President Ahmadinej[ih]ad, student editors, the rhyming ad

President Ahmadinej[ih]ad spoke at a university forum, and I am amazed at the kinds of people who wanted to veto the event. People who should be ashamed to give evidence that they have no understanding of First Ammendment rights, whose fragile minds would shatter at hearing an opposing expression of a worlds-apart idea.
It rhymes with Petraeus. Clever, huh? Orange is a harder word to find a rhyme for. So a rhyme-driven ad must have an additional measure of power to persuade, eh? Was that an example of “high dugeon”? I think I finally found one! In the personally aggrieved politicos who call for censorship to save us from the hurly-burly of political campaign ads!!

Observations and aphorisms

The future is a huge, formless chunk of marble. Your voice is your chisel. Your will is your hammer. Ah, what to do? What to do?

Let’s face it. The way we act sometimes, the world is expendable. 

If one can say, “I am an idea man, intellectual, liberal, aggressive humanist, task-oriented but not without sensitivity to human relations, and an unfashionable perpetual minority of one in an age of anti-intellectualism, conservatism, passive theism, social-emotional business ethics and personal profit ghettos,” then such a person has no identity crisis, but has come through the wringer of self-definition with the help of many significant others and with the result of some equanimity of spirit and the ability to generate the alpha waves of alertness for — hmmmm.

Promiscuity. From a man’s point of view: Is one woman different enough from another in the mechanics or mystique to justify the choice of one female and then another and another, and another, ad feminum? 

Tragedies take place where protagonists do not see the inevitable consequences of the situation they create for themselves. What intervening force might save them? Could that force come from within the protagonist? And it is cultural conflicts at the center of most tragedies.

If you don’t get it, you haven’t got it. 

He is buried alive in his bias. Guess who! 

A simple model of pure democracy exists on the government-constructed streets at every government-marked, intersection stoplight.

Pres. Bush is a model of human behavior that succeeds in the short-term, but will be a model of behavior that will probably not succeed as an advantageous life form in the long term. What he did was, in a very short time,  alter the environment in which he succeeded to a disadvantageous one for him. Sort of like what human beings are doing with the global environment over a very long time. To see a larger advantage in personal behavior is a source of morality, which is learned as a perception of intelligence.

I believe that nearly everyone could put to good use a person who is a good quizzer who respects you and shows an interest in you, asking deep, probing questions that would help you find out where you are and where you want to go, defining who you are and what you are trying to do. Few, I have observed, are good at it. Poor models of questioning can be seen in television reporters interviewing people. There is always the half-assked question. Time does not permit!  More poor models are in the classrooms, teaching! 

I do not believe in evolution because I do not have evolution on faith.

What is the grand scheme of things? You must want to live. You must know how to stay alive. You must know, at the base, steady working conquers all. You must feel that the most basic genius is monstrous energy. 

Do you see better eye to eye than I to I?

 

 

 

Encultured Taste

People will someday be emancipated from having their tastes in all things superimposed on them by others. Then, taste will never have its source in early deprivation and an accumulated habit under deprived conditions, in adaptation to an emaciated milieu. But taste will result from choice among alternatives, from volition and a wealth of opportunity—what the person would choose or do if s-he had had equal opportunities for exposure in the early years. It should be the job of education to provide a conscious, continual and systematic exposure to all graded experiences humankind can have, social, political, cultural, moral, religious, and so on.  That’s what schools are for in a complex, multicultural society. Children will look beyond the politics, religion, and social and economic status of their parents.

Openness, Disclosiveness in Communication and Life History

When two people work in some joint venture, it may almost be a law of human nature that there will be prickly times. There is then only one successful solution, openness, complete open and frank exchange of views about their differences, with their kindly acceptance of an understanding, whether harmonious or discordant. However, there are also barriers to openness that may be almost impossible to surmount, the life histories of each making a high degree of the needed openness, frankness and disclosiveness  too difficult. To be or not to be disclosive and open gets entangled in the color, shade and hue of feeling of one for the other and the confusion of languages spoken. Male-speak. Female-speak. Husband-speak. Wife-speak. Friend-speak. Son-speak or daughter-speak. Boss-speak. Colleague-speak. Brit-speak. American-speak. Black-speak. White-speak. Elder-speak. Youth-speak. Wealth-speak. Celeb-speak. PhD-speak. Rap-speak.

Even if the would-be collaborators are demographically matched, the life-histories of conditioned learning will tend to pry them apart from their intended goal.

Defining Democracy: An Addendum

I have written on this blog previously about defining democracy. Now I would add this discussion of the culture of democracy and its implications for democratizing Iraq.
Tom Brokaw: “Islamic rage, which we can’t completely understand.” (9-11-07)
Mr. Brokaw, there are answers for those wanting to understand Islamic rage. But like the long airy plunge of the cliff-divers, you must be sure you hit the deep flow of the swell, not the shallows of the ebb. The neuroscientists may have their instrumented, empirical answers, and the cognitive scientists may have their view of functional brain events and mental states, but as I believe, those modernist explanations should either be supplemented by, or yield to an explanation by examination of the ancient roots in the evolution of people coming into the functions of language, as studied by Julian Jaynes in the art and literature of ancient times.
Let’s take that plunge into the deep, for “by indirection shall we find direction out” (you know who).
Incipient human forms co-existed with advanced human forms. Modern humans were coexistent with pre-historic human types such as the Neanderthals. A vestige of encounters between the two is the appearance of ogres and giants in fairy tales and myths. At one time, it was inconceivable that a man could ride a horse, and when it so happened that there was a first intrepid and creative genius to conceive it and do it, a mental double-exposure in the brains of the first watchers caused the birth of the man-horse. The centaur myth of Greek (religious) legends became a natural part of tribal lore, a metaphor for generally heroic deeds. Alexander the Great was reported to have encountered on his return from India, by all appearances, stone age people living by the sea. The point is that similarity in human form cannot be generalized into similarity in experience.
Not all people experienced ancient Greek democracy. Not all people were in the dark in the dark ages. Not everyone on Earth felt the re-birth in the Renaissance. Not everybody was enlightened by the Enlightenment.
The mind of human beings can be other-directed, and that is what Julian Jaynes discovered and wanted us to know about ancient people, the time of the installation and the beginning of the self, the introcosm of ego, to me, a sort of mental free agency where we can tell ourselves what to do on nobody’s authority but our own, deliberated say-so. Previous to that time, people were not conscious in any way we are familiar with. They were pre-conscious with devinely ordered decision-making within the functioning of a bicameral mind. Metaphorically, “bicameral” refers to the nature of our deliberative, governmental bodies, the two houses of Congress, and that is the model of the brains of ancient people.
I believe that the tribalism that continues to exist in our time is made possible not by the inner-directed, not by the self-directed, but by the other-, or outer-directed mind, as Jaynes has described (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976).
In our high-tech, “modern” age, not everyone has a free-agent self, with a strong sense of agency, or volition, or self-authorization. Not everyone can claim to be the author of his or her own story. Such people have been deprived of, or helpless in taking control of their own lives. The authority for their behavior is embedded by tribal (religious) acculturation in the right hemisphere of the brain as the hallucinated voice of god-like powers.
At first, the remembered sayings of potentates that were the tribal leaders were the guides of what to do and when to do it. The pronouncements became functionally autonomous as the leaders themselves in time were forgotten, except as iconic statues. The left hemisphere still had language, but it was ordered by the voice hallucinated from the right.
The tribal unit persists today. From early in the first millenium, tribes have enculturated their population in the content of the Islamic culture.
We speak of a democracy for a tribal people, the Iraqi Muslims, who are divided into three, murderously opposed cultures. By definition, their tribal differences originate in the hallucinated voices they respond to, directing them in different pathways to achieve their salvation. The question is, do they have the culture to support democracy? If democracy requires a culture of deliberative, free agent minds, wherein the liberty is granted by the government to think freely, then any attempt to institute a democratic society will fail, and the culture will revert to the one kind of government that succeeded previously, that dictatorship which was instituted by Saddam Hussein.
What is the “Islamic rage” that we have experienced? The complexity of our Western civilization is overwhelming people who from long custom have led a different of life. There is no lexical base in their mind space for coping with the results of liberty. Yet, our President says that that part of the world is desperate for freedom an liberty, words that are a part of the lexicon of democracy. But those words have little meaning for the other-directed people of Islamic upbringing in the madrasah. We have seen the films of pupils in the madrasah memorizing the Koran and Islamic law and Muslim history. Madrasahs inculcate a hatred against Western civilization. Practices of severe corporal punishment are common in many Madrasahs in Pakistan and other countries.
Tension leads to anxiety, leading to the rage against that complexity threatening their basic beliefs induced by the lexicon of democracy being imposed. Superimpose our 231 years of experience on their few years since they lost their cultural shelter. Their young have been engulfed in the atomic fallout from a technological explosion of media freely available in cyberspace.
In my study of the nature of culture with a communication perspective, I arrived at this definition of culture: a culture is distinguished by the high degree in which the people share the codes of communication, lexicon, verbal codes, and nonverbal codes (discussed on my web site).

Christianism is like Islamism

As one author says, the transition from Islamic religion to Islamism may be applied to the Christian religion becoming Christianism, a political ideology. (Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg)

Courage

Courage, I have learned, requires intestinal fortitude to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to the end of life. It is not cowardly quailing before a sea of troubles and not opposing and ending them. Now I carry that definition with me. Will it infect my behavior when the circumstance arises?

The “darkness” of our times as future peoples might see us

As seen from the future, we live in the medieval times of environmental intelligence. The people of the Dark Ages had completely forgotten the routine of the Greek and Roman bath (unlike the “lower animals”). They had no science for rotting teeth, or studying and preventing the plague. They lacked a contemporary written history and material cultural achievements in a general backwardness. It was a dismal time of violence and stagnation. The geniuses of the age were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom. Petrarch saw himself living in a “priest ridden” dark period and wanting to promote a Classic Culture. He foresaw a better age when the darkness would be dispelled, but the dwellers in that age would not have recognized it, for they thought themselves to be the time’s latest achievement. I look around and see the “darkness” of our times as future peoples might see us.

For one example, our democratic process currently does not produce the leaders we need because the electorate still has a “priest-ridden” character and a poor education for civic-political duties. We must watch the election that follows after years of the rotten apple that spoiled the lot. I cannot blame him and his conies so much as those who sorted the apples and left him in the sack. For another example, the fossil-fuel follies will cause destruction of the ecosystem of Earth while the people who know what’s happening stand and watch in horror as the majority of the human race continue the old habits as they stand around shouting in anguish, “What’s happening?” Other examples: over-population; amusing ourselves to death; murderous regimes; pandemics as the health care systems favor the wealthy; tribalism; murderous religions; suicide bombers who wrap up their sex organs to preserve them for a future in a paradise with a given number of virgins; the veneer of civilization that overlays society’s steady production of the most ghastly criminal behavior in every demographic category; media of communication devastatingly dominated by celebrity, entertainment, and commercial gain; the ubiquitous subversion of democratic principles; egoism; global, man-made climate change; an impotent and corrupted world government; the building of housing inappropriate for the geographic location. Among others. Generally, the human race at the present appears quite infantile in development and will be seen that way in the future by a more mature population that has controlled many of the socio-political and technological problems we face now.

The Ugly American

When the American or certain of his minions have cause to go abroad, it’s the ugly American all over again (as before, after WWII) who, simply stated, lacks knowledge of respectful accepting and accommodating for differences in communication across cultures.

Olbermann’s Moderation of a Democratic Forum

Regarding the recent Forum for Democrat Candidates, moderated by Keith Olberman, the format or process failed. They called it a forum, not a debate. However, it should have been a debate, which is a direct clash on the topics. That is difficult to do with a large number of participants. But possible. What we were given was quite simply snippets from the candidates’ self-adulatory, chest-thumping stump speeches. Clamorous and shrill cheer-leading. The audience in the context of a sports stadium couldn’t help but act more like an uncontainable mob of partisans than thoughtful, attentive, open-minded, serious citizen in a serious meeting, thanks mainly to the cheerleaders on stage.

But they were, after all, the Democratic party backbone from the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the blue collar and hard-hat, dust, smoke, grease, grime, sweat, and muscle of everyday construction and maintenance services of the infra- and supra-structure. I knew them from my working in the machine shop of the Studebaker Corporation, where I drilled and tapped oil pumps, or drove fork lifts and the Elwell Parker in the transportation department—they called me “college boy” (I wasn’t sure how to take that bit of stereotyping, friendly or distant)—and  where I breathed the glue fumes in a furniture manufactory, or the printing ink and other chemicals of a printing plant. I knew them, too, as my fellow draftees in the army. The Democrats do not have a monolithic party; Jesse Jackson’s label of “rainbow coalition” fits. To achieve any  consensus for each and every social and political issue in a two-party, majority-rule system, we Democrats have to travel further and work harder and longer than any Republican.

I was disappointed in Olberman’s performance. He is a brilliant journalist with the Democratic bias and a nearly impossible situation unlike his “show” on MSNBC. He did little creative with the difficult dimensions of the “forum” handed to him. I expected him to achieve more of a debate, keeping purely to one topic at a time, allowing no departure from the topic, insisting on a direct response to the question, eschewing “tiny” and frivolous topics and questions, successfully appealing to the audience for discipline, giving each candidate an opportunity to comment on each question, repeating the gist of each question to each candidate, and characterizing each comment as appropriate to the question asked and paraphrasing the response to the satisfaction of the respondent before proceeding to the next.

I do not believe that many journalists have not been schooled in requisite knowledge of spoken communication modes, such as debate. Journalist should not be the moderators of “formal” debates. They may have the substantive knowledge for it but not the procedural skills beyond question-asking. (But even there, having written an article on questioning behavior, I am dubious about journalists’ skills in questioning. In fact, many questions remain about their failure to question the President about his motives for starting a war.)

And who was chosen to provide summaries of the forum? Unbelievable! More grandstanding, hot-dogging self-aggrandizement by the campaign chairmen of the candidates.

There are debate specialists in our society who have been overlooked in favor of “journalists”, who themselves are headline-hogging, wannabe star entertainers and not the “conduits” they should be. The news as entertainment is the coming standard. Almost certainly the academics who know argumentation and debate are not entertaining enough for the media. There is still an empty niche to be filled with the evolution of a political maturity in the electorate displacing the politically infantile fascination with celebrity and stardom being gained by news people who are entertainers.

I enjoy Keith Olberman’s tv show. I was expecting more. He just could not resist the frivolity and irrelevancy in such as the Barry Bonds question.

Old retired teachers never quit.

I keep re-imagining how I could have, might have, should have taught. Am I typical of ORT?

For example, an essential lesson for students of communication is the necessity for students to see themselves as others see them.

O would some Power the gift to give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion:
What airs in dress and gait would leave us,
And even devotion!
(Burns)

In the communication lab, read a poem, sing a lyric, have a conversation, speak on a topic extempore, read from manuscript, etc. Videotape it. Fill out a questionnaire on your reaction to what you see and hear. Have a class fill out the same questionnaire on your performance. Write an essay about the reactions. Have an expert in verbal and nonverbal communication evaluate your video and report the results orally or in writing.

And so it goes, many a night, such waking dreams of work days gone by.