Break Through

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. An excellent read. I am tempted to say that it is for me the most intellectually influential book I have read since Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That statement will have to withstand the test of time, but I highly recommend the book to anybody interested in liberal politics, or politics and environmentalism in general.

Explains perfectly why I have never called myself an environmentalist. More on this later...

Goals

I attended a climate policy conference some weeks ago and I was super impressed by a bunch of the speakers but one in particular. Holmes Hummel. She is young, confident, articulate, personable, a Congressional Science Fellow who teaches at Berkeley and consults on carbon-pricing policymaking. After the conference, I reported my impressions to a friend of mine and we came up with the following life goals:

1) Be articulate.
2) Be impressive.
3) Have shit together.

Ideally by age thirty.

Zeitgeist

I watched Fight Club a couple nights ago. The last time I watched the movie I must have still been a freshman in college, so it was interesting to revisit the film.

In one scene, Tyler Durden pulls Raymond K. Hessel, some poor Asian dude, out of a convenient store and puts a gun to the back of his head. Durden--upon learning through interrogation by gunpoint that Raymond had studied biology in community college in hopes of becoming a veterinarian--issues an ultimatum: either Raymond puts himself on the path towards being a veterinarian in six weeks time or he will be hunted down and killed.

A heartening lesson from Tyler Durden with typical Brad Pitt, will-to-power, Randian undertones. The film, and its message, struck a chord in 1999 and ensuing years. It tapped into a deep strain of male anxiety about the meaninglessness of everyday work, of being a cog in corporate bureaucratic machinery, of being trapped in the value system of consumer culture. Forge the life that you want to live, mold your circumstances according to your wishes, be the chief architect of your own life. The film beats this mantra into your head with very little room for subtlety.

In 2009, though, I think the film strikes a false chord. In this great recession of ours, when rugged individuals aren't feeling so rugged, when fatalism is running high, there is a lot of respect to be had for the Raymond K. Hessels of this world, people who are making an honest living and who've adjusted rather admirably to changing circumstances. Tyler Durden, on the other hand, comes off as adolescent in his narcissism, irresponsible. Mischief? Mayhem? I'll pass.

Our zeitgeist is, in my mind, aptly captured in the 2008 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire. D) It's written. How nice would that be?

John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin...

would approve of Barack Obama.

As I was listening to Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame and his comments on abortion, I was momentarily brought back to my philosophizing college days. So I dug in the archives and looked up some old essays that I had read by John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin. Here are some quotes that I've culled for your (my) reading pleasure:

The concept of justice is independent from and prior to the concept of goodness in the sense that its principles limit the conceptions of the good which are permissible. A just basic structure and its background institutions establish a framework within which permissible conceptions can be advanced...Other things equal, a conception [of justice] will be more or less stable depending on how far the conditions to which it leads support comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines which can constitute a stable overlapping consensus...It suffices to remark that in a society marked by deep divisions between opposing and incommensurable conceptions of the good, justice as fairness enables us to at least conceive how social unity can be both possible and stable. (Rawls, Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical)

Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions," said an admirable writer of our time (Joseph Schumpeter), "and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian." To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty)

As a philosophical stance, liberalism is surely not unproblematic. However, the idea of an "overlapping consensus," the need to identify common ground in a pluralistic world and move productively forward from it, at least gives liberals in the United States a starting point when talking about "moral issues."

Dreams from My Father

I am a bit of a late-comer to the book, but I just finished it and am very glad I took the time to read it. It is very well written in my opinion, in terms of both its prose and its construction. Barack Obama writes about the various figures in his life with great empathy and does a good job preserving narrative momentum throughout.

In hero-journey fashion, the book begins with news of the loss of a father and concludes with a reconciliation of sorts. At once familiar and novel, the book achieves its resonance primarily through the strength of its archetype. And as an archetype in its broadest terms, Obama's story is truly one in which we can all inscribe our own anxieties, fears and dreams.

I run in circles that typically gush with Obama love, so I am sure that my praise will sound trite. Nonetheless, here I go. What really impresses me is Obama's strength, his willingness to probe at difficult questions that are sure not to yield easy or particularly palatable answers. In an exchange between Obama and his half-brother, Mark, who is also of mixed race, I am struck by the possibility of an alternative path, of it all being otherwise:

"Understand, I'm not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don't ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am." [Mark] shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I would..."
For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.
"Who knows? he said. "What's certain is that I don't need the stress. life's hard enough without all that excess baggage." (344)

What Mark regards as superfluous stress, "excess baggage," Obama considers the core of his existence. It is so easy to leave difficult questions for another day, to sweep inconvenient histories aside. Plenty of people choose to put on willful blinders and maybe it is easier that way to get by. But Obama refuses such easy answers, looks incessantly at the facts of his life that are most difficult to digest, and for this, I admire him greatly.

Dolores Labs

Last week, I spent all my time at work day-dreaming about how Dolores Labs, or something like it, will eventually eliminate the need for my job. If you have any experience working a mechanical, repetitive, mindless job, you'll forgive me for my indulgence.

The Irony is Priceless

From Maureen Dowd's Tuesday column this week:

"My adventure did feel like time travel into the past, especially when the G.P.S. began flashing near Yosemite that we were "entering an area where turn-by-turn guidance cannot be provided.""

Isn't Dowd's irony or sarcasm or whatever you want to call it absolutely blissful? She is poking fun at our dependence on technology and how unimaginable it now is to go on an adventure without the aid of technology-aided orientation. Get it?

It's subtle I know, but there it is. After I read the column, I was overcome by a rapid-fire succession of questions. To give you some background (if you haven't read the column yet), Maureen Dowd takes her readers west through San Francisco on an expedition to pan for gold, an activity that has apparently experienced something of a renaissance as our recession has deepened. Let me break that down again. Maureen Dowd, a New York Times op-ed columnist, hops on a plane from New York City to San Francisco, then goes to Yosemite with her GPS to pan for gold for a couple of hours, all so that she can reflect in 850 words on how the literal search for gold captures the state of the economy and our national psyche at the same time. Fool's gold. Otherwise known as pyrite as we are fortunate enough to learn. It's symbolic of our times.

So back to the questions that raced through my mind. How much does Maureen Dowd get paid? Did the NYTimes really fly her out to San Francisco just so that she could write this column? Did she fly first-class? Is there really a recession? Has the price of stock in The New York Times Company really fallen 90% in the last five years? Did the company lose $58 million in 2008 or is Google Finance just lying to me?

What the hell is going on here?

And, finally, how do I get her job?