G as in Good H as in Happy

Street life and other blessings

September 29, 2004

Cronaca, a weblog from art historian David Nishimura, often features archeaological and historic oddities and discoveries. It recently reported "a small experiment in Gyumri, Armenia, ...to turn an urban dead zone into an appealing, living place." A street light, a park bench, and a seesaw. Kids, parents, street vendors. Life.

UPDATE October 1 -- Referring to this, Arts and Letters Daily says, "The litany of death, turmoil, and pain visited on Armenia leaves you surprised that the country still stands at all... " In that context, the light/seesaw/bench enterprise becomes even more inspiring.

Another Cronaca posting directs readers to the NYTimes' report of the role of computer graphics in dating amulets inscribed with words "among the most familiar and ecumenical in the liturgies of Judaism and Christianity."

May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace.

And, less familiar,

May [this one] be blessed by YHWH, the warrior/helper, and the rebuker of Evil.

Improving public space.
Making a difference with the application of very few resources.
Venerable rhetoric invoking peace and safety.

Three things that make me happy.

The nice and the good

September 28, 2004

Randall Jarrell was a deft American poet of deep unsentimental sentiment. (See what you think about The Woman at the Washington Zoo.) His novel, Pictures from An Institution, is superbly funny. I mention this because of a metaphor that appears early in the book. Describing the contortion of an amateur modern dancer, the protagonist is reminded of Greek philosophers having a nervous breakdown, muttering "Is it right to be good?"

Today, so soon after the Jewish High Holy Days, it made me happy to find (via Marginal Revolution) a positive answer to the question, "Is it good to be blessed?" Cecil E. Bohanon and T. Norman Van Cott, professors of economics as Ball State University, take on the manna that fell from heaven in the story of the Hebrews' 40-year wandering in the wilderness enroute to, well, to put it non-politically, a geographical location that they believed was their tribal destiny as well as their destination.

Bohanon and Van Cott argue that, in terms of the big picture, outsourcing means that

lower-cost production alternatives always expand consumption alternatives. Regardless of whether these alternatives trace to manna-like acts of God, new production technologies, foreigners willing to sell their products to us at less-than-prevailing prices, or even immigrants willing to work at less-than-prevailing wages, the result is the same. Consumption alternatives for the natives expand..... Fortunately for the Israelites, Moses didn’t order them to shun manna in order to preserve good jobs in food production.

An important question is how and at what level of magnitude to address the small-chunk problem of those workers who are displaced. The very strengths of a global market work against the tight tribal safety nets of simpler social organization. At the same time, shifts in intersecting market forces are the engine of much that is good.

In Kingsley Amis' novel Lucky Jim, the clear-sighted working-class hero declares that "Nice things are nicer than nasty things." Even mired as so many discussions are in ethical and aesthetic ambiguity, there are worse rules of thumb.

To begin at the level of semantic and perceptual reality:
More is more than less.

Good news from Alexander McCall Smith

September 27, 2004

Anyone else warmed and enchanted by the adventures of Mma Precious Ramotswe and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana can only rejoice at a book review in today's NYTimes. Alexander McCall Smith has launched another series, set in Edinburgh this time, with The Sunday Philosophy Club. To describe his books as "inviting readers into a world of kindness, gentility, and creature comforts" may not provide unambiguous illumination inasmuch as certain edgy postmodernists and over-educated snobs who prowl the fringe of Good&Happy held themselves for a long time aloof from investigating the popular series, leery of popular sentimentality.

Imagine then the salubrious shock of engaging an un-put-down-able paperback of The Kalahari Typing School for Men, when several of us here noticed tears spurting and laughter erupting in tandem, with a swiftness even Trollope had never effected, and for reasons we could not begin to explain.

Now McCall Smith's new heroine of a certain age, Isabel Dalhousie, articles editor for the Scottishly-apt apocryphal Review of Applied Ethics, sounds just the cup of leisurely, atmospheric, epicurean tea near a warm stone hearth. The accidental death of a beautiful youth,

leads Isabel to thoughts of Rupert Brooke and Byron, and to the kind of double negative that most philosophers like to avoid. Perhaps such a loss is sad "because we love the beautiful more; or because Death's momentary victory is all the greater," Isabel thinks. "Nobody, he says, smiling, is too beautiful not to be taken by me."

It is embarrassing to acknowledge that, on particularly frenetic days, out of the corner of my eye, I sometimes glimpse Hyacinth Bucket in the mirror. Perhaps the philosophical Isabel Dalhousie will offer a more beneficent role model. In more practical terms, her appearance on the scene guarantees books enough to last for years, if any local husbands are tempted to despair of finding easy no-fault gift ideas.

Rhetoricians in Paradise

September 26, 2004

Some, like the aforementioned English majors and rhetorical enforcers, will relish this jewel of "the language-related blogosphere," languagelog.

For the pajama'd ilk who collect MSM's (here, NPR's Fresh Air and Harper's Magazine) destined-to-be-shortlived eloquently-clueless dismissal of the blogosphere (collectible buggy-whips, anyone?), see "Little Green Apples at the Blue Moon Bar." Or calculate, in "Role Reversal," the dialectical hazard of contradicting over-the-hill celebrity academics who

(a) if you have the facts right, they'll take aim at the theory, and (b) if your theory is impeccable, they'll take aim at the facts.

Continue to watch as one with High Recognition Factor aims and fires scattered evasive-action head-scratching metaphor.

For a certain taste, rated Highly Recommended to Intoxicating. Post-ers on the roster include Geoff Pullam and John H. McWhorter, both well-known linguists and public intellectuals in the UC system.

Keeping it simple -- and not saying "stupid"

September 24, 2004

Rhetoric for fun and profit. Variant: God is in the grammar.

Around here at Good&Happy we have more than one old-fashioned English major, as well as practitioners of neurolinguistic programming. We entertain awe for the effects of all kinds of rhetorical device, word choice, sentence structure, figures of speech, rhythm, verb tense, the formal and informal elements of discourse. As one of the pioneers of NLP famously notes, there's a big difference between, "(s)he's ugly, but rich;" and "(s)he's rich, but ugly."

Star scholar Stanley Fish, dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, clearly no running dog in the pocket of President Bush, puts his famous post-modern analytical fascination with "the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time" to work on excerpts from the two presidential candidates' speeches.

His freshman writing students were instructed to set aside their political preferences and attend only to the articulation of the candidates' positions. They complained about John F. Kerry's Sept. 8 Greensboro, N. C. speech, finding it "skippy," "confusing," too-informal. Forget flip-flops over a period of time. Fish shows where one argument skittishly changes direction in the space of three short sentences.

Prof. Fish's freshmen declared themselves more satisfied by George W. Bush's speech delivered the same day in Missouri, having as it did the staples of freshman composition--a topic sentence, sequential argument in support of the topic, euphony, parallelism, a conclusion.

Rhetoric carries a moral undertone. Lies, ad hominem attacks, and misdirection via logical fallacies are obvious violations of moral life in a society. "Freshman composition" excellences are subtler. The tools of rhetoric offer landmarks, shared handholds, signals about intention, so that the listener or reader neither suffers uncomfortable and distancing confusion, nor feels stupid.

This kind of rhetoric is not flattery, nor high-falutin', nor something extra and decorative. It's respect. Even equality. And it usually takes work.

Friends of the Democratic campaign have been urging a "message." Fish's New York Times piece gives a pattern suitable to dress it for prime time.

UPDATE September 26--In light of today's New York Times, maybe the Kerry Rhetorical Style is Socratic.

At meetings, Mr. Kerry poses contrarian questions in an often wandering quest for data and conflicting opinions, a style that his aides, sometimes with a roll of the eyes, call Socratic.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania says he advised Senator Kerry about the value of brevity in speeches, especially to outdoor audiences.

"I've given up," Mr Rendell said. "He listens sometimes, and he doesn't listen sometimes."

Socrates, incidentally, is remembered for maintaining while submitting to his own capital punishment that an individual citizen—even when wronged by the state—can never justifiably refuse to obey the laws of the state.

The fly in the ointment

September 22, 2004

The title of this post might be more 19th than 21st century. Western climate-controlled interiors admit very few flies (though there are still a few in Central Texas in May). And there is less use of repeated-application home remedies, "ointment," when we have a skin complaint. As a metaphor, it could be dated.

The phenomenon, however, of Unintended Consequences, is not likely to disappear in a complex world. Good&Happy is regularly bemused when unintended consequences befuddle the wake of simple and often very good intentions. Especially immediate consequences that could have been foreseen within 15 seconds of asking "what else?"

According to another old saw, very little is more certain than taxes. Seems that Oprah's gift of a $28,500 new Pontiac G6 to everyone in her first 19th-season studio audience will create a tax liability for each lucky new owner--up to $7,000 per "taxable event." (Courtesy of the Corner)

What happens in these huge, rich organizations? Don't they have a Yellow Pages? Among all Ophrah's Empowered Female Friends, isn't there a single tax lawyer? Or even law student? Or an accountant?

It's a lament I've had and heard for decades of law practice: Why didn't they ask earlier in the process, and solve the problem in advance? Or do it another way?

That -- clear rather than muddled outcomes -- would make me happy.

UPDATE--The Wall Street Journal (web site requires subscription), under the title "The Gift That Never Stops Taking," takes note of associated labyrinthine complexity:

...the effect of the added income on winners who are, or were, eligible for the earned income tax credit, child tax or education credits, or even welfare payments

Further complication is likely. Selling the car, or waiting to take delivery, don't help a bit.

Spontaneous self-organization

This blog is designed to skirt partisan politics. And in a campaign season, interesting issues may arise in a political context.

The recent CBS/Pajamaheddin-blogosphere events have been called edge-phenomena of an emergent capacity for unpredictable cooperative flow. Frederick Turner, a consistently insightful essayist, writes in TechCentralStation :

an extraordinary example of what chaos and complexity theorists call spontaneous self-organization. Out of a highly communicative but apparently chaotic medium an ordered, sensitively responsive, but robust order emerges, acting as an organism of its own. Suddenly a perfectly-matched team of specialists had self-assembled out of the ether.

And what is the structure that has made this possible? (not the infrastructure, the internet, software, etc.) It is an ongoing conversation of enough interest that people participate, return, draw in others. So that, in a situation of heightened interest or even crisis, there is social capital, accessible entry by newcomers including experts, and some structural resistance to misinformation when allegiances run high.

Part of this is the verifiability, an odd twist on the possibility of authentication, where CBS has stumbled so badly. The memos were posted on the CBS web site. In retrospect, CBS may wish it had not done this. From now on, anyone relying on documents will be questioned if they don't do it.

Thus, participants and observers are able to confirm the assertions that were made (Charles Johnson's re-creation of the memos in MSWord at default settings, and the animated demonstration of the matching features). They were able to reproduce the re-creation.

When genuine experts surfaced, it was quick and easy to check their credentials. When non-experts who spoke from experience weighed in, the substance and limits of that experience became clear.

In this sometimes-anonymous new medium, the speed, numbers, and accessibility enforce transparency. Pre-existing agendas are generally evident, like lumps in the pudding as we read, and are easy to discount. In most cases, no automatic credibility attaches, but it does accumulate. The social capital in any one connection is scant, but the sheer amount of information begins to create suggestive if shifting outlines. Even when the shapes are incomplete, they cast in question the familiar evasive patterns of old and plodding paradigms. "Trust me" vs. "See for yourself." It is an emerging recognition, not a paradigm of "Because I said so."

And, perhaps because I am a Myers Briggs ENTP, that makes me happy.

The only thing we have to fear....

September 19, 2004

An article in Psychology Today points up the irony in the fear of ageing, and in fear itself as a phenomenon -- fear precipitates the things it fears.

But how to escape fear? Not, certainly, by denial or avoiding what should be done today in preparation for time to come. It may however help to remember, in the face of anxiety about the future, that imagined disasters are imagined and thus neither certain nor complete.

By complete, I mean that when a difficulty arises in reality, certain inner and outer remedies can also be found. In frightened anticipation of disaster, there is only the problem, not the unforeseen means and solutions at hand and on the horizon, awaiting our optimism, creativity, and grit.

These grim rehearsals present themselves in the guise of preparatory gestures, as though we could thereby immunize ourselves from expected trauma. Just to notice that I am indulging a tendency to construct scenarios of suffering before they could possibly arrive, helps.

"Is it true?"
"Does the thought cause stress, or happiness?"
"What else might be equally true?"

Questions inspired by The Work of Byron Katie.

Muriel Spark's jealousy tableau

September 18, 2004

The Catholic fiction-writers Flannery O'Connor and Muriel Spark appeal to a niche taste, grounded in a particular framework of Sin and Redemption. Abbreviated Tolstoy and Dostoevski for the shorter Anglophone attention-span. Yeats' phrase comes to mind, "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun."

Only one of them is still alive, Dame Muriel Spark, whose best-known work is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spark has published a new novel, The Finishing School. Its theme is jealousy.

Unlike several other varieties of sin, jealousy does not provide even the illusion of temporary enjoyment, none but the dark relief of surrendering to it. Jealousy and resentment constitute the turned-outward face of the narcissistic exceptionalism of self-pity. Together they cultivate a reciprocally-reinforcing feedback loop, an elaborated drama of sterile hatred and comparison. A no-go for happiness, any way you look at it.

Jealousy, ''unlike some sins of the flesh, gives no one any pleasure. It is a miserable emotion for the jealous one with equally miserable effects on others.'' Its miasmic nature is demonstrated by the...turns of Spark's nasty, cackling plot.

Thanks to Amy Wellborn for the heads-up.

The Tenth Commandment offers a representative catalogue of what not to covet, in short everything that is someone else's. Excited desire to take away something good from another human being, that's the ticket to a toxic interior life.

Jealousy and its remedy are rooted in divergent worldviews. Jealousy assumes scarcity, opposition, and an alien loneliness. Its evident remedy--the application of creative effort to acquire whatever it is that we think we want--grows from the soil of a world permitted to be plentiful and responsive. In the disorienting space-flight from the dark world to the bright one, gratitude, hope, humor, and generous vicarious enjoyment of others' happiness, help provision the traveller.

Experience or stuff

September 16, 2004

A lively ongoing conversation on the marketing front these days is about  "experience marketing," see for instance Bob Jacobsen at Corante>Total Experience.  He points to a recent NYTimes article by Virginia Postrel, on The New Trend in Spending.

For successful restaurants, aesthetics is no longer an afterthought. Customers are paying for memories, not just fuel.

What's true for restaurants is true across the economy. New economic value increasingly comes from experiences.

Americans have not stopped buying stuff, of course. (Indeed, there's a whole industry devoted to organizing our pantry-like closets.) But the marginal value of tangibles versus intangibles has shifted.

Glenn Reynolds, buying shoes with his daughter, appreciates the value of services bundled with necessary goods. 

British marketer Hugh MacLeod puts it bluntly:

NOTE TO SELF:

Your job is no longer about selling. Your job is about firing off as many synapses in your client’s brain as possible.

The more synapses that are fired off, the more dopamines are released. Dopamines are seriously addictive. The more dopamines you release, the more the client will come back for more. Your client thinks he is coming back to you for sane, rational, value-driven reasons. He is wrong. He is coming back to feed.

“We are here to find meaning. Everything else is secondary.”

Having acquired a houseful of stuff, I'd rather buy a service (organize that pantry!) or an experience, which doesn't require dusting or space or any kind of maintenance.

When they stop to think about it, coaching clients discover that every choice and longing has meaning, and that the meaning pretty readily reveals itself.  Some Very High Good is what we're after, whether we buy a widget or a massage or a fancy dinner, or desire something even less durable, attention, reward, access.

What emerges time after time is the wisdom of aiming  consciously and directly at what we really want, independent of possessions or other people. There may be many or better ways to get it--with or without stuff or more experiences. If, for instance, what we really long for is peace of mind, we may discover that we want a house in the country because we believe peace of mind will follow.

How much more expeditious and efficient, economical and satisfying, to develop  the inner footwork that allows us to move into that peaceful state. Then, buy the country property.  Or not. The flowers will bloom just as brightly when it's simply a house suffused with morning birdsong, not an idol clung to in the hope it will jump start the soul.

To give credit where it is most due, I learned this from Connierae Andreas' NLP-based paradigm, Core Transformation(R).