Exogenous Shock

Earliest memory: My father perched on the edge of the couch in the basement of our house in Grand Junction, Colorado as he focused intently on the TV housed in the anachronistic blond wood cabinet.  He strikes a pose that signals remoteness, gravity – leaning forward his right knee propped up his elbow as the forefinger of his hand pressed against the socket of his eye and his thumb supported his chin.  Unnervingly, he stared with raptor-like intensity at the TV through glasses with reddish frames mounted on his deeply furrowed brow.  Dressed in a white tee shirt and khaki pants, he was home from work, unusual for a weekday.  School had been dismissed.  Were my mother and two brothers there?  They must have been, but I do not remember.  At that eternal moment, the compass of my world contracted into a triangle defined by the TV, my father, and me.

At seven years of age, I did not understand the sense of foreboding that hung in the air like a dense fog.  Something terrible had happened.  The moment in the basement was preceded by the inconsolable seriousness of the grownups that constituted the fixed stars in the constellation of my small world.  Some cried – deeply disturbing to a child.

The TV showed a flag draped caisson being drawn along a street lined with crowds.  A riderless horse danced sideways and jerked its head up and down impatiently, boots mounted backwards in the stirrups.  A little boy dressed in a coat and shorts with his bare legs exposed to the winter weather saluted the retreating caisson.

The concept of death was foreign, incomprehensible to me.  John F. Kennedy was my hero – and heroes are invulnerable and immortal.  Watching the funeral procession to Arlington National Cemetery today is a chilling reminder of innocence lost.

Continuing my path through grade school, John F. Kennedy – never John Kennedy – became a talisman that was invoked frequently by quoting from his Inaugural Speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”  My mother collected Kennedy half dollar coins in a glass jar placed in the cabinet over the oven and encouraged me to insert new ones gleaned from trips to the store like offerings to a secular god.  On special occasions, we dumped them out noisily onto the Formica kitchen table and counted them – a fund for my college education.  Tragedy transformed into opportunity.

***

Forty-eight years ago today, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.  Or, should it be: Forty-eight years ago today, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy.  Which version is the more faithful representation of history?  Does the passive voice of the first formulation insulate – soften – the judgment of history?  Is the active voice of the second version too harsh in the face of counterfactual models of history that concatenate coincidences and conspiracy theories to assert that Oswald did not act – could not have acted – alone?

In Ulysses, James Joyce links the travails of his hero, Leonard Bloom, as he walks around Dublin on June 16, 1904 to the adventures depicted by Homer in his 2,000-year-old epic.  On one level, Ulysses is a meditation on the interconnected, iterative neural network of history.  At one point, Joyce alludes to the implacable rule of history by making one of his characters, Stephen Dedalus, declaim: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”  A nightmare. From which we are trying to awake.  Is history a dream, a figment of our imaginations that allows us to find patterns in correlations without the security of causation?

Politics and economics and religion recur to history.  Filled with inspiring stories of heroes and deeds of an unimaginable courage and suffering, history pulsates with lives lived in extremis. Listen to the rhythm of past glory as it courses through the address that Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg 148 years ago:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln defined the American creed, but like most prophets he was without honor in his own country and was sacrificed on Good Friday 1865 as partial expiation for our original sin of slavery.  History is relentless, its claims endless, its toll unyielding, the number of victims unimaginable.  One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War we are still dealing with the legacy of slavery.

Casting the net further back for another example: the three great monotheistic religions claim the same piece of real estate in Jerusalem based on events thousands of years ago and are willing to sacrifice blood – and the tenets of their creeds – to enforce claims grounded in historical interpretations that are simultaneously unassailable and questionable.

In an effort to travel through time, discover causes, and make sense, literary genres morph and adapt: modernist fiction like Ulysses challenged realism with randomness and uncertainty and stream of consciousness, historical fiction like Gone with the Wind inserted characters into real events, literary fiction based on alternative histories like Don DeLillo’s Libra and Stephen King’s 11/22/63 play fast and loose with the facts in an effort to understand events.

Scholars and scientists approach history from oblique angles by creating models on computer screens that abstract the complexity of reality in order to glimpse unseen structures that support the surface that we experience.  Refracting light through disciplinary prisms, the spectrum is decomposed into concepts that shatter old paradigms in the quest for new truths.

In the 1980s, path dependence – a species of history – took its turn in the spotlight: “A process of change … is path dependent if later outcomes of the process depend on the specific course of preceding events.”  More rigorously, it is defined as: “as a property of a stochastic process which obtains under two conditions (contingency and self-reinforcement) and causes lock-in in the absence of exogenous shock.”  Were the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy the result of earlier events that cascaded down through time due to a flap of the wings of a butterfly?  Or did they constitute exogenous shocks that shook up dependent systems and ramify down new paths through time?

Closed systems suffer from the relentless sovereignty of the second law of thermodynamics, which operates according to the self-evident, but often ignored or suppressed intuition that order disintegrates into disorder, that death follows life in an endless spiral.  The future is simply a tendency, an arrow, a vector toward maximum entropy: the undefinable measure of the rate at which disorder exacts its inexorable toll.

Hope emanates from the fortunate ability of entities within closed systems to absorb energy from other systems: the earth and the life it supports partake of power bestowed by a benevolent sun.  Life in the sweep of history triumphs – fleetingly – over disorder in a mystery sublime.

On Revenge and Despair

Yes and some people claim that there's a woman to blame

And I know it's my own damn fault

-          “Margaritaville,” Jimmy Buffett

With mock cheerfulness, she quipped, “I am a cheap date” when the check arrived.  Although the announcement was expected – she uttered the same thing every time we had dinner – hearing the words, hearing the actual words pissed me off. Since she did not suffer from low self-esteem, the boomerang that she launched punctured my hypersensitive self-respect before returning to her with a satisfying snap for future deployment.  Like most frugal people, I resent being called cheap, but resisted the temptation to tell her to shove it.  According to my prelapsarian way of thinking, dinners in the ten to twelve dollar range are not cheap.  And, besides the coed restroom was clean – a sure sign of an upmarket establishment in my estimation.

Casuist distinctions now sink like broken shards of a fine porcelain vase to the bottom of our mutual indecision.  Attracted to her beauty and self-confidence, I was smitten at first sight.  My solidity refracted through a hazy atmosphere of loneliness appealed to her maternal impulse – she would rehabilitate me.  A mutual attraction grounded in shared interests and tastes and spiced with intriguing dissonances developed.  As time wore on without consummation, her confidence, her overconfidence – declarative sentences punctuated with a hearty “Period. End of story” – curdled into a willful avoidance of reality in the Arizona sun as my solidity withered into unreconstructed stinginess, deliberate obtuseness.

After dinner, we went back to my apartment where she resumed her trenchant denunciations of my furniture – wrong kind, not enough, shabby.  The same lame excuses stuck in my throat like a fish bone as intimations of comforting silence beckoned from just beyond the scrim. Failing to interest her in my latest deep thoughts, we parted with an awkward hug – she seemed simultaneously older but too young for me.

Desiccated, hope floated like leaf in the middle of an ocean as recriminations lapped against shores of my mulish obstinacy. With perfect records of failed relationships, we wordlessly negotiated whether to put this one on life support or euthanize it with indifference.  I opted for the latter.  It seemed cleaner.  I miss her bubbly voice.

***

Two weeks ago last Saturday, I absentmindedly turned the knob to set the height of the seat on the stationary bike to fit my six-foot, three-inch frame, clicked the cleats on my shoes into the pedals, mounted the bike, and started pedaling leisurely before the spinning class began.  Looking like an unstrung puppet, the startlingly thin instructor bounced into the stuffy room, twittered nervously like an excited bird, cranked up the formulaic electronica that passes now for hip music, and began issuing commands, incongruous with her slight frame.  After taking at least three hour-long spinning classes a week for ten years – during some periods I would take seven classes per week – the music was boring and the innocent narcissism of the teachers tedious.

Faking it until the endorphins kicked in and stoked my enthusiasm, I lifted my hands from the handlebars and sat upright on the seat, pedaling slowly.  Suddenly, I heard the sickening sound of a seat post sliding down and looked around to see which schmuck in the sparsely attended class had failed to properly tighten the knob on their seat post.  As I was falling backward, the realization dawned on me that I was the schmuck. Milliseconds after my lower back and left hand thumped to the floor, I glared at the instructor as she rushed to my bike.

As I twisted my shoe free from the right pedal while reclining on the floor in supine position like a boxer who suffered a crushing body blow, she launched into an explanation of how to tighten the knob on the seat post without asking the one obvious question: “Are you alright?”  Indignant at her lack of concern and insulted by her chirping nonsense, I rose to my feet and roared, “I know how the knob is used!” As I stalked out of the room, she restarted the class on an upbeat note, determined not to let a middle-aged curmudgeon interfere with her intrepid, inspiring happy talk.

Marching indignantly to the front desk, I demanded that the clerk accompany me to the room to check the bike. As he followed beside me, I scowled impressively, offering an expert opinion on the “ridiculous design” of the bikes.  The old bikes had spring loaded bolts that fit into holes in the seat posts – making them more secure but less amenable to subtle adjustments of the seat height; the new bikes have threaded knobs that allow adjustment to any height with the concomitant risk of sudden failure if the device is not secured properly.

When we got to the room, he tested the seat and proved to my infinite chagrin that the post and knob were OK – I had simply failed to tighten the knob sufficiently.  Humiliated once again, I turned on my heel and stalked out, keeping my fierce gaze sternly ahead.  Still fuming, I took a shower and, to seal my reputation as a mad man, marched once again into the spinning room, purposefully avoiding eye contact with the instructor or the remaining cyclists, and copied the serial number off the offending bike on the chance that I decided to notify the club or pursue a claim. Small comfort for a wounded ego.

***

Recently, I moved to a different apartment in pursuit of lower rent and quieter surroundings.  One evening, shortly after getting settled, the red, macho-looking Jeep in the parking space next to mine began to whistle and flash as I pulled in. Put on guard, I slowly opened the door, only to set off the full cacophony of the alarm – headlights flashing, horn honking, siren whooping and wailing.  Abashed, I slunk away as quickly as possible with my head down, glancing furtively from side to side, hoping that no one would suspect that I was trying to jack the Jeep.  The next morning, I left a note for the manager of the apartment complex asking him to address my discourteous neighbor.

That weekend (Halloween) the alarm accosted me again as I returned home on Saturday afternoon so I marched purposefully over the manager’s office to ask him in person to deal with the issue – and he said that he would on Monday morning while looking at me with bovine indifference as ghoulish revelers lurked and lurched in the background.

With one exception, the alarm continued to blast away whenever I unintentionally violated the personal space of the haughty Jeep.  My frustration moderated into curiosity so I stopped by the office and talked to one of the sincere staff members who assured me that management would look into the matter.  A day later, the manager left a voice message stating that he had talked to the owner of the Jeep who said that he planned to address the problem soon.

To my momentary relief, the next morning the alarm did not sound when I snuck warily into my car at 5:00 a.m.  Properly set up, it blasted me out of my temporary complacency when I returned from working out (yes, I took a spinning class at another club).  After fuming through breakfast, I unloaded on a bicyclist who passed me on the sidewalk by telling her in no uncertain terms that sidewalks were not a proper venue for bicycles.  I am an expert on all things bike.

***

Challenges to my fragile, masculine dignity trigger automatic, instantaneous impulses to strike back and defend my manhood as deep roots of obsession ramify into the reptilian part of my brain if the impulse is thwarted.  All slights, all affronts, all misdemeanors inspire an immediate desire to denounce the miscreants summarily.  If not given an outlet, the urges transmute into grievances that fester while I probe incessantly at the emotional canker sores.

My large body deterred others from retaliating against my sharply worded retorts when I was a kid and allowed me to survive to middle age.  With maturity, spaces usually open up between the desire for retribution and the verbal lashing out.  The out-of-control displays of road rage are a thing of the past and emails documenting my contempt are wisely deposited in the trash can after they are composed and quarantined overnight.

Still, the desire for retribution seems inappropriate to the gravity of the threats – the impulse to fight or flight no longer enhances fitness.  It has been decades since I have lashed out physically and often after the desire for revenge marinades for a couple of hours rationality gains the upper hand and the impulse morphs into regret and despair and self-loathing.

Increasingly, neuroscientists are demonstrating, we are strangers to ourselves – the title of David Eagleman’s book summarizes the human condition well: Incognito.  A surprising number of emotions and thoughts are controlled by subconscious elements that developed in evolutionary contexts that are quite unlike modern society.  However, the naturalistic fallacy prevents one from applying genetic excuses to boorish behavior.  The battle to moderate and adjust those impulses is as close as the neighbor’s car or as far away as the humiliation of Gaddafi.

He’s seen a lot of women, but she never escaped his mind

And he just grew, tangled up in blue.

-          “Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan

Line of Sight

Middle of the night, shuffling around in circles like a lobotomized mental patient: Where am I? What am I doing?  A dentist drill of discomfort twirls insistently at the base of my cranium as a primal imperative insistently rises to consciousness – find a bathroom and find it soon! 

Shifting nervously from foot to foot in an effort to calm myself, it seems increasingly unlikely that a bathroom will appear in a small room with clothes hanging from racks.  The light is bright but does not provide clarity as I rub my sleepy, rheumy eyes.  With baby steps, I exit the closet after realizing vaguely that the route that took me from bed to hallway in the old apartment angled to the left while the trajectory veers to the right in the new one.

Flicking the light switch off (an automatic habit borne of frugality and a heightened concern for sustainability), I sound my way along the bedroom wall until I reach the hall, depositing mental pheromones that will allow me to retrace and refine trails in the new colony populated by one confused two-hundred pound ant.

Simple rules embedded in my unconscious lead to the complex macro-behavior of disposing of waste in the middle of the night in a way consistent with the survival of the colony, but I wonder absentmindedly: Can a colony consist of one member with no queen?  I make a mental note to look into that later, but the imperative amps up its intensity as the unfamiliar but welcoming sight of the bathroom lurches into view as I fumble for a light switch placed in a diabolically unfamiliar place.

***

On the first day of kindergarten, the teacher asked me, “Kevin, what’s on the blackboard?”  Innocently, I answered her question with another one, “What blackboard?”  My response led to hushed conversations between my mother and the teacher, between my mother and the mother next door, and between my mother and father as I hunched playing over toys, taking perverse pride in the fact that they were talking about me: “He couldn’t even see the blackboard?”  Ultimately, the conversations transmuted into an appointment with Dr. Warren Broderson and my special status was communicated to the other kids by my unceremonious removal from class during the middle of the day.

Dr. Broderson perched on a stool and, as he leaned forward, he violated my personal space, increasing my discomfort.  Harsh beams of light pierced my eyes and made them water as the benevolent doctor murmured reassuring incantations as in a rite of passage.  Later, a phoropter was fitted to the bridge of my nose as a kaleidoscope of lenses began to spin and flip before my eyes.  The chart on the wall filled with strange shapes connected at strange angles that morphed and shifted and jumped in unfamiliar ways fascinating to the uninitiated, the visually-impaired. As new combinations of lenses tumbled and clicked into place, Dr. Broderson invoked the minimalist catechism of this strange, scientific liturgy: “Better here?  Microsecond pause. “Or here?”

The first crisp image of my life rose before my eyes like a revelation: a montage of sparse hairs on the top of Dr. Broderson’s balding head as he stared into the recesses of my eyes.  Controlling the power of sight, he was a magician to a confused little boy.  He prescribed glasses with thick lenses that were both a blessing and a curse: in exchange for the gift of sight mocking references to my “four eyes” were hurled when I dropped the ball or made a bad move.  The frames that supported the powerful optics were fractured often during my ill-fated efforts to play sports, but were a price gladly paid.

During the first five years of my life I developed a capacity and level of comfort with feeling and sounding my way in the dark as I made my way through the world without the aid of glasses.  Sometimes I wonder what happened to children with 20/800 sight before the invention of corrective lenses: Were they abandoned?  Did they experience higher rates of accidental injury or death?  If so, why did evolution not eliminate poor eyesight?  Was there a compensating advantage?

My left eye corrects to about 20/25 and my right to 20/40.  Nevertheless, diminished eyesight in my formative years sharpened other senses.  Sounds that many people are unaware of command my attention and demand resolution – the periodic plops of a dripping faucet in the kitchen interfere with sleep.  My normally sure-footed trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night in a familiar apartment confirm that nature compensates for the weakening of one sense with the increased acuity of others. However, the adaptations are not permanent and lead to unintended consequences and further adaptations in an endless kaleidoscopic search for clarity and fitness.

Telling the Truth from the Trees

The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

-          William James, Pragmatism

Many years ago, I developed the habit of investigating the etymology of words after looking them up.  During one of my forays into the back of my trusty American Heritage Dictionary, I discovered that tree and truth have the same root, deru, which means “to be firm, solid, steadfast, hence specialized senses of ‘wood,’ ‘tree,’ and derivatives referring to objects made of wood.”  That truth and trees share a sense of firmness, solidity, and steadfastness is unsurprising – we admire and are attracted to those attributes in the face of an unpredictable, even arbitrary world.  However, on another level, the organic, evolving nature of wood and trees is consistent with the idea of truth that lies at the heart of the philosophy of pragmatism – “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.”

The orientation, attitude, and approach advocated by William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey under the banner of pragmatism stands in stark contrast with firm, solid, steadfast,  absolute truths advocated by religions and ideologies.  In contrast to these positions, truth lives and breathes and adjusts to changing circumstances when viewed from the perspective of pragmatism.

For instance, truths appropriate to conditions found in the Middle East two millennia ago may not avail in the 21^st century.  Of course, ancient truths may continue to be relevant, but they must be evaluated through the lens of current conditions.  This approach requires looking at circumstances carefully, clearly, and directly without prejudging them or applying stale mental models.

In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks describes the efforts of Chris Ward, the leader of the Port Authority, to rescue the rebuilding efforts in Lower Manhattan.  Terms like “Ground Zero” are problematic because they become invested with symbolic meanings – truths – that block thought. Truths seem absolute when viewed in the context of current events.  However, truths can take on different or expanded meanings over time.

For example, the term “Ground Zero” originated during the Manhattan Project that led up to the detonation of nuclear weapons during World War II.  In June 1946, the Strategic Bombing Survey asserted: “For convenience, the term ‘ground zero’ will be used to designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation, or “air zero.’”  The cruel irony is that the country that first detonated weapons of mass destruction during World War II is the same country that suffered an attack on 9/11.

According to Brooks, Ward demystified the meanings surrounding the rebuilding effort and concentrated on “the thing itself” – the massive, complex construction projects that were hampered by the conflicting “truths” that had grown up around what is essentially the burial site of 3,000 people.  Sentiments interfere with the hard work of constructing massive projects.  Brooks goes on to apply the idea of looking at “the thing itself” to various public policy questions – taxes, gun control, green tech – that have become hostage to interest groups on both ends of the political spectrum.

When things become invested with symbolic meanings or values, “You get politicians and commentators whose views are entirely predictable because they don’t care about the specifics of any particular issue.”  Pro-life and pro-choice positions on abortion and Occupy Wall Street efforts to punish the rich and Grover Norquist’s demands that politicians sign pledges stating that they oppose all tax increases as a matter of principle are positions that allow no room for debate – no room for evolving truths. 

Recently, David M. Kennedy was interviewed on Fresh Air.  Kennedy is a criminologist who has looked closely at violent crime in inner city neighborhoods and has promoted programs that have been highly effective in addressing the problems.   His approach entails looking at “the thing itself” – not the bumper sticker slogans, not the posturing of preening politicians who conjure up “headless bodies in the desert,” not the pious platitudes of those who promote self-esteem as a panacea for failure.

Most violence in inner cities is committed by an extremely small number of young, black men whose chances of death are orders of magnitude greater than those of the average American.  However, the story goes much deeper.  Those young men and their neighbors in inner cities believe – rightly or wrongly – that cops are racist and that drugs are weapons in a genocidal crusade aimed at eliminating the black race.  In fact, many residents believe that the CIA invented “crack” cocaine and promoted its use in inner cities.

Frankly, it does not matter if we believe these assertions – the only thing that matters is if we look at the thing itself.  Bottom line: No community can sustain itself if most of the male members are in prison or are ex-felons.  Although a get-tough approach that locks up offenders is appealing in the short run, it is destined to fail in the long run.

Under Kennedy’s program, cops facilitate meetings between gang members and respected members of the community – ministers, ex-gang members, and even mothers of gang members.  During the meetings, the cops and community members tell the current gang members that violence is ripping the neighborhood apart and that “we need you to stop.”  They are told if they do not stop the cops will focus relentlessly on busting them. If they do stop they are given help with finding jobs and drug treatment.

The results can be dramatic – gang members and their neighborhoods begin to heal almost immediately.  This is not a story with a fairy tale ending.  Many communities slide back into old methods that do not to work.  Although the viability of bipartisanship is questionable, many public policy issues are resolvable by reasonable people who are willing to confront the brutal facts.  It is very difficult to keep looking at the thing itself.