On a lighter note, how about those Mariners? Doing pretty damn good so far. Not at the top of the division, but not far off either. A good series against the Angels and they could easily take the top spot. Here’s hoping for a strong effort for the rest of the season and a playoff spot!
Belief and Politics
There has been a lot of talk recently, thanks to the candidacy of Mitt Romney, about the role of personal belief in politics. Jacob Weisberg, writing for Slate, asks if it is religious bigotry to not vote for Romney just because he is Mormon. He argues that this is a valid question because if Romney believes in a religion that is based upon a con-man’s lies, we, as the voters, should know about it and judge him on his gullibility. From a different perspective, Jerry Coyne, in his Edge article, discusses the various candidates’ view of evolution. He discusses Brownback’s claim that we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith, but accept them if they’re compatible (Coyne’s paraphrase of Brownback). Coyne’s point is that if candidates reject science that they are uncomfortable with but that the scientific community strongly supports, we should seriously question if that candidate is worth our vote.
(Incidentally, one minor quibble with Coyne’s otherwise excellent article: He draws the analogy of not believing in evolution to be the same as not believing in atoms and states: …there is just as much evidence for the fact of evolution as there is for the existence of atoms. While I think that the scientific evidence in support of the theory of evolution is strong, atoms are directly observable by several techniques while evolution, to the best of my knowledge, is not directly observed.)
Both articles bring up the role of belief in politics and whether we, as the voting public, should take into account the belief of a candidate before voting for him or her. I would venture to say that both Weisberg and Coyne conclude that not only should we, but we absolutely must take belief into consideration. After all, personal belief plays a major role in people’s lives, informing their decisions and how they act. Just look at the role that religion and belief have played in Bush’s presidency.
Weisberg focuses specifically on Mormonism, feeling that Mormonism was essentially started by a con-man and that anyone who believes what Joseph Smith said is too gullible to deserve his vote. I think this is a little unfair, as the one major disadvantage of Mormonism compared to other religions is its age: it is young enough that a lot more is known about the people who started it than most main stream religions. For all we know, most religions were started by con-men (check out this description by Harlan Ellison on the origins of Scientology).
This, however, raises a bigger point: is anyone who has deep religious conviction then unfit for office? All religions have aspects to them that contradict modern scientific findings. Things that are either untestable or unverifiable. Things that they later have to recant as science uncovers new facts about the universe we live in, facts such as the age of the planet, the age of the universe, the origin of species, the Earth’s place in the universe, the origin of the universe, the nature of free will, the origin of a person’s orientation, and the list goes on. Weisberg points out that, just as he wouldn’t vote for a Mormon, he wouldn’t vote for a fundamentalist that truely believed the Earth was only 7000 years old. But what of a candidate that believed in a literal Garden of Eden? At what point do you draw the line between beliefs that are ok for a public servant to have and ones that are too out there?
Probably most dangerous is, as Coyne points out, those candidates that just plain deny science because it conflicts with their beliefs. This is the same attitude that caused the Church to lock up Galileo when he said the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. When this attitude prevails, it causes politicians to ignore scientific evidence and use their faith as a guide in times of difficulty. And this can have potentially disasterous results, as our delay in addressing Global Warming may soon show us.
Personal belief has a role in personal life, where the decisions are smaller scale. And faith is probably part of human nature, stemming from a need to place some kind of order on the world around us. But, when faith is the dominant mechanism for making decisions that affect millions and perhaps billions of people, it becomes dangerous. We don’t all agree on what faith is the correct one, which one better informs us about the world around us. Your faith doesn’t necessarily jive with mine. While science isn’t perfect, it has three advantages, in my mind, over faith. First, it is self-correcting. If I publish results that are suspect, other people will check and double-check them to verify if I have done a good job. Theories and hypotheses are updated and replaced as new evidence is found that does or does not support them. Second, science is relatively objective. All science has a bit of the researcher’s bias in it, but that is again the role of peer review, to uncover those biases and make the results as objective as possible. Finally, science is predictive. That is the ultimate test of scientific theories: once we have a theory, can we predict something new that can then be verified. Science can be tested, faith cannot.
A final point about the role of science in society: science, as a way of looking at the world, has spread throughout the world without any coersion on the part of missionaries or conquerors. It has done so on its own merits. It is thus, in some sense, the one view of the world that the world has come to some level of consensus on. People in all parts of the world have adopted, to varying degrees, a scientific outlook. And they have done this on their own initiative.
The symbols are those approved for use on graves at Arlington Cemetery (minus a few that have copyrights).
Syrup by Maxx Barry
As you might guess by some of the postings on this site, I have a little problem with some features of our modern, consumerist society. And, directly related to that is how marketing is so tied into our psyches that we are almost literally forced to buy things we have no need of, but want nonetheless. Marketing is the engine that drives our consumer-based economy.
I first encountered Maxx Barry through his novel Jennifer Government. This is about a not-too-distant future in which we identify so strongly with the brands we consume, that we actually take our names from who we work for. Thus, Jennifer works for the Government. It is a scathing view of our market-driven world.
Syrup, in contrast, could take place today or tomorrow. Or even yesterday. It is about a young marketing major, who has renamed or, better said, rebranded himself as Scat, as that is cooler than the name he was given by his parents. He comes up with a million-dollar idea and tries to sell it to Coke, via one of their marketing people, a woman named 6. Scat is screwed out of his millions and thus begins his long path to success and his quest to win 6’s heart.
The novel is about how marketing is used to sell us things we don’t want, don’t need, but are convinced we should have. It is about the role of marketing in society and, as such, is sprinkled with marketing examples that, I presume, are from real-world marketing text books. These examples are pretty blatant in their assumption of the low intelligence levels of the masses. The scary thing is that most of these examples actually work. It would seem we are sheep waiting for someone to tell us something, anything, to do to make our lives just a little bit better.
Eventually, Scat ends up in a struggle with his nemesis, who is also at Coke, and who has put Scat into an impossible situation to succeed. Even though we are pretty confident that Scat will succeed (most protagonists do seem to succeed most of the time), how he will pull it off is always uncertain. This leads to enough tension and suspense that the reader is sucked in. And we are never quite sure how Scat’s relationship with 6 will turn out.
As a commentary on the role of marketing and advertising in our society, I find this and Jennifer Government to be extremely interesting and, might I say, insightful. I think that if we truly realized how much we are manipulated by marketing, we would be appalled.
I am reminded of the lawsuits against the fast food industry for causing obesity. I find these lawsuits pretty damn annoying, because I think that, as a society, we don’t take enough responsibility for our actions. However, I also believe that the fast food industry isn’t innocent. They know more about how we think and feel than we do, and they play to our human instincts to, in some sense, force us to want their product. In some real sense, I think we can’t help ourselves, and these companies are more responsible for some of the ills that face our country than we or they are willing to admit. While we absolutely need to be responsible for our own actions, companies need to be responsible for manipulating our emotions and desires for their own profit.
Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya: A Life by Evan S Connell
Read: May-June, 2007
Goya is probably my favorite artist of all time, for two principle reasons. First, he is of Basque origin. In fact, his ancestors (either his grandfather or his great-grandfather) was from the town of Zerain, Gipuzkoa. My mom’s grandfather, Blas Telleria, was from Mutiloa, Gipuzkoa, which is right next door. In doing some research on my genealogy, I found that one of my ancestors was named Blas de Goya, also from Mutiloa. Thus, it seems to me that there is a small chance that Goya and I are “cousins”. Which I find sort of cool.
The second reason I like Goya is because I just plain like his art. Most of it I don’t appreciate much at all. It seems that half of art can only be appreciated in context. In the case of Goya, his paintings of the Spanish royal family, for example, seem to be lauded because he didn’t idealize his subjects and that was radical for his time. For me, it doesn’t seem all that exciting and I don’t really find all that much of interest in those paintings. However, his Black Paintings and many of his etchings are just plain fascinating. I was lucky enough to find a used copy of his complete etchings at Powell’s in Portland. Especially those dealing with the Spanish war with Napoleon I find very interesting. Goya depictions of humanity’s dark side are, in my mind, still unparalleled.
Some of my favorite paintings by Goya include Saturn Eating his Son, the Third of May, and The Colossus.
I just finished reading Evan Connell’s biography of Goya, entitled, simply, Francisco Goya: A Life. Rather than get into all of the minute details of Goya’s life, Connell rather puts Goya’s life into
the context of Spanish society of the time. That is, we get to know Goya as much through his interactions with Spanish royalty as through his own deeds. Connell goes on a number of tangents dealing with important Spaniards of the time and their goings on. We learn a lot about the sexual conduct of certain powerful women of the time, partially because these women, including the Queen of Spain, determined so much in the life of people like Goya. I think part of the reason these women feature so prominently, though, is because of the titillation factor.
Connell’s style is very familiar. At first, this was a bit off-putting; it was almost too familiar. But after a while, I became accustomed to his style and actually really enjoyed it. Sometimes, the style makes it hard to follow what Connell is talking about. He uses very colloquial phrases and terms and writes as if he is talking with the reader rather than writing an authoritative biography on his subject.
This is the first book specifically on Goya I have read and it may be that part of the reason that Connell digresses on so many other people is because there just isn’t that much known about Goya himself. I just don’t know. For whatever reason, because of this style, we learn a bit less about Goya the man and a good deal about the Spain in which he resided, the Spain that shaped him and his art. We learn about the foibles of the nobility, the misery of the peasants, and the horrors of war. Thus, as a book on Goya, it maybe leaves a little to be desired. But, as both an account of Spain in the later 1700s and as an entertaining romp through history in its own right, this is an excellent book. I highly recommend it to any Spanish history buff.
San Francisco, Revisited Virtually
Google recently released their “Street View” feature, in which they’ve gone around a few cities (including San Fran, Vegas, and NYC) with a van and a camera and photographed everything. Those photos are now on the web.
I thought I’d see if I could find the places I visited back in September (see this post). So far, I wasn’t able to find the San Francisco Brewing Company, even though I know the address. I just couldn’t see it on the street. But I was able to find both Eguna Basque and Iluna Basque. A shot of both of them is here. And you can see a few people hanging out in front of City Light Books. SF Brewing should be just down the street from them, but I am having a hard time finding them.
No, I just found them. Their sign is hidden by a road sign, but you can see their happy hour special!
It’s a bit weird to be able to zoom in on things like this and see people wandering the streets. There are a few sites popping up which show some of the more interesting things people have found (just search for Google Street View in, where else, Google). But it is also cool to be able to take a virtual tour of a city like this. I might feel differently when my house is online like this though…