Category: Politics

Dynamic Tensions – Hospitality and Privacy

Please excuse this very rough string of thoughts. I haven’t posted anything in a few weeks, and while I would prefer to work on this until it’s better researched, I want to a.) strive towards consistency in my writing practice, and b.) show that holding temporary thoughts is not a bad thing.

I’ll place posts that fit this form into what I’ll call Dynamic Tensions. Similar to the idea that I have in my mind of what thesis, antithesis, and synthesis gets at, I want to highlight potential perceived contradictions or contrary thoughts and write about them, how they might collide, and what resolutions might look like. I hold these ideas lightly and am willing to revise my thinking as I learn more.

The inspiration for today is from a video I was watching covering Derrida and Foucault. Derrida’s idea of unconditional hospitality was discussed. This is the idea of conceiving of hospitality as a maximally empathetic activity that strips out the normal boundaries of self and other. It runs with the “what’s mine is yours” approach and offers access to guests unlimited and unrestricted access to your belongings (usually discussed as house and resources). It’s been a while since I’ve revisited Derrida’s writing on it, so I might be hazy on some details – such as whether Derrida used this for State level interactions, or meant to apply it to interpersonal interactions as well. Also, it’s not clear if he meant to be prescriptive of this, or it was meant as a kind of thought experiment to critique norms. For now, I will set those questions aside.

On a level, I like the idea of unconditional hospitality right up until it meets “my stuff” – hence why I’m not sure if it’s meant to apply to individuals or as a function of the State. While yes, I’m squeamish of the idea of abolishing private property rights (or at least loosening my tyranny over how my stuff is to be used), I can see the intuition at play to bring more empathy into the world by bringing the Other closer to the sense of self. Perhaps in a Kantian categorical imperative, or in an ideal communist society, where these are norms that everyone follows, the division between my stuff and your stuff would feel different.

But one area that I have a harder time reconciling is an absolute sense of a right to privacy. I don’t quite mean in the data sense that I have a right not to be snooped on by the government, but in a more practical sense – the ability to have solitude and shut the rest of the world away. If someone has an absolute right to my dwelling (the front door doesn’t have a lock), can I still hold on to a firm line of privacy? Would it just be a first come, first served approach? Am I entitled to hold onto physical space as a domain inaccessible to others, or does my right to privacy end at my ability to hold private thoughts in my head?

I’m sure a number of assumptions above are wrong, and I’m missing some key premises to fill in the details. However I offer this as a rough sketch that flitted through my mind while being reminded of Derrida.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Food for Thought – On Self-Discipline

Michael Sugrue recently posted a series of one-liner observations on his YouTube Community page; one of them grabbed a hold of me, and I wanted to share it.

“Brakes make a car go faster: self-discipline produces freedom”

While it reminded me of Jocko Willink’s Discipline Equals Freedom mantra, it still gave me pause to reflect on this quasi-koan. There are two paths for speed – you either are able to control it, or you give over to speed for its own sake. Unless you disregard all safety and practicality, there is little benefit to unrestrained speed or freedom. It is through imposing limits (or the ability to control the forces at play) that you are truly able to take advantage of what speed (or it is a proxy of) has to offer. It is narrow-minded to believe in absolute freedom without guardrails. To believe we should live without restraint is to place yourself and your needs above everyone else. You might win on a few games, but it is a poor strategy in the long term that hurts everyone.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Ethical Shopping

While I don’t condone thinking of capitalism, consumerism and consumption as hallmarks of Christmas, it’s something that is nevertheless on my mind. After a record year for some big box (or big warehouse) retailers last year, many folks in the ethical space really hammered home that we must vote with our money wisely and choose more ethical options when it comes to shopping. Supporting local, supporting products or services that aren’t wasteful, supporting employers that pay good wages are all values that hit louder when we felt safer just staying home and shopping from our phones.

This year, I’ve made some attempts at being more mindful of my shopping, though with a toddler at home during a pandemic, my flexibility is a little more constrained than in the past. Recently I came into an ethical shopping scenario that I found difficult to find a perfect solution for, and it involves comic books.

I’ve been a nerd for a long time and loved comic books as a kid. While I didn’t always have the means or funds to regularly purchase comic books, I would try to keep up with stories through alternative sources like the now shuttered Wizard magazine. Now that I’m older, with more disposable income, I’d like to step back into comics and attempt some regular readership.

Off the top, my goal would be to support local and to ensure I’m paying for the art, rather than finding easy, cheap access to the stories. The first constraint is, as of writing, we don’t have a comic book shop here in town. There is a shop that’s closer to me the next town over, however I feel a deeper connection to the comic shops in Kitchener-Waterloo, a town not that far from me, but still a commitment to travel to for things like this.

The second constraint is I’m trying to be mindful of the environment and the fact that I tend to be a packrat, and I’ve accepted that I don’t intend to collect comics, but just want to read the books, so I would be fine with paying for digital versions of the comic books. However, there is no service that I can find that would purchase the rights to read the stories from comic book shops. Instead, the near-universal option would be to pay for digital books from a platform called Comixology, which is unfortunately a subsidiary of Amazon (side bar – many publishers have their own digital archives that you can pay for access to, though Comixology seems to be the only service that allows you to buy current books, whereas publishers seem to have a lag of when the stories appear in their lists). I already have an Audible subscription, and I purchase way too much from Amazon already, so I am hesitant to give more money to the big A.

The way I see it, there is no easy solution for this – I can pay money to a big corporation for the ease of reading at home (and hoping that the money spent through Comixology makes its way back to the creators fairly – which I doubt given the comic book industry, artists and writers are not compensated well) but then I’m not supporting local businesses, or I can make special trips into town to buy from the local shop, which is inconvenient, requires driving, and requires me to purchase physical books.

In the end, I made a trip into town (I had other errands to run, so it was a more efficient trip) and bought recent releases at the shop, AND (in full, shameful disclosure), I bought a collected series on Comixology that wasn’t available in the shop. While this was hardly the most ethical solution in the moment, I still think it was a good exercise in thinking through the options and consequences of my choices.

Not fully related to the comics example, but in parallel to this consideration is voting with your money on art worth making. Chris Stuckmann released a short meditation recently on films and the question of why movies aren’t made like they used to be (in the sense of artistic films that were riskier box office bets, rather than the safe intellectual properties we see coming out all the time). The same conversations are being had in music, where it’s harder for bands to get a foothold in the world of streaming, and the only big acts tend to be bands that were big before streaming.

In his essay, Stuckmann reflects that our choices to see certain kinds of film sends messages to studios and the system of what works are likely to make money, so the incentives are to continue making only those kinds of art. I’ll let his video speak for itself, but it gives me something consider when I’m choosing how to support art and how to consume more ethically (if such thing is really possible under capitalism).

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

World Limits

I’ve been thinking about the limits of my world, specifically as it relates to my ability to understand it. Much of the time, I operate as if I have access to capital-T Truth, that I have some connection with facts about the world. It’s easy to fall into this kind of thinking – when I can predict and explain events, it gives me feedback that I know things about the world in a meaningful sense.

But I also know that this confidence in my knowledge is not as strong as I assume it to be. I have to remind myself to adjudicate the claims I encounter, or to remind myself of the difference between history and the past. It’s also good to listen to others who have learned about issues from multiple vantage points (see this amazing conversation on the Tim Ferriss podcast with Noah Feldman, and his experiences with constitution building in the Middle East).

Generally speaking, all of our experience in life has presented us with a mostly successful set of interactions with the world, but those interactions are subjective and limited. Taking the long view of world events, learning new languages, and empathy provide the Archimedean point beyond ourselves to attempt to stand on some point of objectivity (if this is even possible).

As Wittgenstein says, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” This shouldn’t be literally taken to mean language (though I’m assuming that’s what Wittgenstein meant), but we should apply this to our understanding vis a vis experience. The limits of my world are constrained by the limits of my experience and the mental framework I use to make sense of it. If I want to seek to expand my worldview, it’s important to both prune out the dead branches of knowledge while cultivating new seeds of wisdom.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

My Best Interest

If you want a good newsletter, you should check out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newsletter. I signed up a few months back and have thoroughly enjoyed each update. I find him such a fascinating and inspiring person, not just from his bodybuilding work, his acting career, or even his time in politics, but above all because he strikes me as a fundamentally decent person.

He made two interrelated observations in the latest issue that stuck out for me. A significant portion of the email dealt with his clarifying and elaborating on his viral “screw your freedoms” moment during an interview talking about why people should get their vaccines. In his expanded comments, he urges his readers to pay attention to the motivations of people trying to give them advice, and discard those opinions which are not in your best interest (including his own). By this, he means fitness influencers and politicians, whose motivations are clicks and ad revenue in the former, as well as outrage, donations, and votes in the latter. When it comes to your health, these people are not giving advice based on your own health and wellbeing.

The second related comment is that if you can’t trust government or social media, who should you trust? To that, he says you should trust your doctor because your doctor took an oath to protect you. Your doctor is paid with only one expectation in return – the promotion of your wellbeing and health.

Talk to your doctor, not people who don’t have your health as their main responsibility. The Instagram and Facebook accounts you follow that give information on vaccines are not concerned about your health. They are concerned with getting more followers and making money.

I have seen way too many stories about people who listened to politicized information about the vaccine instead of their doctors, and then changed their minds when it was too late.

At the end of the day, everyone has to make their own decision about getting vaccinated. But if I can inspire even a few of you or your friends or family to avoid another one of these tragic stories that tore families apart, I want to do it.

He urges us to trust the experts and take wisdom from their experience. When presented with advice, we should ask ourselves what the advice-giver gets in return for our compliance. Do they benefit from our participation? What do we lose by their gain? These are important checks that we should make when deciding what’s in our best interest.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

A Draft Ontology of Shipwrecks and Identity

In a recent podcast episode I was listening to, the hosts were speaking glibly about progressivism. I won’t name the show because who was saying it is ultimately unimportant. At the crux of their tangential discussion away from Plato’s Greater and Minor Hippias was their dismissal of progressivist attitudes towards the flow of history, that those who come later in history will assert some sort of superiority (technological, moral, intellectual) over less developed, unenlightened peoples of the past. While I think they were onto something in thinking that any sort of change is not prima facie better, I was unconvinced of their move to dismiss it because they didn’t adequately set out a criteria by which to judge advancement. Instead, they proceeded to discuss (within the context of Plato’s dialogue) the relative comparisons of Athenian and Spartan laws. And when they came to a discussion in the text about the relative merits of spoons according to function and form, the one host came dangerously close to undermining his rebuttals of progressivism in my estimation.

But this isn’t a post about their podcast episode – truthfully I haven’t taken the time to go back and listen to their post for the fidelity of the above paragraph because that’s not what I want to write about. It serves as a frame from what it made me think about.

Instead, their conversation reminded me of folks who complain about changes to our understanding of the world, especially as it relates to mental health and/or personal identity concerning gender. There is a resistance to keeping an open mind because it doesn’t harmonize with a worldview they hold that’s often formed and set in ones late teens or early twenties. You see this come out in a number of ways in the way they talk about these issues, but a canonical refrain is “back in my day, they didn’t have x,” whether that is expanded definitions of mental health issues or nonbinary categories of gender. Instead, the proliferation of new words to capture experiences is seen as a self-evident refutation of these developments because they think the relative plurality of new understandings of the world must not be grounded in anything solid or universal. That is to say, if they haven’t experienced it, then it must clearly not be real in an ontological sense.

When I say real in an ontological sense I mean that the phenomenon the word is attached to doesn’t carry existence attached to a concrete thing1. In the podcast, they discussed this in the context of trees and trying to identify tree types. In the Platonic tradition, trees are trees because the thing I’m seeing out my window that grows tall, has a solid brown body covered in a rough exterior that is thicker near the bottom and branches out at the top, terminating in green thin pieces, participates in the Form of tree or tree-ness. The concept of tree is tied to the physical object, but to Plato the Form of tree exists independently of the tree in front of me. In biology, living things are categorized according to common, reliable traits that distinguish different types of organisms from another. A maple tree and a pine tree don’t share many common physical appearance traits, but they share a sufficient number of them that we call them both trees. The concept of tree is an abstraction used to describe something about the physical object. If we are being rigorous, there may be a debate whether the concept of tree as described above (as a Platonic Form) has an ontological existence, but for the purposes of our discussion, tree as a category is real because it is tied to a thing that physically exists out there in the world.

And so to circle back, the anti-progressivist disclaims new labels on people on the thinking that the label/category doesn’t map to something real. There is a reduction problem in their mind – the mental disorder or gender identity (in this sentence, I treat them as two separate concepts that are not intended to be inclusive) are not mapped to anything that can be pointed to. To them, gender identity is reducible only to secondary sexual characteristics (genitals), and mental health is based on stereotype behaviours easily observed (signs) rather than reported (symptoms). In the anti-progressivist mind, creating a new name or category means creating a new phenomenon; a phenomenon that did not exist before.

Here we come to the title of this post’s line of thinking. What the anti-progressivist is confusing is the difference between creating new categories, and giving words to describe something already existing but had yet to become clarified. For this, I invoke the late Paul Virilio and shipwrecks. The anti-progressivist2 treats mental disorder and gender identity as concepts invented wholly new like the concept of a shipwreck. Before the invention of the ship, there was no concept of shipwreck, or train derailment before trains, car crash before automobiles, etc.3 These concept categories did not exist previously, and their existence is contingent on us inventing them (even if by accident). But I think this is the wrong way to capture what is going on when we create a new category of understanding.

It is not the case that more children are coming out as transgender because its faddish, trendy, or a socially acceptable way of acting out against social norms. To the contrary, it’s more likely that more children (or people generally) are publicly identifying as trans (or nonbinary, or homosexual/bisexual/asexual, etc.) because we’ve given them language to make sense of what they are feeling within. I do not have a source to provide, but I read a lament once that because of previously draconian crackdowns on LGBT communities, many people did not live long enough to allow their existences to be counted. The number of people who identify as LGBT is not growing because people are suddenly “becoming queer.” Rather, our language and society is moving towards a place that has space for a plurality of lives.

And I think the same thing is happening as we redefine and clarify mental health issues – these issues are likely not new4, but instead we are better able to understand the internal lives of others because we are listening to what these individuals are saying about their experiences. We aren’t inventing new categories so much as we are finally recognizing things that can now be counted. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. The old terms that were used to medicalize people’s internal lives were insufficient to either understand or treat the person, and so we refine our language to better capture their experiences.

When we reclassify our language, we create nuance. We create a more interesting and vibrant world. This is a good thing – we understand the world in new ways and can appreciate the diversity and complexity that comes from this understanding. I agree that progress for its own sake is not automatically good. Progress must be paired with wisdom and experience if we want to avoid creating harm in the future. But progress should not be halted on the belief that change is flippant, nor should it be dismissed because it introduces complexity to our worldview. The anti-progressivist seems to hold that society is sliding from order to disorder, away from some ideal that we must actively work to return to. To them, anything new is to be distrusted merely because past progress yielded harms. They place more weight on the mis-steps and ignore the improvements to the quality of our lives. This view is just as false as assuming a teleological bent to society evolving – that society is always aiming at getting better.

Society is neither sliding away from perfection nor building towards it. It is moving from simplicity to complexity; from blunt and clumsy to fine and precise.5 As our understanding of the world grows, so too must our language to describe it. With understanding comes language, with language comes empathy, with empathy comes diversity, and from diversity comes strength.6

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

[P.S. – A few days after publishing this, I read a post from Seth Godin on Cyber-realists that says some of what I say above about wisdom tempering progress, but much more succinctly.]

Notes:

1For those who have studied metaphysics and ontology, I apologize if my take comes off as uninformed – I must admit that this is me working through the ideas in my head.

2I’ve typed this word many times in this post without critically thinking whether this is the appropriate term to give to the person/line of thinking to which I’m responding. However, this post is mostly a first-draft attempt at clarifying my thoughts, and so I leave it for now with the understanding that this is all mutable upon further consideration.

3This is perhaps one of the few areas where I’m sympathetic to the anti-progressivist – not all progress is devoid of negatives or downsides. With any effect, there will be unintended or unanticipated side effects and consequences. The technology that helps preserve food and makes it cheaper to produce might also be causing health problems from fast food, for example.

4Here I’m talking about reclassifying old or outdated diagnostic methods, rather than genuinely new classifications that are the result of modern life, though this might be up for debate – is it genuinely new or merely a sub-classification of already existing conditions, such as video game addiction. I’m out of my expertise here, so I can’t say anything with authority on the matter.

5There is a conversation to be had here that brings Kuhn into the party, but this post has groaned on too long. I like Kuhn’s ideas that rather than a steady march of progress, science changes through the adoption of new worldviews, but I think this is less about knowledge and more about the sociology of knowing-peoples. People, ideology, and politics makes science messy.

6Admittedly, this is appears to be a slippery slope that requires a lot more argument to make clear. As with Kuhn, this could be left to a different post, but my main argument is that diversity is good because it hedges against downsides. I think there are limited cases where uniformity and homogeneity are preferable, but those are exceptions that prove the rule.

The Insidious Internet Business

I love Hank and John Green from the vlogbrothers YouTube channel. I don’t know how they manage to crank out so many thoughtful videos, but each time I check-in, I’m treated to another video where they somehow connect a thoughtful musing into a reflection of substance.

Feel free to check out the full video of one of Hank’s recent entries “Wrong on the Internet,” but below I have captured some of the interesting points that connected with thoughts I’ve had and resonated with me.

  • Layperson epistemology – it’s difficult for the average layperson to make sense of conflicting/contrary pieces of information when the business of the internet is motivated towards churning out content that screams for your attention.
  • Similar to the incompleteness theorem, solutions we create for problems will be temporary until we innovate new solutions based on updated information and advances in technology. This can bring about cynicism related to Kuhnian-style revolutions of our worldviews, that problems never seem to go away.
  • The internet business is not an information game, it’s a rhetoric game. Rhetoric is the prime mover of information, especially when hard data is absent. You can whinge about how “the other side” is devoid of logic and refuses to see the truth before their eyes, or you can accept this as a fact and play the game to win the rhetoric game.
  • Memes (of the information variety, not the funny pictures kind) that make you feel good smug are super dangerous for distracting the issues. Corporations might be the biggest cause of our climate or capitalist problems, but we can’t just immediately remove them and expect all our woes to be solved. The services they provide are still required for society to function.
  • Shifting blame breeds complacency. Instead, personal accountability and action at the individual level are still important.
  • A problem well-formed is half solved, but the internet business is not about forming good problems. In our smugness, we play games to win or gain prestige, and so reactions move far quicker and are easier than responses. In order to create well-formed problems, we need to place greater value on responding to solutions, articulating our values, and using tools like science, politics, and economics to optimize according to our values. (h/t to Seth Godin’s thinking that influenced me here)
  • On the topic of responding to emergencies (starting at 2:40 of the video), it’s important to remember in our smugness that we are not, in fact, rational creatures.
  • The insidious effect of the internet business: “If the tweet makes us feel good, we don’t tend to spend a lot of time doing a bunch of research to tell us whether or not it actually is good.”

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Meaningful Actions

Over the weekend, I attended a virtual board meeting for engineering education. One of the reports pertained to a working-group’s findings and recommended actions to support the aims the 30 by 30 Campaign to address low representation of women in the engineering profession. This is a great initiative and I’m looking at ways we can improve our own processes to support women in STEM in our programs at the college. There was a comment that made me think, and it’s worth considering.

One of the board members expressed support for the report, but also commented that she had provided input as early as the 1990’s on this very initiative. Her comment was not meant to cast doubt over the process, but instead highlighted two important things – that this is not a new issue, and that many people have tried to make sweeping changes for the profession, which clearly hasn’t been entirely successful. Her advice was to be cautious about taking on too much scope with the recommendations, and instead to support a “divide and conquer” strategy for making targeted, meaningful actions to promote change.

I don’t hold any illusions that we will solve systemic issues overnight. If I’ve learned anything this past year, it’s that my hopes for reform are likely to fail and that instead of refinement, we should be aiming at transformative changes.

There is also another tension – on some level, this line of thinking suggests a teleological progression of progress for society and culture. I want to think that our culture is aiming at progress (“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is a powerful vision to work towards), but a skeptical voice reminds me that, like our misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution, there is nothing inherent in the progress of change that aims towards a higher, final form. A kind of defeatism can creep in when one thinks that meaningful actions do not contribute towards progress, but instead are just the spinning of our collective wheels.

I reject this defeatist view and want to aim towards a higher vision. I grant that the universe is largely amoral and unconcerned with our progress. So, instead, we must clearly define our values and principles, and take actions towards achieving these ends. The actions are neither good nor bad in an absolute sense. Rather, we mark progress with how close we come to realizing the values we want to see manifested in our lives. Meaningful actions are measured not against morality, but instead on efficacy for the outcomes. There are trade-offs and consequences along the way, and so we must be prudent. Both history and mythology have given us plenty of examples of why hubris should be avoided.

I don’t have a good answer on what meaningful actions we ought to settle on as part of our agenda. As noted, this issue has been discussed far longer than my tenure in the employment game. I’ll defer to folks much smarter than I, and try to learn from their efforts to do my part.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Supporting Community

Since the birth of our son, my wife has joined an online mom’s group in our town. Among the various posts asking for advice or to share items for sale, there periodically comes posts from the admin notifying the group of a request for aid. Families who find themselves in a financial pinch can contact the admin to anonymously ask for support.

The other day, my wife saw one of these posts, and in reflecting on how expensive life can be with our newborn, she felt instantly connected with the call for help. The pandemic has been hard on most people, but we feel we’ve been very fortunate to have our jobs reasonably secure this last year. While I have lost two side jobs over the course of the pandemic, my main source of income allows us to be fairly comfortable.

So, without much deliberation, we picked up some gift cards for the grocery store, loaded it with funds to help with groceries for a week, and offered them to the administrator. This is on top of the automatic monthly charitable contributions I started in November.

In the moment, this had me reflecting on what it means to be a part of a community. Setting aside questions about the role of government and the problems caused by exploitative capitalism, there is a strong moral case to be found in looking out for our community neighbours. We want our communities to be vibrant and healthy. Hyper-individualism may maximize utility for you and your family unit, but I think that outlook discounts the intangible benefits we see when we pitch in to help people feel safe, secure, and taken care of. Take your pick of moral argument:

  • Deontological – we have a moral imperative to help those who experience suffering due to a lack of resources.
  • Utilitarian – the morally right thing to do is to use surplus utility to offset the suffering experienced by others.
  • Feminism & Intersectional Ethics – redistributing wealth, even in the short-term, helps to buttress against the effects of systems that oppress people. This also applies to those who by luck or happenstance are experiencing suffering.
  • Rights-based & Social Contract – people have a right to security of person, and while this right is usually handled by the state, the community shares some of this responsibility as part of the social contract; if you want to derive the benefits of living in a community, you ought to be willing to support and contribute.
  • Virtue ethics – charity and magnanimity are virtues of the ethical person; giving neither too little, nor to excess.
  • Theory of Justice – if I were not in a privileged position to feel safe and secure, I would hope that my community could help me. It is better to work to lift all life conditions and raise the floor of suffering.

In truth, I often feel like a terrible neighbour because of my social habits. I feel awkward meeting new people and making small talk, so I’ll wave at neighbours at a distance instead of striking up conversation. Over a year into living in this house and we just learned the last names of one of our neighbours (who have been fantastic the entire time we’ve lived here – dropping off gifts for our son a few times since he’s been born). Where I lack the social grace to learn about the lives of my neighbours in a meaningful way, I hope I can make up a little bit of good will that comes from answering a call from a stranger online.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan