The best of all possible worlds?

In response to my post about gratitude, Bodhisagan commented:

I've always thought being grateful for a crappy life was one of the things that traditionalists love to say but never really believe it themselves (life is a gift, even when you were burned over 99% of your body by your crack head mother's boyfriend for fun and now you live digit-less and people cringe at your appearance...).

This poke at unwarranted gratitude reminded me of Voltaire's novel, Candide, in which the protagonist, Candide, and his tutor, Pangloss, experience numerous misfortunes. Despite this, Pangloss often proclaims that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". A dose of reality-based optimism is healthy because it keeps people motivated when life becomes difficult, but Pangloss takes it way too far and can't even recognize that he's got problems. As a result he does not take action to solve his problems or think about how to avoid new ones. He thinks he's happy, but his life could be much better if he were not so naïvely optimistic.

Voltaire's thinking and writing about optimism were probably influenced by his optimistic lover, Émilie du Châtelet, a brilliant mathematician, physicist, and author. Her upper class lifestyle may have influenced her optimistic outlook, but sadly, a late pregnancy cut her life short.

While Émilie's optimism appears healthy and reality-based, the optimism practiced by Nathan Price, the evangelical Baptist missionary in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible, and by President George W. Bush, is of the dangerous type that Pangloss advocates. Nathan Price's attempts to convert a village in the Belgian Congo to Christianity and George W. Bush's attempts to bring democracy to Iraq both result in failure.

Everything that goes wrong with their missions is not the fault of Nathan Price and George W. Bush, but problems are aggravated by their shared character flaws. Both are ignorant, and incurious, about the cultures they attempt to change. Both are arrogant and refuse to admit errors or take the advice of others. Both are stubborn and refuse to change direction, continuing to put the lives of others in danger. The combination of ignorance, incuriousity, incompetence, arrogance, dishonesty, indifference, power, and stubbornness in pursuing their goals, even with the best intentions, has many unintended evil consequences. But it is their misplaced optimism, combined with their deep religious faith, that allows them to view any success as a sign from God, and any failure as a test of faith. The resulting "stay the course" mindset leads to spectacular failures.

Bodhisagan also commented:

If things suck I say don't stew, but get mad and do something about it, if you are in a position to.

Extreme pessimism, with the disheartening view of insurmountable problems, is just as dangerous because the resulting inaction often leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. Pragmatism, like the scientific method, is a better way because instead of pretending that problems don't exist or that they are too hard to solve, they are identified and studied, the knowledge gained is used to design solutions, and then those solutions are tested in the real world. Failures are tweaked or discarded and successes are put into more widespread use. We won't ever arrive at Utopia, an elusive target because new problems will always arise, but with pragmatism we'll choose better solutions and make slow, steady progress.

Want "green" food? Use chemicals of course!

This is a cool one I stumbled upon. It reminds me of a presentation I caught where this researcher was trying to convince the crowd that DDT (already banned at the time) was safer than insecticidal soap because of the small amount used. His take on this has changed my perspective on things despite the fact that I think the presenter was a crackpot.

Well this article has as part of it the equivalent of the same argument but as it relates to fertilizer and to a lesser extent tillage and herbicides. Here's the article in full which also contains information about food politics/economics in other ways as well.

Here's an excerpt about fertilizer, tilth and herbicides as it appears in The Economist:

But not everyone agrees that organic farming is better for the environment. Perhaps the most eminent critic of organic farming is Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution”, winner of the Nobel peace prize and an outspoken advocate of the use of synthetic fertilisers to increase crop yields. He claims the idea that organic farming is better for the environment is “ridiculous” because organic farming produces lower yields and therefore requires more land under cultivation to produce the same amount of food.

Thanks to synthetic fertilisers, Mr Borlaug points out, global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%. Using traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation. The more intensively you farm, Mr Borlaug contends, the more room you have left for rainforest.

What of the claim that organic farming is more energy-efficient? Lord Melchett points out for example that the artificial fertiliser used in conventional farming is made using natural gas, which is “completely unsustainable”. But Anthony Trewavas, a biochemist at the University of Edinburgh, counters that organic farming actually requires more energy per tonne of food produced, because yields are lower and weeds are kept at bay by ploughing. And Mr Pollan notes that only one-fifth of the energy associated with food production across the whole food chain is consumed on the farm: the rest goes on transport and processing.

The most environmentally benign form of agriculture appears to be “no till” farming, which involves little or no ploughing and relies on cover crops and carefully applied herbicides to control weeds. This makes it hard to combine with organic methods (though some researchers are trying).

Too rigid an insistence on organic farming's somewhat arbitrary rules, then—copper, a heavy metal, can be used as an organic fungicide because it is traditional—can actually hinder the adoption of greener agricultural techniques. Alas, shoppers look in vain for “no till” labels on their food—at least so far.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, at least there's one thing we can agree on

Jeane Kirkpatrick's recent death has people talking about her. In this Slate article by Timothy Noah I found that I agree with her in one respect, she wrote against running around democratizing other countries.

She noted, correctly, that democracy is complicated and not easy to establish or maintain, and certainly can't be imposed. Of course she was an architect of neoconservatism, and as such our similarities probably stop there.

The mark she left on neoconservatives that is most conspicuous to me comes through in her "Blame America First" speech (the "blame America" tear is 3/4 of the way down the page) from the 1984 Republican Convention. This speech helped to remove introspection from the behaviors tolerated by patriots. Of course she was a Democrat still, but not for long. She became a Republican in '85.

Upon reading the whole speech she seems a bit paranoid in retrospect, although it was the cold war and things were different then. However, by suggesting we should refrain from introspection (she does this by mocking those who might hold ourselves accountable), she helped enable the justification for war in Iraq, the enacting of the draconian Patriot Act and the generally bad choices made by the Bush administration via marginalizing all who questioned the the President.

It is not surprising that even she, a smart if misguided lady, supported war in Iraq despite holding onto the idea that democratization wasn't possible. So, she was for the war but against the impossible, the democratisation of Iraq via our intervention.

That leaves me with one lingering question. What's the point of justifying a war to remove a despot, only to replace him with another? You have to be very confident that you can pick a better despot than the guy you just ousted.

Golden Ratio Myth

OK this isn't political. It is about wishful thinkers co-opting something that isn't theirs and completely making a mockery of it (mathematics in this case). Sorry, I watched Da Vinci Code last night and it got me thinking. Here are several links to Golden Ratio Myth busting articles. I do see this as related to ID /intelligent design, since it uses scientific jargon to justify its (their) nonsense arguments.

laputanlogic - Nice blog that starts off with links to other sources debunking Golden Ratio myths.

Here is his actual article. It's good and informal.

And this caught my eye during a google search.

What kind of Christmas tree to buy???

Not sure what's good for the environment? Good for you? Look at this. Sorry, mine is PVC. LOL

http://grist.org/advice/ask/2004/12/08/umbra-tree/

Post Marks of Gratitude

While I have no expectations of Utopia anytime soon, recent events leave me feeling more optimistic and less anxious than I have in a long time, and for that I am thankful.

I enjoyed both of these post-election expressions of gratitude, the first a cartoon from Mark Fiore, the second a column from Mark Morford, and wanted to share them.

Here's the part of Mark Morford's column that I found especially fitting:

This Thanksgiving, we have more to be genuinely grateful for than at any time in the past six years. A tentative return to "real" democracy. The desperate curse of corruption and misprision being lifted. Many of our nation's most sneering demons -- Pombo, Santorum, Hastert, Rumsfeld, the dogma of the Christian right -- all gone, all like so many slowly fading nightmares. A Democrat-run Congress that might actually serve a comparatively humanitarian, progressive agenda not based in war and scandal and a violent, judgmental God. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

But wait, is it cosmically just to parse and appraise gratitude this way? After all, the wise ones and the mystics tell us that thanks should have no such qualifications. We are to offer thanks for the hardship as well as the joy, the failure as well as the success, death as well as life, the Bush as well as the Clinton. It is all of a piece. Each is just another facet of the Great Teaching.

In other words, we are to offer, always and without reservation, thanks for this life, as it is now, in this moment, no matter how ugly and dejected it may feel, because it is precious and delicious and always full of simmering electric joy, if you just know where to look. It is, of course, a wonderful sentiment. It is karmically right and true.

Then again, these guys didn't endure "I'm the decider," "Is our children learning" or "Make the pie higher." It's enough to make even Buddha groan and cringe and say, Oh holy hell, that Dubya guy just ain't right in the head. I mean, come on.

No matter. Thanks is back. Thanks has returned to the tip of the tongue of a wary and war-torn nation. It is unpacking its bags, settling back in, buying some nice, at least moderately progressive furniture. And if we do this human evolution thing right, it might actually stay awhile.

And for that, we can all be grateful.

"I don't care much for gratitude of the noisy, boisterous kind. Why, when some men discharge an obligation, you can hear the report for miles around."
- Mark Twain

One from the AJC

Here's one from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Nice take on things. In all fairness she talks about the policies being bad for rates of teen pregnancies etc. and I agree with her, but statistically I understand rates to be historically low. So she shouldn't go there since that would be easy to throw back at her.

I think the low rates of teen pregnancy have more to do with cultural changes, not the least of which is people locking their kids up until they're 18 today. Kids don't even play in my cul de sac. Nuts! My mom used to have us play outside and I knew I had to be back by dark. None of this super-supervised lives our kids (even mine) live today.

Anyway, she should have tread lightly there, otherwise I think she takes a very Pragtopic approach. I like it.

http://www.workingforchange.com/printitem.cfm?itemid=21684

Steve