Geeze, I never thought I’d write that title and not think of it as complete bullshit. But now that I’m starting to see the other side of the picture, in my class on the Scientific Revolution, I’m starting to understand that alienation. The pre-modern world is less mechanistic, less cold — more connected, more symbolic, more sacred.

At the end of my experiment with religious faith, I started piecing out a more Hegelian conception of God. He was the grand pattern, that emerged partly from the meaning we imbued in the universe. It was a god that slowly came to awareness, rather than some omniscient being above us all. However, in the end, I saw no pattern encompassing it all; I saw chaos. There was no greater meaning in the universe.

Humans are alone and disconnected. For some, consciousness is even a convenient illusion. Love is just chemical reactions. It is a cold, indifferent universe. What solace can humans find? This is one source of alienation, but it stretches further.

In the university, I’m disconnected from the community at large. I feel no sense of community with the surrounding city, or even with my fellow classmates. Atomization is a fundamental feature of human existence in the modern age.

Even in my studies, I feel alienated from history and the texts I study. I write my essays, but I don’t really engage with ideas. I am a commentator removed from the actual fray. My essays are meaningless, read once and tossed away.

The atheistic, secular, scientific worldview is a worldview alienated from the world around us, but it doesn’t have to be. We can add myth, I think. I mean, sure we can find meaning in our family life and in politics, but I still feel something missing. I need more of the sacred in my life. I need stories that help me understand that world. I don’t need god or the supernatural, but I want myth.

Truth beyond what’s written on paper. Useful ways of expressing things that can’t be expressed conventionally. Meaning requires something transcendent, something sacred. Truth is so much more complicated than what we give it credit for. Myth can lack any basis in literal reality, but still be true. It doesn’t even have to be a purely practical, or instrumental truth. No, I’m not sure what to call it, but you can invent myths and know that they’re invented, but still know that they have some truth. You can imbue the myths with meaning.

I don’t believe that religion will ever disappear. It will adapt. Even if you kill faith, you can’t kill the sacred. There’s something basic and human that science, literature, and politics can’t fully capture.

Sorry for being slightly esoteric, unclear, and rambling. I wrote this more for me, to get something down which I’m just beginning to grasp.

I figured out that writing essays causes about 90% of the stress and unhappiness in my life. Partial solution: Take less classes with essays next semester.

Scott Baio-wulf

I’m fucking tired of these fire alarms going off at 9AM and 3:30AM.

I can imagine Johannes Kepler and his feverish mathematical scribbling, interpreting pure coincidence as the hand of God. He works out the mathematics of inscribing polyhedra in spheres and spheres in polyhedra. The five Platonic solids, the only perfect solids, match the orbits of the five planets. What mathematical perfection! I’m sure that as his pen swept across the paper, he could feel elation. He felt as if he were a prophet; God spoke through the numbers and now was guiding his hand. No, this was not what he felt, but what he must have known with 100% certainty. He must have interpreted the elation as a further sign that God was telling them he was on the right path.

How strange this sounds to the modern mind. God no longer is a cosmic geometer. He does not speak to us through numbers. We also know that there are more than five planets. The strange link between the five Platonic solids and the multitude of planets breaks down. Kepler, who must have been so sure that he was getting a glimpse of the Almighty, in reality, found nothing of spiritual significance.

Although his interpretation of events is now foreign, the feeling of the religious elation must be familiar to so many. This happiness, this wave of ecstasy, that you feel when you think you’re during the work of God, is nothing more than wishful thinking. I ask of even the most saintly, “What difference is there between your feeling and Kepler’s?”

I spent last weekend in New York, with my awesome friend, Emerald. Here’s a long list of things for me to remember this:

• up at an ungodly hour
• werewolves outside the train station
• cafeteria + asia = fantastically clever name + plain pad thai
• post-its = e-mails
• seeing the statue of liberty from the ferry
• super wind
• being on the wrong side of the ferry on the way back
• whining for cookies and coffee
• chocolate cake, as the quintessence of exquisiteness
• Where is Maddox’s school?
• the Met for 25 cents
• mean lady taking a picture at the Egyptian temple
• crocodile
• this Egyptian squiggle is longer than that squiggle
• American Art is horrible and imperialist, apparently
• Washington crossing the Delaware kicks ass
• biting my tongue upon seeing a zombie jesus
• one-armed Mars(?), with a shitty interpretation
• puppy store. aww.
• Italian dinner, constant soft rock in the background
• Can I get a second water, please?
• waiting ridiculously long for subway trains to come
• hostel towels are grody
• wandering Times Square and not getting lost
• a buck for tea isn’t objectively that good a deal
• I’m standing outside your building, sipping tea
• puppy store again
• sitting on a park bench in Central Park, eating lunch, watching the little boats in the water
• the guy making balloon animals, next to us, with the constant stream of little children
• old guy playing sax and then accordion
• strolling through Central Park
• watching the people dance, after the cancer walk
• Someday, I’ll take six months to play Latin jazz
• a wonderful, striking image: so many picturesque trees, full trees, lining a path — unable to be caught on camera
• feeling the most relaxed I’ve been in sooo long
• did we really walk that far? feet starting to hurt
• Apple Store, those new iPod nanos with video are damn sexy, better than I expected
• very confusing elevator
• No Cinnabon, what?
• No cookie sundae, what?
• Top of the Rock
• breath-taking views
• Target Breezeway
• Central Park on one side, Empire State Building on the other
• Naked boys. Singing!
• Is that… Joan Rivers
• asian food, panang curry… mmm… didn’t taste the hint of Latin cuisine, though
• rushing back — geeze, we did a lot of standing and walking
• a group of kids outside the train station flashing their matching vampire teeth as I walk by… I smile
• Amtrak back, drifting in and out of sleep

That’s a lot of stuff, but I still probably forgot to write down a bunch.

My favorite weekend since river rafting, I think. All thanks to my gracious host in the city. Now I’m broke, haha.

Modern society gives us the distinct displeasure of seeing mass death up close.

To simultaneously feel every death as our own, to feel all those dreams extinguished. To raucously laugh at the death of millions, to laugh at the greatest tragedy. Humanity is at once sublime and meaningless. To live this fundamental contradiction is to be perfectly human: To both be perfectly empathetic and be absurdly detached. Laugh and cry. Cry and laugh. Your life means everything and nothing. Does this mean nothing and everything are the same thing?

No, this can’t be right. But I want to laugh nonetheless at all we do.

Taking yourself seriously is as great a sin as not taking yourself seriously, but both are not as horrible options as being neutral. Choice: Take yourself seriously. Choice: Don’t take yourself seriously. Choice: Neutrality. Choice: Both — Take yourself seriously and don’t take yourself seriously. Choice: All 3.

Is it possible to choose more than one? I must reject neutrality at all costs. I must be human.

Both? At the same time? At different times? To all degrees at all times?

Life only has meaning when you kiss the ground like Alyosha and pledge to love everything. This is the only way we can have dreams. Liberty only exists when you’re able to throw off this burden from your back and act as if nothing matters. This is the only way we can achieve our dreams.

Love cannot exist without fear. Fear of loss. The prospect of attachment, because we live in a finite world, must also mean that we experience sadness with loss. Love everything, but then you cannot move. What happens if you go wrong?

Laughter is our one recourse. Only laughter can break the paralysis. Only in laughter is there freedom. Only in laughter is there action. Laugh at your ridiculous love. What do you love but nothingness?

I laugh. Soon, the world fades away. Only I exist within the surrounding blackness. There is nothing. Why should I move? I stand still, as paralyzed as before.

Only love can answer “Why?” Only laughter can answer “How?”

So, both. Somehow.

It’s official. I have a quarterback curse. First, Kurt Warner went out of the game early, and then David Garrard. Two weeks in a row my fantasy team got creamed.

Okay, no, that’s not all. I also held Matt Leinart and Jake Delhomme, who are both out for the season. Matt Schaub, who I had for a while and recently dropped (and was considering picking up) also went out for a game. I also had Vince Young, but I think he’s holding up okay.

At this rate, Derek Anderson is going to get knocked out in the first quarter next week.

Actually, I woke up early to try to work on an essay I need to finish, but again I’m lazy and putting it off.

I believe that in order to get any change in our elected officials, we have to get rid of voter registration, or at least make it same-day voter registration. What kind of change is hard to say because you’ll get a whole lot of voters who haven’t been voting. When you take down this ridiculous barrier to voting, then it makes it easier to mobilize voters, to engage in mass politics. Mass politics is the only path towards taking down the current kleptocratic power structure.

Purpose. I was wrong about the first step. I need to know what I’m striving to open my time for. I need to set my goals.

Lately, I’ve been trying to get my work-filled life under control. I recently realized that I’ve been going about this the wrong way. My problem is not that I am not a hard worker. My problem is that I am a vastly inefficient worker.

If I give myself a whole weekend to do a paper, and I end up doing it on the last day anyway, do I really need a full weekend to do the work?

I constantly distract myself with the Internet. It is impossible to do a task with constant interruptions. I assume there is something wrong with me, and I was just not focusing enough, but the real solution is to remove the interruptions.

I thought I wanted to be a hard worker; I thought that was a virtue I wanted to instill within myself. No, what I really need to be is an efficient and effective worker. I need to get a task done and make sure that I’m not just spinning my wheels.

One other thing to get off my chest: schoolwork sucks and is very unfulfilling. How come I can devour certain books within the span of a couple days, but take obscene amounts of time to finish my class reading? I blame my classes. I write an essay but for what purpose? A grade? I write a paper that will be read once and then tossed aside forever. My life essentially consists of writing these papers. It is an unfulfilling life.

The first step towards breaking the pattern is eliminating my inefficient work habits. Then, I can use the free time to do something that’s worth the time.

Is it possible to be both prudent and incautious?

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK ESSAYS FUCK FUCK FUCK

FUCK

My life is so empty without television.

The New York Times has a good article to read on Blackwater USA, titled Report Says Firm Sought to Cover Up Iraq Shootings. Blackwater USA consists what they call “security contractors,” but what antiquity calls mercenaries.

Here is the offending evidence, suggesting that Blackwater did engage in cover-ups:

In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report said. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

Here are some additional paragraphs provoke worry:

But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.

The report also says Blackwater gunmen engaged in offensive operations alongside uniformed American military personnel in violation of their State Department contract, which states that Blackwater guards are to use their weapons only for defensive purposes.

Blackwater has dismissed 122 of its employees over the past three years for misuse of weapons, drug or alcohol abuse, lewd conduct or violent behavior, according to the report. It has also terminated workers for insubordination, failure to report incidents or lying about them, and publicly embarrassing the company. One employee was dismissed for showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’m particularly worried about what happens with the mercenary situation when (if?) we leave Iraq.

Undoubtedly, there are so many things political and philosophical I could be blogging about. But what I really need to accomplish is getting control of my life. Instead of being overwhelmed by work, I need to make it manageable. I need to ritualize my classwork, habituate myself to doing work instead of goofing off. Cordon off time to belong only to classwork and to nothing else.

So while I work on that, this blog will remain mostly empty — with only the occasional small outburst, until I can ritualize this too.

Things that have been occupying my time, a list:

• football, watching
• school work, mostly reading — goddamn, so much reading
• clubs
• long naps
• cable television
• the internets
• chatting with friends

Things that should occupy my time more, a list:

• The Chalkboard Manifesto
• reading for pleasure
• regular sleep
• planning for club activities
• blogging

Things that should occupy my time less, a list:

• the internets
• long naps
• cable television
• football?

“Once all was ready, the archbishop of Milan ordered the leading citizens of Bologna to be arrested as though they were guilty of a conspiracy. He extracted from them under torture, as he had intended, a confession that they had held discussions with the Florentine People about throwing off his lordship and freeing the city. This became the pretext for war. Is there anything more common than for tyrants to invent false reasons in place of true ones?” — Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, vol II, book VII

I’m frustrated. I need to manage my time better.

I think I need to focus on getting everything else in order (especially getting reading done) before I move on with such a big project.

There may be a few entries which are more substantive, but don’t expect many this week. This week I’m really going to try to block time for reading.

So I was on the internets in some place where people can talk towards each other (I will not mention exactly where, suffice it to say, I was bored and just wandering around), and I discovered a very interesting conversation concerning God. A guy asked whether Jesus was God, or just the son of God.

The girl replied, “BOTH. That’s the purpose of the TRINITY – it doesn’t have to make sense. I accept it by FAITH.”

Is this what people of faith really think? I would like to think that there are people out there who conceive of faith in a very different manner.

Ethics stuff on hold. Work today. Hitchens tomorrow. No time.

In other news, I hacked the library e-reserves. Or rather, I figured out all the passwords. It’s just the first three letters of the professor’s name and then the course number (not the department number). What’s hilarious is that I thought I’d have to search through the course catalog for numbers and stuff, but all the information is on the e-reserve page. Supposedly, they introduced the passwords to further protect the copyrights of academics. If I were an obscure academic, though, I’d rather have more people reading my work. Kidding.

Maybe they don’t need passwords even a moron can figure out.

Note to self: Do other schools have the same e-reserves system?

Link: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge222.html#haidt.

Will comment later.

Tomorrow: What is Ethics? — An Initial Stab

A personal note: OMG LT U failed me. My fantasy team is not going to look good this week.

The idea of alternate ethical schemes was sparked by a shooting star. After I had seen it, I sat in the tent thinking, “What would I really wish for?” I decided that I would not wish for a change in the composition of human nature, such as making us more benevolent, because our institutions, like government, are designed to take account of human nature. If human nature changed, our societies would collapse. Or so thinks the conservative me, who still places a lot of value on contingency.

Way later on, now that I’m taking a class on ethics — a philosophy class, not a jailed CEO’s re-education course — I’m beginning to wonder if ethics are contingent on human nature. That is to say, are our moral systems dependent on human psychology? If we came across alien creatures, would have they have ethics in a way we could conceive? Would it be entirely different? Or would they necessarily have ethics, the way they would necessarily have mathematics (although even this is up for debate)?

At this point, I don’t know. I’m leaning towards believing that there are some universal conceptions they’d have to share, like fairness and justice, but that these could be expressed in completely different fashions, thus making our two ethical systems incompatible. I’m leaning towards believing that ethics are contingent on human nature, and that to believe that ethics are God-given is completely wrong.

Before I even broach the topic of God, I must first decide to what degree ethics are contingent on human nature. I plan on using a strategy of first attempting to devise alternate ethical systems.

Here are my different ideas:

• Find differences in morality between different cultures and exaggerate them.
• Find psychological subjects and imagine an entire society of these brain-damaged or neuro-atypical individuals
• Examine Asimov’s 3 Laws and see how they’d work for robots with free will
• Look at the structure of animal societies and see how they’d work with more intelligent agents
• Scour science-fiction literature for alien ethics
• Examine tit-for-tat and other strategies in economics literature and see if I can imagine societies

But even before I do all that, I’ve got to look at what “ethics” and “morality” mean.

Tomorrow: Defining morality and ethics in a broad sense.

A personal note: I have an unidentified disease at the moment. I’m enjoying calling myself a medical mystery. But I’m seeing someone who’s not a general practitioner on Monday, and hopefully he’ll figure it out. I’d recommend limiting contact with me until further notice.

I really struggled as to whether I would do my usual 9/11 “tribute”. Isn’t it time to “move on”? But in the midst of so much propaganda and lies, I figured it would be good to take just a moment to engage in the act of remembrance. It is a useful exercise to expunge our frames from our minds and remember 9/11 not as a geopolitical event, but as a tragedy involving real families. The word “remember” changes for me each year, and this year brought completely different emotions to mind. The flashbulb-type memory is gone. Instead of feeling like just five years ago, it feels like ages ago. Undoubtedly, this is due to my personal experiences. This summer just felt long in general, and I started working for a bit. The increasing burden of responsibility seems to demarcate a new era in my life.

Where I really struggled was whether to put the usual tribute comic for Chalkboard Manifesto, or to go with comedy. In fact, I had the comic drawn and I had decided not to publish the 9/11 comic at one point, but then I changed my mind.

Remember the dead. The enemy still exists and we have not yet devised an appropriate strategy to defeat him.

It feels different now. Iraq feels like so much bigger a problem than 9/11.

Still, I read over what I wrote last year and decided that it was important to take some time to remember.

Remember.

OH NOES! SLEEP SCHEDULE OFF! DAMN YOU ROUND EARTH AND SUN!

I’ll have a lot to do when I get back. I’ll have a lot of opportunities. Unfortunately, I still can’t trick myself into looking forward to going back to Baltimore.

I will try to enjoy myself as best I can, but my heart will always belong here in the Bay Area.

List of summer reading:

• I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter — 363 pages
• Fiasco by Thomas Ricks — 439 pages
• God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens — 283 pages
• Invasion of the Party Snatchers by Victor Gold — 235 pages
• Settling Accounts: Drive to the East by Harry Turtledove — 594 pages
• Settling Accounts: The Grapple by Harry Turtledove — 616 pages
• Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar — 176 pages
• A Collection of Essays by George Orwell — 316 pages (unfinished — approximately read 100 pages)
• Downsizing Democracy by Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg — 244 pages (unfinished — read 128 pages)

Total pages read (approximate): 2934.