Lewis Microblogishing

Living upon the Edge: The Ethics and Ethos of Extremism

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:59:22 -0700

It is well within human "nature" to run to extremes. Often we almost cannot help but do it, especially under extreme circumstances. We all run to extremes sometimes--extremes of mood, of feeling, of thought or ideation, or of action and reaction. A few cannot but seem to help running to extremes much if not most of the time. The thing about extreme behaviors is that it does not pull to the center, but pushes away from the center, and if we are to seek a spirit of compromise, cooperation and consensus, perhaps it is not best sought upon the extreme, multi-faceted edges of our world. People who live far out on the edge seem seldom to evince the kind of tolerance towards others that they implicitly expect from others. Indeed, intolerance of alternation is a hallmark of extremist orientations. An extremist orientation does not foster a live and let live ethos, nor a sense of ethics based upon a golden mean.

In the relativity of human undersanding and values, can we find in extreme behaviors, beyond testing the limits of normality, what we might refer to as a common ethos and even an ethics of such living on the edge of the conventional world. An open world dictates an ethos based upon human freedom--that people, as individuals or groups, should be able to explore and experiment in alternative realities and life-styles. We begin drawing the line when and where we find that the permission of others freedoms begin intruding on the freedoms of ourselves.

We recognize in extremist human behavior a proclivity toward radical, even violent and destructive reactions, and we recognize in the allowance of extreme extremism the coercion and totalitarianism of a kind of unfreedom which comes from intolerance and the nonreciprocal expectation of absolute conformity.

It seems that we need extremism, to a degree, as long as it remains a safe and sane way of testing our boundaries and putting the world beyond our little boxes. We need extremism, in other words, to let us know when and where and how our boundaries are, and to remind us of what happens if and when we overstep these kinds of boundaries. There thus seems to be a creative and adaptive side of extremism and living out on the edge, that allows us to break with trite conventions and to challenge received realities of the status quo.

At the same time, extremist orientations pose a risk and a potential threat to the sense of order and purpose in our world, and challenge a sense of stability with a kind of chaos. Extremist behavior lapses from healthy to pathological at some fine, indeterminate point of no return, from creative to destructive, from adaptive to maladaptive, and it is not quite clear at what point the line is crossed until after the fact of crossing it and turning back retrospectively to realize how far we have come from what we once were. We value freedom enough to permit and tolerate such risks in allowing people to choose living upon the edge, and to break with the received conventions and traditions and ideals by which we tend to define our collective identity, but we invariably must pay the price of allowing freedom to sometimes become its own worst form of tyranny.

The danger of extremism is the subjective, perceptual sense of "normalization" of what is otherwise abnormal, and of "moralization," degree by subtle degree, of what would otherwise once have been obviously amoral if not outright immoral. In the subjective apprehension of extreme states of being, there is thus an inherent, subconscious tendency to "naturalize" as if normal and an intrinsic part of everyday life what is extreme and highly unnatural.

Have we learned our lessons from our own history of extremism? We do not hold gladiator games any longer, and do not permit legal slavery to occur. We continue to make war, but have sought to limit by convention and arbitration some of the more extreme and violent aspects of making war. We have pushed our behavioral sciences to try to understand in a more precise and reliable way the behavioral pathologies of people and how to arrest and control these pathologies before they become too destructive in the world. And yet, it seems, we still have an awefully long way yet to go to completely understand and come to terms with the possibilities and potentialities of human extremism in such a way as to be able to successfully identify and delimit its moral and normative boundaries in our world.

Saving the Mother Who Saves the Child Who Saves Us

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:57:27 -0700

What is clearly evident in the modern history of human development is that a mother who loses her child will soon, within a cycle of seasons, have another child. The paradox is that regions of the highest rates of infant mortality also tend to have the highest rates of fertility. And the child, in such a context, who survives, is well on its way to growing up in a social authoritarian system and has a pretty good chance of becoming a wantabe young Hitler in a rag-tag militia army.

A woman who has not a choice to conceive or not to conceive, a choice given to her by her very own nature, is one that is essentially raped by a man. Such a man who rapes a woman, whether they do so violently or coercively or even psychologically by enforcing their own arbitrary willpower over the woman, who forces her to conception without her choice, is a man who does not, cannot, truly love that woman, nor who could be a good father who loves the child to which that woman thus gives birth.

Such a child, who grows up without the real love of a father, becomes de facto at risk for being a man who may rape other women, or who may not be able to love other children in turn. And thus we have the beginning of a kind of desperate cycle, of a form of vicious poverty--a poverty of respect for the woman, for the child, for the self, that tends to perpetuate itself and beget itself over and over again.

It is equally evident that young women who realize real economic opportunity in their lives within a larger globalized economy in their lives frequently postpone or even permanently defer the decision to become pregnant. Women, in short, become their own best birth control mechanism--the choice to conceive and when and how to conceive, governed by the dictates of their own lives, their own screens of opportunities, and their own desires for a better life, than by a system, or by a man, or by a sense of bygone familial obligation.

Symbolic Freedom, Cultural Coercion, and General Systems Development

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 18:26:08 -0700

Culture is, if nothing else, compulsive of individual behavior--we most often have little choice but to conform, or else run the risk marginalization and becoming labeled dysphemistically in a manner that becomes a socially fulfilling prophecy.

Symbolic freedom is the freedom of the human intellect to explore knowledge and understanding without arbitrary or culturally constrained boundaries. Symbolic freedom knows no absolute truths and no unquestionable creeds.

The great emanicipating principle of an earnest, empirical science is that is has liberated our symbolic worldview from the shackles of a colloquial culture-boundness. We may ascribe to any ideological or religious system of belief we choose to, or to none at all--we are not constrained to believe in any particular way and hence to behave in ways we might not otherwise choose to believe in.

The history of human civilization has been a long track record of gradual scientific-technological achievement, of the creation of alternative systems of work and society, that never previously existed before. This has occurred in spite of the wars, the corrupt interference, the unfortunate working of disease and inveterate, pan-human violence.

In all of this form of development, that leads humankind both to greater spiritual and symbolic liberation, from liberation of the cultural constraints that previously tied people in webs of obligation to one another, toward greater liberation from the tyranny of death, destruction, and disease, there is an overarching, grand logic and a profound sense of order that is not just sublime and naturally beautiful, but profoundly universal and ultimately meaningful.

To hook our symbolic ideology to something as vague and impersonal as a "general system" may seem to many unattractive and anti-spiritual ("God did not play dice with the Universe.") But to have to chose between equally unattractive candidates among the traditional Great Religions (which one is the right one?), or some esoteric synthesis between these religions, or to substitute for our spiritual sense of unity and order in the world a rather spurious and specious political or economic or social ideology that invariably entails a plan of action that is usually violent in its entailments, seems at least to myself to be a less prospective alternative than embracing the idea of a true universal sense of order about our shared reality, that not only provides us a sense of our place and of who, what and why we are in this world, but also a sense that we are probably, ultimately, neither alone nor that unique in the universe. In this kind of choice it makes little difference in the final analysis whether or not the Universe was originally a stochastically ordered event structure based upon chance.

Greening the Military: Semi-Soft Value Strategies

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:05:34 -0700

It has become time to turn swords into ploughshares and bullets into pens and words. Modern warfare is, by virtue of its lethality, its expense, and its destructiveness, obsolete in human systems. This is especially the case when it comes to the development, deployment and destructiveness of weapons of mass destruction.

Increasing socio-political security can only be gained through enhanced socio-economic stability.

The fastest and best road to the solution of the chronic human problems of poverty and overpopulation is through effective and appropriate development programs that are based upon the following factors:

1. The availabiity of a cheap and abundant (virtually unlimited) supply of functional energy.
2. Food-production that makes available and abundant enough food to feed a population at adequate levels of healthy nutrition.
3. Universal education that carries on from early childhood into adulthood, and that crosses social boundaries of age, gender, class, or ethnic or religious identity.
4. Sufficient mixed economies that entail widespread employment and productive labor for a population.

Any strategy adopted as a matter of foriegn policy, to combat the ills of terrorism and insurgency, would best focus on long-term development programs that would be viable in a decade or in several decades.

The role of any military force in such a context would be to support, protect and promote such development programs and strategies.

Each dollar spent in such a manner, would, in the long run, entail many dollars in return, and a priceless peace bought through enhanced international and global security.

Where They May Be: SETI & Kardeshev/Sagan Civilizations

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:32:04 -0700

The question of extra-terrestrial intelligence and the development of alien civilization is a critical question for human systems and for the extension of general systems. Its discovery would be profound, and yet we are left with some profound and equally perplexing questions. Beyond a brief, 60 second WOW signal, we have yet to find any form or instance of direct evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. The most reasonable explanation is the time-space relativity of light energy--in other words, they may be out there, but they are so far away, that their signals have either not yet reached us, or, if they have reached us, have been of the nature, structure or strength that they have as yet been undetectable with our current detection technologies.

Spatio-temporal relativity of light based communication systems entails that most advanced civilizations will seek to establish long-distance communication with one another in order to share information and knowledge.

A few presuppositions are in order:

1. Alien intelligence with advanced civilization would have developed an interest in communicating with other intelligent forms of life and discovering these forms of life.
2. Civilizations that are more advanced along the Kardeshev/Sagan scales would possess the means for constructing large transmitting devices that would make possible deep space transmissions that would be detectable from very far away, given the right detection technologies.
3. Such civilizations may have developed means of communication along energy pathways other than that of the electro-magnetic spectrum, but would still attempt to transmit non-random signals with light energy.
a. Large light broadcasting devices might take the form of "artificial solar structures" that would be equivalent to a small dwarf star, and that would probably be semi-intelligent in its capacity to broadcast multiple signals.
b. An alternative device may be a large laser type transmitting beacon (or set or system of beacons) that can produce an intense and relative pure signal powerful enough to register with point-source accuracy light-years away.
c. Where we find one such transmitting device, we are likely to find others (more than one) in some form of structured arrangement.

It follows that our best chance possibly for the detection of extra-terrestrial intelligence will be the search for sources of light energy, anywhere along the electro-magnetic spectrum, which, at great depths, may be confused for weak natural signals, but which may, upon closer analysis, harbor signals within the light itself that are non-random, and that may include the presence or absence of bands of light, amplitude and frequency modulation or other forms of combination or modification of light signals.

There would be every reason to expect such communication to be complex, multi-leveled and to contain a huge amount of information buried within the signal (Contact scenario), and to be capable of transmitting complex amounts of information over very long periods of time.

Correct Culture and False Consciousness: The Hidden Uniformity of Structural Diversity and the Closing of the American Mind

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:11:36 -0700

America without a middle, is a hollow sounding name that is defined by the extremes of the left and the right. And these extremes make for strange bedfellows in the halls of American academia. At no time in our history have the Universities been more of an intellectual zoo--administratively on the far, far, right, and academically on the far, far left. Too far to the left, or too far to the right, and we suspect that the ends come back together again in some hidden place in Washington, or in some secret closet of our Collective Soul.

A culture of correctness is implicitly a culture of conformity and uniformity. We bear witness to a closing of American culture and of American consciousness, at a very time when issues of globalization are knocking on all American doors. Canned diversity becomes a force for conformity and structural reinforcement of uniformity of values and attitudes. It is used to quel free speech and suppress choices and opportunities in line with received standards of correctness.

The extreme left, the coopted self-styled radicals protected in the Ivory-gone-Babel Towers of Higher Education, have given a bad name to true liberalism--the sense of openness to alternatives, to looking forward to a genuinely free and equal future, the sense of true tolerance for human difference in the world. The extreme right, cloistered in their Sunday enclaves, have given a bad name to the spirit and true meaning of Christianity, touting doctrines of intolerance, hate, and self-serving conservatism that seeks to deny the scientific realities and blessings of our modern era.

The culture wars in America are really class wars, of competition for increasingly scarce resources and opportunities in the American market place. They are wars in which conspiracies and coalitions of either extreme, of the left and the right, seek to monopolize all that they can control, at the expense of any other human being who does not fit their narrow frames of mind, often abandoning these incorrigible and independent people as socially dead on the side of the road of life.

The greatest blessing I have found about being an American, has been the freedom to make my own mistakes, and the opportunity always to correct these mistakes. It has been the freedom to think independently for myself, and to act independently on the basis of my own mind. The greatest blessing about having been an American is that, though left alone more than once on the edge of the great highway in life, there is always remaining hope and the promise of a better life and world tomorrow. That people would be willing to give these freedoms up for the sake of some false sense of socio-economic status and security, and, even worse, to force untold and countless others to give up the same kinds of freedoms for their own selfish sense of chronic insecurity and need for status, in a nation blessed with such freedom, is unfathomable and deeply problematic.

As someone recently suggested, perhaps if Rome is not yet on fire, it certainly seems to be smoldering away.

Holding On and Letting Go

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:47:23 -0700

I am convinced at the half-century mark of my life that there are larger forces at work in the unfolding of our lives than what meets the eye or that we are in a capacity to understand, much less control. In other words, things are meant to happen as they are for reasons we do not fully understand. I do not see this, as my Grandfather might have seen it, as the working of fate, or of divine intervention. I see it as the consequence of the complexity of life, and its subtle integration. Comprehending the reasons for such changes are not what is important--accepting the inevitability and consequences of such change is vital to living, especially if we are to claim to have lived well.

There are times for holding on to what we have, and building upon it, adding to it and improving it. Then there are interludes that demand that we let go of what we have, perhaps to make room for new things, or new ways of having things. And holding on, or letting go, seem to punctuate our lives in cycles of change, beginning, and ending, and we know that the ending and resulting change is ultimately inescapable.

I do not know clearly or exactly what tips the difference between holding on and letting go, but I do know and firmly believe that it is primarily a reaction, and a consequence, of the quality of one's relationship to a larger social world, a world that is a construction, not just of one's own construction, but of others as well. And it is the construction of others that sometimes influences our lives, for better or worse, the results of which we have little control or influence upon.

It is perhaps wishful thinking to hope for a life that is relatively free of the frequently negative influence of others, whether direct or indirect, but it is clear, as Ruth Benedict would have put it, that one's own ego and behavior must be consonant on some level with the prevalent norms and values of the social world in which we live, else one will suffer a chronic sense of marginalization, and possibly, even annihilation.

I no longer seek to understand or know the reasons why things happen as they do, but I have lived enough years upon earth to recognize when these things are occurring, even to anticipate them somewhat, and to accept the consequences, the play and fall of the cards as they may.

One must play one's best game, no matter what the hand dealt. The loss is not in defeat, but in the failure to play the game at all.

Blue-Collar Blues: Class-based Culture and the Anti-Work Ethos

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:39:04 -0700

A culture that has come to define itself exclusively on the basis of money and the status symbols that money can buy, becomes a kind of value culture in which social mobility through status-acquisition, or at least the appearance of such mobility through the advertisment of status-based symbolisms, becomes the implicitly shared norm and common expectation in social forums. This expectation constitutes the social calculus by which one's actions and one's capacities are measured and evaluated in most behavioral settings in everyday life.

Street wisdom in such a society dictates that nice guys finish last, the selfish get ahead, the generous are fools, and those who work hard are not working smart. The calculus is that one must be prepared to screw over other people, if one is to get ahead of the game.

In such a culture, the last thing a person wants to become identified with is as working class, which comes to define a kind of counter-culture or sub-culture--the dialectical, symbolic anti-thesis of success. One must be seen as a good worker, but as never breaking a sweat, and, certainly, never emptying the trash can. Physical work, in a class-based culture, becomes polluting and associated with the opposite of positive status. It becomes a "counter-reference" symbolism.

The trick in a status-based system is to appear to work at all times, and to pawn or palm off the work load onto someone or something else. Now this would appear counter-intuitive--logic would dictate that the hardest worker be rewarded the most. In fact, there is a direct negative corelation between the type of work, the amount of pay, and the supervisorial authority deemed necessary to "oversee" the task. In other words, those who work the hardest physically (often illegal "aliens" whose status is inherently ambiguous and hence exploitable) are most often at the opposite end of the social status continuum from those who make the most money and enjoy the greatest independence from direct supervisorial authority.

I would not have accepted this thesis as correct, but experiences in the workplace of the last five years have born out this basic relationship, increasingly, and has also born out how this relationship, always self-reinforcing, is growing institutionally more and more embedded with each passing year. The harder one works, the less likely is one's long term success, while those who work the least, get ahead and stay ahead in the long run. If one is working hard, and falling behind, then certainly one is doing something fundamentally wrong.

If we stand back and look at what's really going on in a quasi-objective manner, we realize that a system that has become increasingly polarized between lower and upper classes is one that is de facto increasingly closed except for special category individuals. With increasing closure, scramble competition for limited resources, though tough and cut-throat, is always preempted by interference competition by means of conspiracies to monopolize resources or sources of resources, and the power that controls access to such resources.

The main function of those in power is not to work hard, but to get others to do their work for them. The main function of those in power is to protect their own power and hence their own source of resources and status. Since those in power de facto control status as well in institutional and larger social settings, they have a double-advantage over those who are otherwise dispossessed and left to fend for themselves in a larger world.

Of course, information control and protecting who knows what about access to resources and the power to control such access comes at a premium, and those who, usually by means of conspiracy, are systematically engaged in such interference competition become successful only to the extent that they are able to restrict access to privileged and vital information about such access, and about the legal technicalities that serve to structurally define potential access.

The perception of hard physical work, or the cultivation of such a social perception, is anathema to successfully playing the status game, when what is implicitly in order is the adoption of the manifest values and elitest style of life, that serves to legitimize and rationalize the unequal access to control over resources.

This kind of culture, as a value versus a reality culture, does not seem adaptive in the structure of the long run with increasingly limited and circumscribed resources in the world, when the true measure of a person will not be in terms of the status symbols one can buy or the style of life one may presume or pretend to, but what one can do independently with one's own hands.

Eating the Human Heart of Darkness: Basic Kindness as Non-violent Strategy

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:31:23 -0700

The capacity of human sentience, to imagine ourselves as others, and others as ourselves, to walk in their mocassins, to feel their feelings, to empathize and understand them, is to acknowledge our common humanity and to share a basic bond of trust.

It is precisely this capacity that is abrogated and precluded in the perpetration of human violence. We must deny the sense of self in the other, and the sense of the other in ourselves, if we wish to do harm, physically, psychically or socially, against that other person. There is a good reason that a killer not know a victim, and depersonalize and even dehumanize the victim as an object or an animal, as something less than ourselves.

State bureaucracy and administrative power, however delimited, make it easy and often dutiful to do basic harm to others who are defined as objects, numbers, as "cases" or file numbers. The state interposes boundary mechanisms that automatically depersonalizes the relationship with the other and which makes it easy to objectivize and fundamentally deny the subjective humanity of the other. People are often rewarded well for doing their jobs which entails a routine-operational approach to the victimization of others, directly or indirectly.

Basic human kindness is the capacity to acknowledge the other and to accommodate the other in one's world in a manner that does not harm the other. It is establishment of a basic bond of trust between self and other, by which the benefit of the doubt in the interelationship is mutually granted and taken.

This bond allows the other freedom and encouragement to grow and develop without interference or hindrance. Acknowledgement of the common humanity of other people, however different from oneself, is the basis for an increasingly humanized and non-violent world.

Extending basic human kindness even to others who might otherwise do us harm becomes a basic non-violent strategy of passive resistance. Responding to violence with antipathy and violence, responding to prejudice and discrimination with similar acts that dehumanize the other, leads only to escalation of conflict and to the rule of fear in human relationships.

The modern world cannot afford any longer the tyranny of fear and violence, or the state-based dehumanization of people. It becomes imperative in an increasingly human world that we adopt and respond to others with non-violent strategies rooted in basic human kindness instead of in prejudice and antipathy.

Symbolic Wounds of the Broken Family: Psychic Disrepair in the Construction of the Modern World

nospam@example.com (Hugh M. Lewis) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:11:24 -0700

An old friend whom I had not communicated with in over twenty years recently wrote to me that the family is the center of repose and last refuge for the troubled soul. It set me to thinking about my own convoluted life, and the lives of others I have known, and to remembering many contradictory things I rarely think about in my everyday life.

The fundamental, tacit cultural models we have upon which our ego rests, and which forms the foundation for our behavioral and symbolic responses to the world for the rest of our lives, is formed within early family contexts, and is well set like concrete by fourteen years of age.

Desymbolization as a result of the displacement and loss of traditional culture by modernization is not a problem only felt by indigenous peoples who are overwhelmed by acculturation, but psychic disrepair on a basic level is a problem that is prevalent in all ethnocultural contexts in the world, everywhere that modernization has resulted in disruption and in the loss of traditional kinship patterns upon which traditional cultures depended.

I have found the deep seated symbolic wounds among my students in China, and very similar kinds of symbolic wounds in my American students, and in both cases what has been shared in common are similar histories of familial disruption during childhood, deaths of significant others in the primary family, the attendant problems of chronic poverty, radical displacement and dislocation of families from extended familial contexts, and the confusion of basic relational identities that are strained or broken by incorporation into modern state societies.

What is leftover is a deepseated and irreconciliable sense of psychic anguish, psychological anomie and social alienation. What remains leftover is an incomplete and broken sense of self, subject to damaged impulse controls, left in a lifetime search for a lost sense of love and identity, of primary cultural models always incomplete and often damaged in basic ways. Demons of our past control our emotional responses to the present and the life-chances, the opportunity structures, of our future.

The loss of culture and chronic psychological and behavioral disruption attendant upon the processes of modernization in the world seem in fact to be prevalent in all state societies around the world. They are the common diseases of our modern world, a world in which the promise of affluence is held over everyone's head, overshadowing the underlying realities of desymbolization and primary deculturation.

Homo modernus is a unique and strange creature with a deeply troubled, restless soul. The modern world for most people has become an existential reality in which many symbolisms have been rendered meaningless and irrelevant to the fundamental challenges of our adaptation, sense of well being, and the requirements for making a living.

The traumas of childhood in the loss and disruption of primary family bonds and identities constitute symbolic wounds that those children will carry with them the rest of their lives, influencing critically everything they do in ways they find difficult later in their lives to understand or control. I have known it in my own life, and in the lives of my siblings and my wife, and I have seen it intimately in the lives of many other people I have known.

The promise of the Modern world is at best a mixed blessing. On one hand it offers a material and technological paradise on earth--a style of life for many people around the world relatively free of the constraints of poverty, disease, starvation, and overt violence. On the other hand, for many it becomes a nightmarish world of chronic confusion, emptiness, compulsion, and meaninglessness.

No one in the world would want to give up hot showers, television, fast food, driving cars or air conditioning. And yet, almost everyone would question the final trade-off for these things in their lives, admitting that the things that are most important in life cannot be bought with money or made in a factory.