Against Pi Day

I don՚t want to poop on anybody՚s celebration of Pi Day, but while pi itself is certainly something to be wondered at and celebrated, the fact that an arbitrarily numbered point on the human calendar aligns with the decimal approximate representation of something transcendental and timeless does not excite me in the least.

What I՚m saying is, we live in a universe where pi pops up everywhere, so every day (defined by a rotation of our pi-manifesting spherical planet) should be pi day.

Yom Kippur and Escape from Language

My relationship with Jewishness is untainted by any feelings of ideological obligation. That is to say, I belong to this people and community (sort of, more or less), I participate in their rituals (very occasionally), I share some deep values (not necessarily the obvious and articulated ones), but I will be damned if it will determine how I think. Like any other body of learning, I treat it as a resource that I will make use of as I see fit, not a framework that I have to fit myself into. 

This sounds both a bit naive and a bit like bragging, but I’m just trying to be accurate about how things are with me. I’ve never been able to comfortably wear an ideological or identity. In a way it’s annoying that I am a radical non-joiner. Some people manage to make themselves nice lives out of being Jewish, or being an anarchist, or scholar, or activist, or whatever. I resist being anything. I suppose even that becomes an identity eventually.

“I decided I’d rather starve and live on the edges of nowhere than do anything at all, than become anything labeled.” – Bukowski (a saint of illegibility)

Given that I’m not a counterculture hero or anything close, but rather a middle-class guy with a family to support, I do in fact have a quite labeled work identity (and resume and LinkedIn profile and all the rest). It’s a real enough aspect of me; I don’t mind (much) inhabiting the role and selling it on the marketplace. But a holy day is a point where I can step back from it and place it in its proper perspective. Taking off from work is just a superficial aspect; it is taking a day off from the everyday structural illusions of the world, the better to put them in their proper place.

There’s a lot of talk about the soul this time of year – how to purify it, is it going to be inscribed in the Book of Life, etc. Like a good materialist with cognitive science training, I am deeply dubious about the very concept. Yet someone or thing is being dubious, no? If nothing else, language and grammar force an identity to come into being.

Yom Kippur begins with the Kol Nidrei, an odd bit of legalistic performative Aramaic that has the emotional force of prayer, and an interesting and controversial history that I was unaware of until recently. It is a release from vows, and has been interpreted by anti-semites to mean that Jews can’t be trusted.

It refers to vows assumed by an individual for himself alone, where no other persons or interests are involved. Though the context makes it perfectly obvious that no vows or obligations towards others are implied, there have been many who were misled into believing that by means of this formula all their vows and oaths are annulled. – Philip Birbaum via Wikipedia

Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the reconstructionist movement, tried to get rid of it but failed. The emotional force of it and its connection to the ritual proved too strong; and for many Jews it is the most moving and holy ceremony of the calendar.

My own interpretation, which is no doubt overly influenced by my own particular obsessions, is that the Kol Nidrei is a fundamental and irreplaceable counterweight to the usual Jewish obsessions with language and law. It is not so much a release from vows as a release from language, a temporary ritual acknowledgement that for all our word-worship, words are an imperfect and inadequate tool to face reality and life, and most of all the sacred. Like many other religious and meditative practices, the Kol Nidre is a form of language whose function is to move beyond language.

In(between)dependencies

This year Independence Day comes at a moment when I am in something of a liminal state in respect of my professional life. I’m not becoming independent, but may be switching masters. The best I can do at this point in my life is throw off one set of chains and immediately strap on another. I do admire those who can be free agents rather than employees; the latter always has a feeling of serfdom. But unless you really have fuck-you money you always are serving somebody. And that’s not entirely a bad thing, god knows. I am rather bad at serving, and at this point I am starting to actually feel somewhat sorry for all the bosses who’ve had the unenviable job of trying to manage me. 

All normal people learn how to submit, how to take up a place in a hierarchy, how to serve. That’s what keeps society running. But what an enormous strain on the soul it is. No wonder people turn to anarchism, music, drugs and other forms of rebellion. My own rebelliousness feels like a leftover adolescent quality, and I am way past the age where it is seemly to act like an adolescdent. But without it I am quite literally nothing, I can’t accomplish much unless I am in some way doing it against the grain, on my own terms. If that sounds like bragging, it isn’t meant to be, just an accurate statement of how things are with me. A successful rebellion might be worth boasting about, but rebelliousness is just a pain in the ass for everyone.





I hasten to add that I don’t have that much personal grounds for complaint. My working conditions and rewards are pretty damn good compared to the bulk of mankind. And the new job is quite promising along several dimensions. But work, workplaces, commerce, and money remain what they are.


Previous Independence Day posts: here, here, here

Portraits of neglected Unicode characters #3: ⋩ SUCCEEDS BUT NOT EQUIVALENT TO

This symbol, somewhat awkward in both name and graphic, seems to be perfect for denoting certain types of human relationships, such as fathers and sons, teachers and students, influencers and artists. In all cases, the right side of the relationship obviously owes a great debt to the left side that precedes them, but determinedly asserts their non-equivalence.

The “but” seems weak though, as though it wasn’t really believed. Successors have to go through a process of overthrowing the influence of their predecessors. Like most revolutions, it can be at best a partial success, the revolutionary child inevitably ends up copying many of the strongest aspects of the paternal authority they are rebelling against. And over the course of time they tend to end up on the other side of the relationship, wondering how the hell they came to play a role that they defined themselves against.

(for father’s day)

Backward Jewish Soldiers

For Memorial Day:





[Previous Memorial Day posts here, here, and especially here.]

The scaffold sways the future

I do a lot of holiday posts, for reasons that aren't clear to me. It’s not like I do a lot of observance in real life, but they provide a nice theme to crystallize thought, and their annual reappearance provides a sort of long rhythm to what is otherwise a pretty formless stream.

So, here’s a couple of past posts on MLK Day. And here is MLK himself:

I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future. 

Is there an arc to the universe, and does it bend toward justice? If so, how does that work exactly? Yes I am a crudely materialistic engineer contemplating the spiritual and wanting to hack it, to understand, invade, and improve it. It feels slightly silly. Unlike King, I can’t simply summon faith, I need to know the wiring diagram.

Justice is one of those things (like Truth and Beauty) that act as cosmic attractors, that pull people and reality itself towards them. More than just exerting a passive gravitational pull, it inspires passion in people. The arc bends, but individuals must do the work of bending it. This must be something like what someone from King’s religious world would call doing the Lord’s work, and what we modern Jews call Tikkun Olam.

The concept of justice seems to have deep biological roots, predating humanity (that link goes to a paper on cheating in primates by Marc Hauser, who himself was caught cheating). That may represent the starting point of King’s arc. Humanity is somewhere further along. The endpoint is not really visible to mortal eyes, yet we have these capital-letter names for it, and some like King claim to be able to see through the murk of the present into the far distance and want to lead us there. But as usual humanity is caught somewhere in the uncomfortable middle between ape and angel.

The implementation of justice relies on the ability to consider people on a level playing field, where my rights and freedoms are the same as yours and his. This is exceedingly unnatural, because obviously the human in the mythical state of nature privileges himself, his family, his friends above random strangers on the other side of the world. I never liked Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethics, because it is impractical, and because it ignores this basic fact of human psychology. It starts from a place we haven’t gotten to and perhaps can’t get to.

I am more interested in the practical and humble psychology of justice and empathy, how we go about constructing this would-be universal sense of justice, this ability to treat every human being with equal dignity and equal rights. It might be unattainable, it might not even be desirable, but it exerts a pull on the arc of humanity nonetheless.

The Same and Not the Same

I like my last year's Rosh Hashanah post. But I can't write the same one twice.

The solar clock is about to tick again, so here we are, at a boundary between two chunks of time. Year past and year to come, entirely different from our humble embedded perspective, and so damn similar when seen from above. Variations on a theme, and year-to-come will be year-past soon enough. My past-self was wont to scoff at such arbitrary boundaries as secular or religious new year's days; my current-self, made less arrogant and more human by the tenderizing mallets of time, is more apt to latch onto them gratefully, as useful and stable landmarks amidst the chaotic swirl. But these two selves are also variants of some common prototype. They are the same, they are both versions of me, yet different.

"The same and not the same" is a rather koan-like phrase but I got it from the title of a pretty good book on chemistry, and as it happens I am starting a new job once again dealing with computational chemistry, which is looking to be the same and not the same as the one that got me out to San Francisco about 13 years ago. Back then my wife was pregnant with our second child who is now about to have a Bar Mitzvah, which is going to be the same and not the same as that of his brother, three years earlier. These two individuals, who in years past might have been thought of as rough copies of their parents, are working hard on differentiating themselves from us and each other, as is appropriate to their age. That process too has probably happened in much the same way for thousands of years, and is utterly different each time.

Another sage once said that history not only repeats itself, it stutters. More recently I read someone complaining that modern life was like trying to keep time to a shoe going around in a dryer (ie, as arrhythmic and unpatterned a sound as can be imagined). Change is accelerating; my ability to deal with it is diminishing, so the older I get the more I cling to whatever stable temporal patterns are available. This particular one has lasted a very long time, and part of the reason for that is its ability to sweep up even the dubious and reluctant into itself.

Bombs bursting in the air

So back when I was a tot, the US tried to blow up the Van Allen Belt because "if we don't do it, the Russians will". The light show was spectacular.

You know, looking forward to dooms yet to come -- climate change, ecological devastation, economic collapse -- together with dooms of the past, I am amazed that against fantastic odds, 6 billion people and I are still alive. I can only conclude that it must be something like the anthropic computational principle at work.

I live in one of the few Bay Area towns that permits legal fireworks, so tonight like every year I'm going to set some off in the driveway to entertain the neighborhood kids. These are pretty wimpy as fireworks go. The official label is "safe and sane", that is, mostly roman candle like fountains; no aerial shells or explosions. But I don't see why I have to be safe and sane while the government gets to be the opposite. This is America, damn it!

Previous independence day thoughts here (jeremiadish) and here (philosophical).

[Update: more from Wikipedia and a blog devoted to this stuff. The Starfish blast apparently killed the original Telstar satellite and many others. And Declassified U.S. Nuclear Test Film #62 goes into some detail.

This test also revealed that the EMP effect of nuclear explosions was much more powerful than had been thought previously: streetlights were knocked out in Hawaii, 900 miles away). It is ironic (misusing the term, but I can't think of a better one) that this is the kind of thing that gave rise to the ARPANET and later the Internet, which now allows me to spend my holiday perusing enormous piles of useless information. I have to admit getting sucked into the technical coolness of this horrific stuff -- must have been fun developing the instrumentation packages for these tests, which were shot up on rockets next to the burst and were presumably destroyed in milliseconds.]