Why is the idea of social engineering so alarming to people, and haphazard piecemeal replacement or displacement of organic life being with engineered activities so unworthy of concern?

For someone who has watched the User Experience profession evolve from calling itself Information Architecture, to an array of User Experience roles, and is now beginning to question the term “user” as it considers the importance of the non-functional, emotional and story, the language of this passage from Walter Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” is startlingly relevant:

Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand.

There is much to contemplate in this passage related to information, experience and brand, and the evolution of our commercial culture.

In his essay/letter “Some Reflections on Kafka” Benjamin shares a striking quote from Stanley Eddington:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

We are subjective beings, living in subjectively significant worlds, but our minds think in terms of objects and remember only objects.

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Only through remembering objectively do we recall subjective experience.

Only through imagining objectively do we evoke subjective experience.

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The source of our valuing is beyond the grasp of our minds, but we depend on our minds for access to what we care about.

The source of our valuing can be apprehended but not comprehended.

We feel it at our fingertips, but our hands cannot close around it, because it lacks edges.

So we close our fingers around what reflects our valuing and allows us to value things.

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The finite is defined when its outer edges are felt out. The infinite cannot be defined, because outer edges are the one thing infinity lacks.

But in a very strange sense each individual bears the image of infinity through experience and its horizon of blindness. Our experience is to us infinite because we cannot define it. We define within it.

Alternatively, perhaps we only learn the meaning of infinity through experiencing our former finitude retrospectively by expanding our present “everything”. Seeing the old boundless “everything” whole against a new background of boundless “everything”, one knows his former blindness. Not only the expanded “everything” is seen. More importantly, one is aware that this new boundlessness is bounded, and learns to make a distinction between our own finite “everything” and infinity. It can take more than one experience of finitude to recognize this fact. The first can look a lot like transcendence from a world of illusion into the world of truth.

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We seem to be made in an image of infinity, but the image is so convincing that we can confuse the image for the real thing. And this confusion is deeply pleasurable, so we’re less motivated to dispel it (by actively seeking out how we may be wrong) than to reinforce it (by demonstrating how we are right). Some confuse their individual being with this image. The real danger, though, is collective being, because then the consensus of relevant opinions confirms each individual’s error, and there’s nobody to correct the error except those whose opinions are irrelevant.

Brand: the systematic attempt to outfit an organization’s or individual’s Who — which is never essentially a What — with a suitable, representative and compelling public What.

Brand planning: the systematic attempt to understand a public’s What-receptivity, in order to present an organization’s Who to it — that is, their brand — as suitably, representatively and compellingly as possible.

“No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is — as distinct from the question of who he is — which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless.” — Hannah Arendt

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“The basis of man’s life with man is twofold, and it is one — the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow men in this way. That this capacity lies so immeasurably fallow constitutes the real weakness and questionableness of the human race: actual humanity exists only where this capacity unfolds. On the other hand, of course, an empty claim for confirmation, without devotion for being and becoming, again and again mars the truth of the life between man and man.” — Buber

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Brand positioning: the systematic attempt to outfit an organization’s or individual’s Who with a suitable public What.

Singing sonar songs, we flit in the dark, not even flying, bouncing words off invisible ears arrayed in space, ascertaining where this other stands relative to ourselves in reality.

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“Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.” — Heraclitus

“What Homer says of it is so true and so terrible it pierces us through: ‘the muse loved him dearly and gave to him good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet song.’ — This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good and evil, that is her way of loving dearly! And everyone will interpret for himself why it is we thinkers and poets have to give our eyes in exchange.” — Nietzsche

“The life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. It does not exist in virtue of activities alone which have some thing for their object. / I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone. / This and the like together establish the realm of It. / But the realm of Thou has a different basis. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds. / When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation.” — Buber

“Our fellow men, it is true, live round about us as components of the independent world over against us, but in so far as we grasp each one as a human being he ceases to be a component and is there in his self-being as I am; his being at a distance does not exist merely for me, but it cannot be separated from the fact of my being at a distance for him. The first movement of human life puts men into mutual existence which is fundamental and even. But the second movement puts them into mutual relation with me which happens from time to time and by no means in an even way, but depends on our carrying it out. Relation is fulfilled in a full making present when I think of the other not merely as this very one, but experience, in the particular approximation of the given moment, the experience belonging to him as this very one. Here and now for the first time does the other become a self for me, and the making independent of his being which was carried out in the first movement of distancing is shown in a new highly pregnant sense as a presupposition — a presupposition of this ‘becoming a self for me’, which is, however, to be understood not in a psychological but in a strictly ontological sense, and should therefore rather be called ‘becoming a self with me’. But it is ontologically complete only when the other knows that he is made present by me in his self and when this knowledge induces the process of his inmost self-becoming. For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between the one and the other, between men, that is, pre-eminently in the mutuality of the making present — in the making present of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in his own self by the other — together with the mutuality of acceptance, of affirmation and confirmation.” — Buber

I might have to reorganize my library by the metaphysical attitude of the authors. I’d have poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, businessmen, design theorists, anthropologists, artists, historians, sociologists, theologians, etc. all grouped together by philosophical like-mindedness, liberated from their inadequate categories (or maybe benevolently imprisoned by my own).

My primary consideration would not be the usability of the system, but rather, what would it be like to sit in my chair, surrounded by my books organized this way?

(Experimental pano shot of my untidied office.)

Maybe Jungian type describes attitudes one takes toward the yaos (What, How, Why) in one’s daily functioning, where the Enneagram indicates focus of interest on one or several of the yaos. In other words, maybe the triad can serve as a unifying structure. Just a thought.

Who is the way one approaches the questions What? How? and Why?

To wonder how another person approaches What? How? and Why? is to regard that person as Who? instead of as an answer to one of your own questions — as a thing, or a means, or a projection.

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“Thou” is the proper name for “Who?”.

I can’t decide which vision is more damaging: the Fall or Progress. The former results in attitudes of resignation or ignorant reactionism, the other leads to complacence or reckless utopianism.

The controversy of Darwinism / Creationism / Intelligent Design owes its intensity to the conflict between the Fall and Progress. Each vision wants its mythical embodiment taught to the young.

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Meliorism is the way out of this conflict, but meliorism requires proper education. Unfortunately, in our mania to quantify education we’ve lost all sense of paideia. Only banausos (facts and skills) can be quantified, and we are far too poorly educated to know how to approach that which resists quantification.

We teach only the doing of one’s determinate duty, not reflection on duty.

Consequently, our society is more and more like an autonomous, self-building machine without an operator.

The world is stuffed with public philistines and private romantics, and also people who are one or the other at different times of day, but never simultaneously. Integrating the concrete, the practical and the meaningful is impossible if one wishes to protect meaning from the “defilement” of explicit language, or if one has no persistent sense of meaning at all, nor any expectation that meaning ought to exist (which is already a sense of meaning).

Anyone who wishes to integrate the concrete, the practical and the meaningful will find himself caught in a strange kind of cross-fire between philistines and romantics, sympathizing with aspects of both, but disagreeing with the one point where the two sides vehemently agree: that communion is neither possible nor desirable.

Holy crap, Walter Benjamin was a completely lazy, useless man. From Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Illuminations:

Viewed from the outside, it was the position of the free-lance writer who lives by his pen; however, as only Max Rychner seems to have observed, he did so in a “peculiar way,” for “his publications were anything but frequent” and “it was never quite clear … to what extent he was able to draw upon other resources.” Rychner’s suspicions were justified in every respect. Not only were “other resources” at his disposal prior to his emigration, but behind the facade of free-lance writing he led the considerably freer, albeit constantly endangered, life of an homme de lettres whose home was a library that had been gathered with extreme care but was by no means intended as a working tool; it consisted of treasures whose value, as Benjamin often repeated, was proved by the fact that he had not read them — a library, then, which was guaranteed not to be useful or at the service of any profession. Such an existence was something unknown in Germany, and almost equally unknown was the occupation which Benjamin, only because he had to make a living, derived from it: not the occupation of a literary historian and scholar with the requisite number of fat tomes to his credit, but that of a critic and essayist who regarded even the essay form as too vulgarly extensive and would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line. He was certainly not unaware of the fact that his professional ambitions were directed at something that simply did not exist in Germany, where, despite Lichtenberg, Lessing, Schiegel, Heine, and Nietzsche, aphorisms have never been appreciated and people have usually thought of criticism as something disreputably subversive which might be enjoyed — if at all — only in the cultural section of a newspaper. It was no accident that Benjamin chose the French language for expressing this ambition: … “The goal I set for myself … is to be regarded as the foremost critic of German literature. The trouble is that for more than fifty years literary criticism in Germany has not been considered a serious genre. To create a place in criticism for oneself means to re-create it as a genre”)

… One could say that Benjamin did not prepare for anything but the “profession” of a private collector and totally independent scholar, what was then called Privatgelehrter. Under the circumstances of the time his studies, which he had begun before the First World War, could have ended only with a university career, but unbaptized Jews were still barred from such a career, as they were from any career in the civil service. Such Jews were permitted a Habilitation and at most could attain the rank of an unpaid Extraordinarius; it was a career which presupposed rather than provided an assured income. The doctorate which Benjamin decided to take only “out of consideration for my family” and his subsequent attempt at Habilitation were intended as the basis for his family’s readiness to place such an income at his disposal.

This situation changed abruptly after the war: the inflation had impoverished, even dispossessed, large numbers of the bourgeoisie, and in the Weimar Republic a university career was open even to unbaptized Jews. The unhappy story of the Habilitation shows clearly how little Benjamin took these altered circumstances into account and how greatly he continued to be dominated by prewar ideas in all financial matters. For from the outset the Habilitation had only been intended to call his father “to order” by supplying “evidence of public recognition” (Briefe I, 293) and to make him grant his son, who was in his thirties at that time, an income that was adequate and, one should add, commensurate with his social standing. At no time, not even when he had already come close to the Communists, did he doubt that despite his chronic conflicts with his parents he was entitled to such a subvention and that their demand that he “work for a living” was “unspeakable”. When his father said later that he could not or would not increase the monthly stipend he was paying anyway, even if his son achieved the Habilitation, this naturally removed the basis of Benjamin’s entire undertaking. Until his parents’ death in 1930, Benjamin was able to solve the problem of his livelihood by moving back into the parental home, living there first with his family (he had a wife and a son), and after his separation — which came soon enough — by himself. (He was not divorced until 1930.) It is evident that this arrangement caused him a great deal of suffering, but it is just as evident that in all probability he never seriously considered another solution. It is also striking that despite his permanent financial trouble he managed throughout these years constantly to enlarge his library. His one attempt to deny himself this expensive passion — he visited the great auction houses the way others frequent gambling casinos — and his resolution even to sell something “in an emergency” ended with his feeling obliged to “deaden the pain of this readiness” by making fresh purchases; and his one demonstrable attempt to free himself from financial dependence on his family ended with the proposal that his father immediately give him “funds enabling me to buy an interest in a secondhand bookstore”. This is the only gainful employment that Benjamin ever considered. Nothing came of it, of course.

In view of the realities of the Germany of the twenties and of Benjamin’s awareness that he would never be able to make a living with his pen — “there are places in which I can earn a minimum and places in which I can live on a minimum, but there is no place where I can do both” (Briefe II, 563) — his whole attitude may strike one as unpardonably irresponsible. Yet it was anything but a case of irresponsibility. It is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth; the former seem carried away by a recklessness of which they are totally unaware, the latter seem possessed by a stinginess which actually is nothing but the old ingrained fear of what the next day may bring.

Moreover, in his attitude to financial problems Benjamin was by no means an isolated case. If anything, his outlook was typical of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals, although probably no one else fared so badly with it. Its basis was the mentality of the fathers, successful businessmen who did not think too highly of their own achievements and whose dream it was that their sons were destined for higher things. It was the secularized version of the ancient Jewish belief that those who “learn” — the Torah or the Talmud, that is, God’s Law — were the true elite of the people and should not be bothered with so vulgar an occupation as making money or working for it. This is not to say that in this generation there were no father-son conflicts; on the contrary, the literature of the time is full of them, and if Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients, we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex. But as a rule these conflicts were resolved by the sons’ laying claim to being geniuses, or, in the case of the numerous Communists from well-to-do homes, to being devoted to the welfare of mankind — in any case, to aspiring to things higher than making money — and the fathers were more than willing to grant that this was a valid excuse for not making a living. Where such claims were not made or recognized, catastrophe was just around the corner. Benjamin was a case in point: his father never recognized his claims, and their relations were extraordinarily bad. Another such case was Kafka, who — possibly because he really was something like a genius — was quite free of the genius mania of his environment, never claimed to be a genius, and ensured his financial independence by taking an ordinary job at the Prague workmen’s compensation office. (His relations with his father were of course equally bad, but for different reasons.) And still, no sooner had Kafka taken this position than he saw in it a “running start for suicides,” as though he were obeying an order that says “You have to earn your grave.”

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Today the homme de lettres strikes us as a rather harmless, marginal figure, as though he were actually to be equated with the figure of the Privatgelehrter that has always had a touch of the comic. Benjamin, who felt so close to French that the language became for him a “sort of alibi” (Brife II, 505) for his existence, probably knew about the homme de lettres’s origins in prerevolutionary France as well as about his extraordinary career in the French Revolution. In contrast to the later writers and literati, the “ecrivains et litterateurs” as even Larousse defines the hommes de lettres, these men, though they did live in the world of the written and printed word and were, above all, surrounded by books, were neither obliged nor willing to write and read professionally, in order to earn a living. Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society. Their material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially. On the basis of this dual independence they could afford that attitude of superior disdain which gave rise to La Rochefoucauld’s contemptuous insights into human behavior, the worldly wisdom of Montaigne, the aphoristic trenchancy of Pascal’s thought, the boldness and open-mindedness of Montesquieu’s political reflections. It cannot be my task here to discuss the circumstances which eventually turned the hommes de lettres into revolutionaries in the eighteenth century nor the way in which their successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries split into the class of the “cultured” on the one hand and of the professional revolutionaries on the other. I mention this historical background only because in Benjamin the element of culture combined in such a unique way with the element of the revolutionary and rebellious. It was as though shortly before its disappearance the figure of the homme de lettres was destined to show itself once more in the fullness of its possibilities, although — or, possibly, because — it had lost its material basis in such a catastrophic way, so that the purely intellectual passion which makes this figure so lovable might unfold in all its most telling and impressive possibilities.

This review hit the part of my brain that loves Mark Twain.

The DeMoulin Lung Tester was a plain, serious-looking box with a nickel-plated mouthpiece and a calibrated dial on its face. Its ostensible purpose was to measure a man’s lung capacity, the bulky antecedent to today’s spirometers. Its real purpose was to measure a man’s ability to maintain his composure after being made the butt of a joke. When an unsuspecting mark blew into it, a .32 caliber blank cartridge exploded and a blast of flour hit him squarely in the face.

It is important to note: for me this is strictly third-person hilarity. This is epic humor.

Scenes are surveyed from a distance. In each one crass men do terrible shit to each other in miniature self-contained exhibitions of minor cruelty. The thought of participation has no part in it. Being there would make it less funny. There is no interior aspect, whatsoever. It is all imagined externally as a sort of conceptual sight gag.

The worse the behavior — the more it exposes the innocent depravity of human nature — the funnier it is to me. It is the pure fact that people are like this that cracks me up.

It is very possible this sense of humor is a symptom of being a bad person.

I think American culture is deeply disoriented in regard to assessing standards of living. The basics of life — having a home in a safe neighborhood in reasonable proximity to one’s work, the choice of having a one-income household, having time and energy to invest in family life and parenting or in personal interests or in reflexion — are now beyond the reach of many people. However, luxuries — such as hi-fi home and portable stereo systems, home theaters, computers, multiple luxury cars, fine food — these items are relatively cheap.

Any comparison of how the middle-class is doing now versus ten, twenty or thirty years ago that only adjusts for inflation without adjusting for the relative costs of basics and luxuries, or considering the number of hours worked per household (or better, the amount of free-time available to members of the middle-class) is barely looking at the real issue.

The crisis of the middle-class has less to do with how much money each household has, and more to do with quality and sustainability of the middle-class life.

The right understands the masses infinitely better than the left. The left believes individuals are concerned with their well-being, where the right understands very well that the masses do not care about accomplishing happiness, but only infusing their unhappiness with the maximum intensity of meaning.

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Contrary to popular opinion, the non-viability of Marxism has nothing at all to do with the underestimating the force of greed in individuals. It has to do with an inability to grasp the fundamentally non-functionalist orientation of the ordinary person, and the degree to which most people are dominated by symbols.

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I believe metaphysical reductionism is the root cause of political extremism. Materialistic reductionism pushes toward the hard left, and idealist reductionism (common Platonism) pushes toward hard right. And dialectics, both materialist and idealist, amplifies the effect. Dialectic promises — and in actually delivers — unexpected and unexpectable deep shifts in one’s relationship to reality, at least at the level of individual consciousness. The natural extension of real individual experience to the theoretical possibility of analogous collective experience results in what Voegelin called “metastatic expectation“.

Continue reading Bread and circuses →

The New Oxford American Dictionary says this about the usage of conviction verses persuasion:

Although it is common to see convince and persuade used interchangeably, there are distinctions in meaning that careful writers and speakers try to preserve. Convince derives from a Latin word meaning ‘conquer, overcome.’ Persuade derives from a Latin word meaning ‘advise, make appealing, sweeten.’

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Proof convinces. Proof produces agreement through intellectual coercion. There are kinds of truth that are subject to proof, and these are objective truths. With a valid proof, to accept the premises is to accept the conclusion. One cannot resist the argument if one is intellectually decent. To reject the argument is to betray civility. With proof agreement is necessary.

But not all truths fall inside the jurisdiction of proof.

In fact, the most important truths — the ideas most significant to us, which in fact lend significance to objective truths — are outside the reach of proof’s coercive powers. They reside in the realm of freedom, where only persuasion has sway.

Appeals persuade. Appeals invite agreement. Appeals address the other as free beings, who decide out of desire, not necessity.

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Some people covet their freedom, but lack faith that freedom is theirs regardless of what is proven to them.

They see truth as a threat to their autonomy. And so they choose intellectual indecency.

And indeed, there are many people who cannot imagine voluntary agreement, who look for proofs that support their deepest convictions. They wish to convince others that their most important truths are the only valid truth, and to make others convicts of their own beloved beliefs. They attempt to argue others into submission.

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The easiest things to prove matter least.

The things that matter most are impossible to prove.

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If we wish to come to agreement on the things that matter most to us, we will have to rethink our notions of truth, and especially how this truth is established. We will not have certainty where we most desire it. We will never compel the types of agreements we crave.

, but we must come voluntarily and we must learn to invite others to agreement. As long as we will only come to an agreement when we cannot escape agreement — that is where we’ve been argued into submission —

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Compulsion by proof is only one mode of persuasion.

The modes of persuasion available to a person affects every aspect of his social existence. It determines the types of appeals he makes and accepts.

Splitting open an over-ripe peach I discovered the pit, broken and dry. I cut away the fragments of shell and the dessicated kernel, and ate the rest of it. It was maybe a little too sweet.

“I could conceive of another Abraham — to be sure, he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer —  an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away, being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready; but without having his house ready, without having something to fall back on, he cannot leave — this the Bible also realized, for it says: ‘He set his house in order.'”