind that will help you be successful isn't always the best for being happy.

the "great person" view of history

I’ve been listening to a course called “A History of Freedom,” and even though I like the content and appreciate the professor’s ability as a storyteller, I’m nearing the end and I’m a little sick of his constant hammering on the idea that history is made by “great people,” not anonymous forces.

It’s ironic, because even though the professor seems to place a lot of importance on the individual, his view of history actually robs the individuals who influenced these “great people” of their agency and their place in history. I get tired of hearing people talk about political leaders as if they’re superhuman forces of nature. That’s not to say there are no “great people,” but they’re still just people, and like all people they are flawed, dynamic, capable of change, and influenced by other people and circumstances.

Take Lincoln as an example. I love Lincoln! I consider him a personal hero! But to view him as a superhuman figure who single-handedly won the war and freed the slaves is to oversimplify things. It robs people like Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, and probably thousands of other individual abolitionists of their place in history, and their roles in influencing Lincoln’s evolving political thought.

On this note, I learned a couple of things about Martin Luther King Jr. recently that I hadn’t known before. One was how the “I Have a Dream” speech was actually not the scripted speech he had prepared, and how he started improvising it after gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted “tell them about the dream, Martin!” Another is how MLK’s interest in Gandhi was sparked partly by a librarian named Juliette Hampton Morgan, who wrote a letter in support of the Montgomery bus boycott to the local paper.

While it’s important not to view history as a sequence of events that were somehow destined to happen, it’s also important not to view the great people of history as towers of intellect that moved mobs of anonymous people in one direction or another. Churchill was great, and the Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain were great, but there are probably hundreds if not thousands of other great people from that time and place whose stories are forgotten, buried, or untold. Hell, during the blitz, getting up and going to your job at the grocery store was an act of greatness as far as I’m concerned. I find those stories a lot more interesting than what kind of scotch the prime minister had with breakfast every morning.

freedom in ancient Athens

I’m listening to a new Great Course called “A History of Freedom,” and the professor kicks it off by talking about freedom in ancient Athens, touching on a lot of the things I talked about in my last post--the positive freedom of self-governance, the “general will,” and the freedom that can be granted by a benevolent dictator.

Athens during the fifth century BC was a direct democracy. Citizens didn’t elect representatives the way we do. Instead, all major decisions were voted on by an assembly of all the adult male citizens. Government offices were filled by lottery. An ordinary farmer could become a ranking official for a term just by having his name drawn randomly. We can see how it’s a place where the positive freedom to govern one’s self requires a pretty significant sacrifice of negative freedom. This is exemplified in the quote from Pericles:

“We do not say that a man who takes no interest in public affairs is a man who minds his own business. We say he has no business being here at all.”

Then along comes Socrates. Socrates has no interest in public affairs. He is interested in deeper philosophical ideas, and questioning long-held beliefs and traditions. He says, “no honest man can survive in your democracy.” This doesn’t jibe with the Athenian devotion to duty and democracy, and Socrates is condemned to death by a jury of his peers for the crime of “corrupting the youth.”

In another Great Course, “Freedom: The Philosophy of Liberation,” the professor describes how the trial of Socrates destroyed Plato’s faith in democracy. Plato was a student of Socrates who went on to write “The Republic,” which put forward the idea that the best form of government would be monarchy under a “philosopher king.”

This eventually came to pass with the rise of Alexander the Great, a student of Aristotle, who was himself a student of Plato. Alexander really does appear to have been a great philosopher, and his empire does seem to have been a place where people enjoyed peace, security, freedom of religion, and economic prosperity. But it was still an empire, built on war and death, and when Alexander died, it all fell apart as the men he left it to turned on one another.

So what do I take from all this? First, I think the trial of Socrates was probably on the minds of some of the founders of our country when writing the First Amendment. While the democracy of ancient Athens sounds great for a lot of reasons, it also demonstrates the sort of “tyranny of the majority” that can arise from such a system. This brings me back to my idea that civic engagement is essential to freedom, because unless we have the freedom to associate and exchange ideas with one another (and not only have that freedom but also use it), we can’t have a truly free and vital democracy.

Second, I think the rise of Alexander demonstrates the appeal of believing that a single “great person” can sweep aside all of society’s problems if given absolute power. This isn’t to say that Alexander wasn’t an amazing figure, nor is it to say that everyone who shows strong support for a candidate for office is acting on blind faith in some super-human leader. But no matter how great things might have been under Alexander the Great, no matter how tremendous his impact was on history, it wasn’t worth the cost in lives and liberty. The ends never justify the means.

positive and negative liberty

One time in high school I was talking to my friend Jay, who like a lot of my friends growing up was from a more politically conservative household. I casually mentioned that I was waiting for a library book that was being shipped from another library the next county over. When Jay learned that the local library system had a fleet of trucks that brought books from one library to another every day, he said, “I wonder how much that costs the taxpayers.” I argued that whatever the cost was in taxes, it was probably worth it to give kids access to every library book in the area, instead of just the library books available in their town.

Jay and I were arguing about two different types of freedom, defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Jay was arguing in favor of negative liberty, which can be broadly defined as “freedom from”--in this case, freedom from taxes. I was arguing in favor of positive liberty, “freedom to”--in this case, freedom to access a wealth of knowledge. The United States was founded on both concepts of freedom: the freedom from tyranny and oppression, along with the freedom to “the pursuit of happiness”; freedom from arbitrary government, along with a freedom to govern one’s self. The difficult task of a democracy is to maintain a balance of both, because too much of one without the other can be a dangerous thing.

John Locke is regarded as the father of negative liberty. Locke’s writings are a little difficult to get a handle on today, because at the time he was arguing with people who genuinely believed that monarchy was the only legitimate form of government, and that monarchs derived their right to rule from God. At the time, Locke’s idea that people should be free from the rule of a monarch was pretty radical.

One of Locke’s key concepts was the idea that the law should protect an individual’s rights to land ownership. This had a big influence on Thomas Jefferson during the conception of the United States government (Locke wrote that people have the right to “life, liberty and property”--Jefferson replaced “property” with “the pursuit of happiness”) . Property rights are central to our idea of freedom, and for good reason. Privately-owned farms are more productive than communal ones. The pride of home ownership is important to vibrant neighborhoods. Intellectual property rights are vital to a dynamic business economy.

But if government’s only job is to protect property rights and avoid constraining individual liberty, then what happens if one successful businessperson starts buying all the land in town and charging rent to tenants? The tenants may want to become landowners, but even though there are no legal constraints preventing them from doing so, there are economic constraints imposed by their having to pay rent to the landlord, and the landlord owning all of the good land in the area. They are free from arbitrary laws preventing them from owning their own land, but they are not free to actually become landowners.

This brings us to the problems with negative liberty. The political activist Emma Goldman wrote:

“True liberty...is not a negative thing of being free from something, because with such freedom you may starve to death. Real freedom, true liberty, is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”

Political theorist Hannah Arendt demonstrates the historical importance of positive liberty in her essay “The Freedom to be Free,” in which she compares the American Revolution with the French Revolution, and asks why one led to the foundation of a lasting democracy while the other descended into chaos and gave rise to an empire. She argues that France’s problem lay in the fact that it’s people were so poverty-stricken that when they were freed from tyranny, they had no interest in sitting down and debating the best way to form a republic--they needed food and clothes first. As Arendt put it:

“The men of the first revolutions, though they knew well enough that liberation had to precede freedom, were still unaware of the fact that such liberation means more than political liberation from absolute and despotic power; that to be free for freedom meant first of all to be free not only from fear but also from want.”

In short, freedom means more than opening someone’s prison cell and saying, “you’re free!” They need more than freedom from, they need freedom to. If you kill the king but don’t build a new form of government, you’ll just end up with a different king. Democracy actually requires the positive freedom of self-government, whereas negative freedom alone can be provided by a benevolent dictator. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it when summarizing Isaiah Berlin’s essay:

“As Berlin admits, on the negative view, I am free even if I live in a dictatorship just as long as the dictator happens, on a whim, not to interfere with me (see also Hayek 1960).”

This brings us to the concept of positive liberty: the freedom to. If John Locke is the father of negative liberty, then the father of positive liberty is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau believed that individual freedom was achievable through the community, with everyone working together toward a common goal, or “general will.” The Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States, begins with a declaration of a general will:

“Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace; and whereas in our settling (by a wise providence of God) we are further dispersed upon the sea coasts and rivers than was at first intended, so that we can not according to our desire with convenience communicate in one government and jurisdiction…”

The framers of the Articles of Confederation were agreeing that they didn’t want Emma Goldman’s negative freedom “to starve to death.” By entering into “a firm and perpetual league of friendship and amity for offence and defence, mutual advice and succor upon all just occasions,” they were agreeing to be free of hunger, want, and fear.

So what could possibly be controversial about this kind of freedom? Well, Rousseau gets into trouble with this passage from his book “The Social Contract”:

“Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”

The contradiction here is obvious: how can someone be “forced to be free”? How do we decide what the “general will” is?

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a champion of positive liberty and opponent of negative liberty, took things a step further by saying:

“The state does not exist for the citizens; on the contrary, one could say that the state is the end and they are its means.”

To Hegel, we achieve freedom only by fulfilling our role within the state. This is nationalism, and it should come as no surprise that Hegel was a great admirer of conquerors and emperors, including Napoleon.

So now we’ve seen both extremes. If our only ideal is negative liberty, we can end up with a government that refuses to protect people from being enslaved by one another (by the way, John Locke, despite all his talk about freedom, was an investor in the slave trade through the Royal African Company). On the other hand, if we only believe in positive liberty, we can end up throwing ourselves at the mercy of an emperor. How do we balance the two?

Let’s go back to my conversation with my friend Jay. I was the one arguing against the negative freedom from taxes, in favor of the positive freedom to check out library books, so I obviously lean a little more toward one type of liberty than the other. I personally tend to be a little bit skeptical of champions of negative liberty. I grew up with a lot of friends like Jay, and in their arguments I heard a desire for a type of freedom that I don’t think is really reasonable to expect, or even desirable--a freedom from other people, a cabin in the woods where they will never be bothered by anyone ever. I think this kind of libertarian ideal of negative liberty is pretty much impossible to achieve in a world as densely populated and technologically advanced as ours.

On the other hand, I certainly don’t think guys like Jay need to be somehow “forced to be free,” whatever that means. I think they can enjoy a lot of the freedoms they value by participating in the democratic system and civil society that safeguard those freedoms. This lies in exercising the positive freedoms that I think we sometimes take for granted in America: the freedom to assemble; the freedom to associate with whomever we want; the freedom to vote; the freedom to participate in a civic society that is separate from both business and government.

There’s another quote from Rousseau that I think gets to the point of my idea of positive liberty:

“Every man is virtuous when his particular will is in all things conformable to the general will, and we voluntarily will what is willed by those whom we love.”

It might sound corny or naive, but I honestly think it’s the part about “those whom we love” that’s crucial. It’s one thing to watch pundits and politicians debate about this or that legislation and then cast our vote, but it’s another thing to talk about issues with friends, family and neighbors. Having friends like Jay growing up helped me understand political conservatism and libertarianism a little better than I would have if I had been insulated from different opinions. I was able to bring Jay around to my side of our little library disagreement not necessarily because I’m a great debater, but because we already had an established friendship based on trust and respect.

Not to sound overly alarmist, but I think this is something we’re losing in America right now - a sense of mutual respect, community, and common interest, for and with one another. I personally think we’ve gotten a little too fixated on negative liberty at the expense of positive liberty. As much as we all might want to sometimes, we’ll never be free from other people. But maybe that’s a good thing.

anger

In my last post I talked about how I had been avoiding the news because the headlines over the last few years have mostly just made me angry, and how recent events have made me realize I can’t keep my head in the sand anymore. Since then I’ve been trying to stay more informed, and I’ve also been trying to acknowledge and analyze the feelings that rise up in me as I do. One thing I’ve learned is that I can only really manage a feeling by confronting it, not trying to ignore it or make it go away.

To keep myself calm, I think of a lecture from the series “Understanding the Dark Side of Human Nature” about anger. The professor talks about how some philosophers view anger as the only humane response to the suffering of others:

“To make this argument, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum appeals to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s experience of being rescued from a Nazi death camp. On seeing the horrors of the camp, Wiesel recounts, an American soldier started yelling and cursing. Rather than finding the soldier’s behavior upsetting or offensive, Wiesel found his behavior justified, reasonable, and genuinely humane.”

In contrast to this example, the professor then talks about Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. The story goes that when Avalokiteśvara became aware of how much suffering there was in the world, she was so overwhelmed that her head split into eleven pieces:

“The buddha Amitābha, upon seeing her plight, gave her eleven heads to help her hear the cries of those who are suffering. Upon hearing these cries and comprehending them, Avalokiteśvara attempted to reach out to all those who needed aid, but found that her two arms shattered into pieces. Once more, Amitābha came to her aid and appointed her a thousand arms to let her reach out to those in need.”

He then asks which you would rather encounter if you were a person in need: the angry soldier, or the compassionate bodhisattva. I see the value of both, and I don’t think it needs to be an either-or question. But I’ve started to realize that I need to work on being more compassionate and less angry. There are horrible people doing horrible things in the world, but instead of wasting my energy fixating on them, I need to be paying more attention to the victims and to the good that is happening. Like anything, it’ll take practice, but I need to stick with it.

humbled

I was really humbled at work on Wednesday. In the morning our new department director scheduled a meeting for later that afternoon, and when we all called in he said he wanted to talk about current events. Then he broke down in tears, and had a really tough time getting the words out.

In the conversation that followed, many of my co-workers surprised me with their personal interest in the subject and the depth of their knowledge about it. I really respected the vulnerability they demonstrated, and their willingness to speak up and express themselves.

I stayed quiet, mostly because I’ve been avoiding the news. Some time last year, I started to realize that the headlines just made me angry, and I made it a practice to stay off social media and news apps. I started easing myself back in by listening to Marketplace every morning earlier this year (which turned out to be perfect timing to be aware of the pandemic as it entered the U.S. and started to spread), but then I fell off the habit again.

I’ve been thinking over the last few months about how, if it weren’t for my wife giving me the important news about the pandemic, I would have no idea what’s going on. It’s really not fair of me to appoint her my liaison to the outside world, and I had been thinking I should change that. But current events finally pushed me over the edge. As infuriating as it is that our country’s president cannot be the leader it needs during a time of unprecedented crisis, I can’t let that fury drive me away from public life entirely.

The first thing I read after wading back into the news was the statement by Jim Mattis released yesterday. The takeaway quote for me:

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us...We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

I’ll have more to say about this quote in another post.

what you believe vs. which side you're on

I was as surprised as anyone by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. I remember being in a restaurant not too long afterward and overhearing a conversation between two women, one of whom was trying to make sense of the fact that her parents had voted Trump. She kept saying, “but they’re good people! They’ve always been good people!”

Many of us can probably relate to that woman, trying to figure out how someone we know voted for a candidate whose values don’t seem aligned with their own. I admit, I didn’t have these kinds of conversations in person, but in looking around social media I kept running into a few general rationalizations:

“Sure, he’s said some awful things, but other people have said worse things than that.”

“I’m voting for him because he’ll do X. He’s not really going to do Y - that’s just something he said to get votes.”

“He’s no saint, but he’s the type of person we need.”

I was really blown away by the contortions some people were willing to twist into to make their vote make sense. It made me wonder, “do you really know what you believe, or do you just know which side you’re on?”

I realized once I put it into words that if I was going to ask that question of others, I had to ask it of myself first. I don’t mean the minutiae of “do you support a capital gains tax on blah blah blah.” I mean, what are my beliefs about freedom? Or democracy? Not many people would say they were against freedom or democracy, but what happens when the freedoms of others make us feel unsafe, or democracy starts to feel like rule by mob?

These are obviously huge questions that I can’t even begin to do justice to yet (or probably ever). Hopefully over the next few months I can put everything I’ve been learning and thinking about these subjects together into something cohesive. I’m not trying to write a dissertation or anything, I just want to organize my thoughts and state my current beliefs clearly.

Anyways, what made me start thinking about all this again was something the professor said in my lecture series about America after the Cold War. At one point he casually mentioned how Bill Clinton was chosen by the Democratic Leadership Council as a candidate who could move the party back toward the center and win back white middle-class voters. It was news to me, and it caught my attention because I find the constant shifting of the platforms of the two major parties very interesting. All the more reason to be aware of what I believe instead of just which side I'm on.

emotional economics

Let’s play a game. Imagine you and another person each go into separate rooms. The person in the other room is given an envelope containing $100. You’re told that the person in the other room gets to decide how to split the money with you. They will take the money they want, and leave their offer to you in the envelope, which will then be brought to you by a third party. You can accept or reject the offer. If you accept, you walk away with the amount of money the other person offered you. However, if you reject it, you and the other person both have to give your money back, and walk away with nothing.

What’s the lowest amount of money you would accept? If you’re like most people, you would gladly accept $50. You might even be willing to accept $30. But would you accept $5? $1? Again, if you’re like most people, probably not. But why not? How did you arrive at the minimum offer you would accept?

This problem, called the “ultimatum game,” is widely discussed in business and economics, because it flies in the face of a core assumption a lot of businesspeople and economists make: that people will generally do what’s rational to maximize their individual economic gain. A purely rational person would accept one dollar, because they would walk away from the game a dollar richer. But most people don’t do this, which means there is something else at work in their decision-making.

Let’s look at another example. In this game, one person is given a mug, and told they can either keep the mug as a gift, or sell it. Another person is simply shown the mug, and asked how much they would be willing to pay for it. In this game, people who were given the mug placed its value almost twice as high as people who were shown the identical mug.

This is an example of the “endowment effect,” the finding that people generally value what they already own much more than if they didn’t already own it.

You can tweak the endowment effect to make it work in favor of the seller too. Suppose you see an ad for a used guitar, best offer, with just a general description and a picture. Now suppose you see an ad for the same guitar with the same description and picture, but now the seller has added a story about when they first bought the guitar, and descriptions of the many times they played that guitar on stage. Odds are you would make a much better starting offer if you saw the second ad.

The lesson you could take from all of this is that people are irrational, emotional, easily-deceived creatures, but I think that would be a lazy and misanthropic conclusion. Instead, we can think a little deeper and discover the hidden logic behind these seemingly illogical behaviors. With our used guitar example, it’s easy to see that the added story behind the guitar shows how much value it has to its current owner, which probably makes you willing to pay a little more.

Now suppose instead of talking about guitars and mugs, we’re talking about something vital and perishable, like food. If we were living in a less technologically advanced era when food was more scarce, we would probably place great value on the food we already had stored. Acquiring more food might not always be worth the risk of going hunting or going to war. This could help explain why our brains naturally place greater value on what we already own.

The ultimatum game is a little harder to explain, and people have different theories on it. My own theory is pretty simple, and it starts with the anger we can all imagine feeling if we were offered that single dollar. That anger comes from a sense of injustice. “No,” we think, “you can’t just take $99 and leave me with only one. I’d rather we both walked away with nothing.” To me, this goes back to the lecture on “Retribution and Revenge” from Daniel Breyer’s course on the dark side of human nature: we are driven to get even with people who have wronged us because a society where wrong-doing goes unpunished is not stable. Most of us feel it’s worth a dollar (or five or ten or twenty) to teach that other person a lesson about the kind of society we ought to live in.

All of this can be summed up by a quote from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: “We are not necessarily thinking machines; we are feeling machines that think.” That’s not a bad thing, either--there’s a kind of wisdom to our emotional decision-making.

green space

Picture from me and my wife's hike up Whittaker Wilderness Peak Trail

"As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens." -Oliver Sacks (source: James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter)

Lately I’ve been hearing two pieces of advice for dealing with quarantine that needle me a little. The first is to go outside often and get some fresh air. The second is to make a space in your home that is designated just for work.

Neither of these things is easy for me and my wife in our little one-bedroom breezeway apartment. We had been planning on starting our home-buying search about this time. One of the things we talked about was yard space, and we agreed that we wanted a little room to garden and enjoy the outdoors, but not a huge lawn to mow. Maybe just enough grass to lie down on.

I can’t help feeling a little bitter that we’ve had to put off that dream. I think we’re all learning a lesson about the value of outdoor space right now. A few of the folks I work with seem to really take it for granted. I guess I did too before my wife and I got into hiking. A few years ago, the closing of trailheads probably wouldn’t have even been on our radar.

It’s important for me to remind myself that if not being able to hike or look at real estate are the worst hardships I’ve had to deal with, I’ve gotten off really lucky. Yesterday we were finally able to get out to Cougar Mountain and enjoy a pretty quiet hike.

I hope that we as a country (or a state, or a city) come out of this crisis with a renewed sense of the importance of greenspace. I also hope we start thinking about ways that we can make it a little more affordable for everyone to be able to own a little bit of outdoor space, where they can garden and have privacy and pride of ownership. It’s all well and good to tell people how important it is to spend time outdoors and in nature, but we need to make sure that stays possible.

parasite

Damn, this movie kinda messed me up. It’s rare to go into a movie with such high expectations because of all the buzz, and have those expectations beat. I think what stunned me most was the humanity of it, the way it made me really feel for all these characters, even as they did some really terrible things. It was able to evoke that weird, jealous, delirious feeling of being a poor kid at a rich kid’s party, in a way that made me feel really nostalgic for some reason. It spoke directly to our present situation of inequality, but it also felt very timeless. It almost felt like a story by Charles Dickens or F. Scott Fitzgerland or something.

As always, it reminded me of the course I’m listening to right now, about the American West. The lecturer keeps returning to the point of how economic and technological progress was generally good for society overall, but left individual lives destroyed in its wake. For instance, farming on the Great Plains produced a surplus of food that drove prices down, which was a net positive effect for most people in the country. However, it was bad for the farmers themselves, whose farms yielded less and less profit due to overproduction, and who often ended up working their whole lives for next to nothing (not to mention the Native Americans who were robbed of their homes, cultures and ways of life by the westward expansion of the US).

I feel like this is what every argument I’ve ever had about capitalism, ever since high school, has boiled down to: one person telling me that the Kim families of the world depend on the Park families, and me saying the Kims and the Parks should be equals. Instead of Mr. Kim driving Mr. Park around, they should each have their own car (or be carpool buddies!). A lot of people scoff at this idea, or get outright pissed off about it, and I think that’s funny. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has ever had less than, felt less than, and been treated less than somebody else could watch “Parasite” and not have at least some sympathy for Mr. Kim.

It reminds me of the essay “The Freedom to be Free” by Hannah Arendt. There’s a quote in that essay from John Adams:

“Wherever men, women, or children are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low...ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approve and respected by the people about him and within his knowledge.”

Arendt goes on to say:

“It is the desire to excel which makes men love the company of their peers and spurs them on into the public realm...this kind of freedom demands equality, it is possible only amongst peers.”

No matter how hard Mr. Kim works, he will never be on an equal footing with Mr. Park. He’ll always be Mr. Park’s employee being paid extra for a favor, not his buddy helping him out. He’ll never be able to have a real conversation with Mr. Park without “crossing the line.” He’ll always have that “smell.” Mr. Park may like Mr. Kim, but he’ll never respect him. The fact that a character screams the word “respect” right before the climactic moment drives that point home.

Of course none of that excuses what Mr. Kim (or the rest of the Kim family) did, but I think that’s the beauty of this movie: it doesn’t make a moral point either way. It portrays these people so well that you understand exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing, even if you don’t think it’s right. You may not agree with it, but you kind of respect it.

it's always been like this

One day around the time I was finishing college, my dad and I were at my grandparents’ house, watching the news with my grandpa. I don’t remember what specifically they were talking about, but it was shortly after Obama’s election.

At some point my dad said, “I don’t remember things ever being this polarized.” It was one of those moments you know is going to stick in your memory, even as it’s happening. It was an uncharacteristically reflective and vulnerable thing for my dad to say. He rarely talks politics or expresses uncertainty--it was strange to hear him do both at once.

My grandpa, in his usual way, muttered something about how “it’s always been like this.” At the time, that seemed sort of wise and comforting. Grandpa’s seen it all, I thought. Things aren’t that bad, they just seem bad because I’m young.

Looking back on it now though, I see what my grandpa said as a little dismissive. Sure, politics have always been divisive. It’s important to have a thorough understanding of history, especially recent history, to be able to put current events in context. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into the trap of believing that things are worse than they are, and pining for a mythological bygone era.

But on the other hand, we also shouldn’t let ourselves become apathetic toward current events, writing off real cultural shifts as “politics as usual.” In retrospect, my dad’s casual remark was a pretty important observation about the changing state of political discourse at the time. I think it may have also been a little window into his own evolving political views. I wonder what his other thoughts and feelings were between 9/11 and the great recession.

I thought about this moment again recently after my wife told me about an interview she read with Fran Lebowitz, where she said “it is a very startling thing to be my age—I’m sixty-nine—and to have something happen that doesn’t remind you of anything else.” I guess everyone reacts to that startling feeling differently. I think some people, like my grandpa, react to it by underreacting.

It makes me thankful that my own parents have remained curious, thoughtful people as they’ve gotten older. I hope I can do the same as I get older myself.

the stories we tell ourselves

“Stories are ordered from the beginning in a way that we can only do by virtue of hindsight, by looking back afterwards and trying to make sense of everything that came prior. Therefore, when we recount our own lives as stories, as we so often tend to do, we’re basically fictionalizing what really was.”

This quote is from a video on the YouTube channel “Like Stories of Old,” and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The lecture series I just started about the American West starts by making a similar point: whenever we look back at history, we tend to think of what came later as somehow being inevitable. As an example, the lecturer talks about the shape of the United States on the map. We’re so familiar with that shape that when we look at a map of North America without national boundaries, we project that shape onto the map in our minds. When we think about the formation of the country and its expansion westward, we still have that national shape in mind, as if it was already there and just needed to be discovered. It’s so easy to forget that the boundaries could have been drawn up many different ways.

The one I always think about is World War II. The story I constructed as a kid, from other stories I was told, is so baked into my brain that it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for the people actually living through that experience, who didn’t yet know how things were going to turn out. For instance, the citizens of London during the Blitz, who lived in a city under constant assault by terrifying weapons. It’s easy for us now to look at the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster and mythologize the bravery of those people. It’s a lot harder to imagine the terror they must have felt, at a time when defeat seemed a lot more likely than victory. The European nations were falling one by one to the Nazi war machine, the Soviet Union was still an ally of Germany, and the United States had not even entered the war.

I thought a lot about the Londoners of WWII when the COVID-19 situation started to heat up. I remember going into Trader Joe’s one morning and seeing empty shelves and slightly-panicked faces. It got scary for a while there. There were rumors that we’d all be ordered to stay in our homes, and that we’d need to have enough food to last several weeks. But then the governor announced that people would still be allowed to go grocery shopping, and Trader Joe’s stocked up and started letting people in a few at a time, and everything turned out alright.

That’s my story, anyway. As things have started returning to normal, I can already feel myself forgetting about the fear and uncertainty I felt during those early weeks as I put the story together in my head. Now that I know everything turned out okay for me and those close to me, I can look back and think, “yeah, I was a little worried, but I knew things would work out.”

It makes me wonder what stories other people will tell themselves about the crisis. What about my mom-in-law's boyfriend, who thought from the beginning that everyone, my wife and I included, was overreacting? I’m sure we'll be hearing his I-told-you-so’s next time we see him. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, what about my friend’s brother, who made apocalyptic predictions and brought his family and a bunch of loaded firearms to his friend’s farm to “wait it out”? He’ll probably find a different way of rationalizing his reaction and making sense of the crisis in retrospect.

If mythologizing the past is something our brains just naturally do, we have to be active in thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. We can't let ourselves believe that our version of events, the narrative we've strung together with the benefit of hindsight, is absolute truth.

old men

A few weeks ago during a family Zoom call, my uncle--my mom’s brother--made a joke. His connection wasn’t great so I didn’t catch the whole thing, but the premise was Spanish Flu and COVID-19 sitting at a bar. COVID-19 says something about bringing attention to income inequality, and Spanish Flu rolls its eyes and says “millennials.”

My sister and I couldn’t stop talking about it afterward. A few months ago my uncle also made a mildly off-color remark about gender-non-binary folks. And this is not “that one conservative uncle” we’re talking about--he’s a gay man who came of age in the ‘80’s.

It makes me think of a lecture series I listened to recently about conservatism. One of the recurring themes throughout the series is how conservatism is resistant to radical change and prefers what is familiar, but change is inevitable, so as the world changes, what is familiar changes with it. In the late 18th century, being politically conservative in the US and the UK meant being royalist and anti-capitalist. Capitalism was a radical new idea that “conservatives” were generally opposed to. It wasn’t until capitalism had been established for a few generations and communism emerged as a revolutionary alternative that being politically conservative came to mean being pro-capitalism and anti-communism.

It’s true that as people get older, they tend to become more politically conservative, but it’s not so much that our political beliefs change. It has more to do with the world changing around us. The radical changes that excited us when we were younger become the norm, and new alternatives emerge to replace them.

I don’t mean to pick on my uncle here, but what he said struck me as a stark example of how quickly we can let ourselves get jaded and complacent. It wasn’t that long ago that he was a young man fighting for the rights of gay folks, and already he seems comfortable chuckling at young people who are fighting for their own rights. I love him, I respect him, I know he probably meant nothing by that joke, but it made me mad, and I keep thinking about it. I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg of my feelings about the generational divide right now.

The best I can do is try to be aware of that shift as it happens in me, and acknowledge that it’s just a part of human nature.

art is hard

When I was in first grade I wrote a poem about America for a class assignment. The poem was a big deal. My parents and teachers loved it. I wrote more poems, and they loved those, too. When our principal retired, I wrote a poem for him and read it at a school assembly. I became Poetry Kid.

I learned two false beliefs from this experience. The first was that art is easy. It comes out of you fully formed, perfect the first time. I carried this belief through my high school and college years when I played in bands. I didn’t revise or re-work songs I wrote. I didn’t even like re-recording. So what if we made a mistake? Leave it in! That’s punk rock! However it came out is how it was meant to be!

Like a lot of smart kids, I didn’t learn how to practice, how to make mistakes, how to fail and try again. When I got older and read books like Stephen King’s “On Writing” that talked about the discipline of art, I ignored the advice. I continued waiting for lightning bolts of inspiration. I wrote for as long as the charge lasted, and when the spark was gone, I did something else.

The second false belief I learned was that art is for other peoples’ approval. It was for contests, school assemblies, or crowds of drunk college students. There was no point in producing something that other people couldn’t consume. People had to appreciate what I made, to give it value. When I stopped writing poems about America and retiring principals and started writing stories about shape-shifting aliens and barbarian-women fighting giant crabs, I didn’t get the accolades anymore (one time I handed my mom several chapters of what I thought was my sci-fi magnum opus; the only thing I remember her saying when she finished was “it was very violent”). So I stopped creating.

I’m still unlearning these beliefs. I’ve spent the last two years developing new habits and patterns. I got on a workout regimen. I started meditating in the morning. I’m discovering the value of doing things I don’t feel like doing. I’m learning how to stick to a course instead of letting myself be blown around by my moods. I’m finding freedom in routine.

Now I’m applying the discipline I’ve learned to writing. I hope I can make a habit of this, and that it’ll help me organize some of the thoughts I’ve been having about everything I’ve been reading and learning about over the last few years.

kentucky route zero

There’s a scene in the game Kentucky Route Zero where the game’s protagonist, Conway, is touring a whiskey distillery run by glowing orange skeletons. Conway came to the distillery to ask for directions, but the skeletons there seem to think he is a new hire. There is a feeling of mounting dread as you guide Conway through the cavernous structure, following a skeleton who explains how all the employees of the distillery are each working off some sort of debt.

The tour ends back where it started, and the tour guide offers Conway a shot of the “top shelf” whiskey, as a sort of “welcome aboard.” Conway, who we have learned over the course of the game so far is a recovering alcoholic, tries one last time to explain that he is not here for a job, but the skeleton doesn’t seem to understand. Finally there is just one option for you to click on: “Drink.” As you try to move your cursor around the screen, looking for some other way out, the cursor is taken out of our control, pulled back to that final option.

Not only does it break the rules of video games, it breaks the rules of computer interfacing in general. The experience of moving your mouse and watching the cursor disobey you is surprisingly unsettling. When the first act of Kentucky Route Zero was released, the trend in video games was open worlds, endless choices, and multiple endings. In contrast, the inexorability of the “drink” moment hits like a punch in the gut. It made me laugh the way tense moments in horror movies sometimes make me laugh, and the game is full of moments like this.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game that was released in five acts over the course of nine years, starting in 2011. The concluding act was just released last month. It begins with Conway, a delivery driver making his last delivery, pulling into a gas station for directions. While the sun sets in the background, the attendant tells Conway he needs to take “the zero” to get to his destination. Night falls, weird things start happening, and it becomes apparent that the zero is not an ordinary highway. We learn early on that there was a bad wreck nearby, and it’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that Conway died in that wreck and is now a spirit in some sort of limbo. But that’s not it. There are no such easy answers in this story.

What unfolds is a journey through an otherworld. The zero doesn’t appear to be the afterlife--it’s more like an axis running through different planes of existence. People are known to travel back and forth along the mysterious highway, between here and another place. At one point another character tells us that the people in this other place are like us, but different. Glowing orange skeletons aren’t even the strangest things you encounter on your quest.

Playing Kentucky Route Zero feels like playing Myst when I was a kid--the weird mixture of curious wonder and hair-raising uneasiness. I can’t decide if I’m longing to visit this place or if I’m dreading what’s around the next corner, but I want to go deeper. Like Myst, there are people who went before you into this place, and you need to find out what happened to them. Like all great surreal adventures, it’s more than a series of “OMG WTF” moments--there’s a thread running through it all. The themes of people struggling with debt, losing touch with family, and trying to find home are all recurrent, and deeply poignant for a story that started shortly after the great recession, and is ending during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s hard to play a game like this in the evening, then get up in the morning and try to work--especially when I do both at the same desk. But it’s worth the struggle to experience a truly groundbreaking example of video games as art.