Lowercase profanity

It gets better: Navigating a mixed-faith Mormon marriage

2012-01-22T15:51:00.000-06:00

I gave the following talk at a Mormon Stories conference yesterday here in Houston. Since I haven't posted anything detailed on how I left Mormonism, I thought that some of you might appreciate reading this. The talk was recorded, and the live version should be available here sometime soon.

I’d like to begin with two disclaimers.

First, while I’m the one standing up here and telling the story — and while I’m certainly telling it from my perspective — this is our story. It's a story of how I left Mormonism, how Amanda has remained an active member, and how our relationship has survived in spite of our differences. It’s a story about both of us, in other words. It’s too bad that there isn’t time for both of us to tell our sides of it, and I find it a bit anti-feminist — especially for Mormon Stories! — that I’m the one up here. But here we are. The consolation prize is that we get to break the usual Sacrament Meeting convention: Here it’s the husband who has to introduce the family to the new ward, not the wife!

Second, I don’t want anyone to think we have marriage advice to give out. We know we got off easy: we’re young, we have no kids, and our situation is much less complex than many others'. All I can do is to tell what we’ve been through and to share a few insights that we’ve gleaned along the way. The predictive value of our experiences, or the applicability of our insights to individual circumstances, I’m simply not willing to claim.

With those out of the way, let me lay out my thesis: Stable, healthy marriages between active Mormons and ex-Mormons are possible. New apostates often feel like the only way to save their marriage is to deconvert their spouse. I believe this to be a largely false and harmful idea. I also believe that the shift in worldview that often accompanies a faith crisis gives the apostate two insights that can help stabilize a mixed-faith marriage. One, belief doesn’t have much to do with intelligence. Two, belief doesn’t have much to do with morality.

By Mormon standards, my upbringing was pretty ordinary. I was born in Tacoma, Washington, to parents of pioneer ancestry. Dad worked in business while Mom stayed home with the five kids. We were loyal Republicans. I hit all the usual milestones. I was baptized at 8, ordained to the Aaronic priesthood at 12, and at 18 I graduated from high school and was shipped off to BYU, where I picked a safe, marketable major.After my freshman year, I put in my papers and was called to the Australia Perth Mission.

I had always believed in Mormonism, and I felt like it held together logically, but I also subscribed to the Mormon epistemology that I could know, through unmistakeable spiritual witness, that it was True. And I’d never had such a witness. So while I left for my mission not “knowing” if the Church was true, I had every expectation of receiving a witness while teaching the gospel. I was not disappointed. In the early months of my mission, during a small handful of our very rare opportunities to teach, I experienced a profound, naked human connection as we testified of the gospel and as our testimonies were received. Even now, as an unbeliever and a thoroughgoing materialist, I consider these experiences meaningful and even transcendental. As an idealistic young missionary hungry for spiritual validation, I considered them an indisputable manifestation of the Holy Spirit. I completed my mission and returned to BYU confident that I knew, not merely believed, and that my faith would endure for the rest of my life.

I was wrong. In fact, my faith endured for only a few years. My faith started its transition as I worked on my master’s degree. I was still at BYU, and I wasn’t studying anything that would challenge a testimony, but the transition from undergraduate study to graduate work has a way of forcing self-skepticism on a person. And that’s because research is difficult and unstructured. Suddenly, instead of being the guy who can master difficult concepts and solve problems on exams, I was the guy suggesting wrong-headed solutions to research problems. I went from being very rarely wrong in my area of expertise to being wrong every single day. And I came to learn that this was perfectly normal. Being wrong was part of the program. The first of my two insights began to set in: When the questions are hard, even smart people are wrong all the time. Belief has little to do with intelligence.

Around this time I met Amanda. Her upbringing was less stereotypically Mormon than mine. She grew up in Dallas. Her parents had converted to Mormonism in the mid 70s. By Mormon standards they were politically left-of-center. In their household, belief in evolution did not contradict belief in Mormonism. Gays and lesbians were regarded as good, decent people, and although you might share an honest difference of opinion with them there was no reason to condemn or avoid them. It was still an orthodox Mormon home, both in terms of belief and practice, but it was less rigid than many of her peers.

When Amanda and I met, she had just finished her degree at BYU in anthropology. Our first meeting, a chance encounter by the apartment complex pool, got off to an auspicious start. I made some jokes, she laughed at those jokes, and we discussed our academic aspirations. I got her phone number, asked her out, and for the next two years we dated off and on. Around the time I was finishing my master’s degree we began to talk seriously about marriage.

In the meantime, my self-skepticism had put down deep roots. As I realized I could be wrong on technical matters, I also realized I could be wrong about almost anything, and my entire worldview was up for reexamination. I consciously admitted to myself doubts that before I had kept sequestered in the subconscious. I doubted that my missionary experiences were necessarily divine manifestations. I doubted that a few million Mormons, out of the billions of humans on the earth, have any credible claim to exclusive truth. I doubted that there is a life after this one. I doubted that there exists any God at all.

It turns out you can rationalize anything when the stakes are high enough. As we talked more seriously about marriage, I confided in Amanda my doubts — she knew what I was when she picked me up, you might say. But we examined the problem from a very Mormon perspective. We talked about how I was “struggling” with my testimony, and we were optimistic that I would “overcome” my doubts. In other words, we assumed that the right answer — from a purely moral perspective — was for me to find a way to continue believing. And, for a while, I did. Of course I did. I was in love, I wanted to get married, and “overcoming” my doubts was a precondition for getting married. We got engaged a few weeks later, got married a few months after that, and immediately afterwards we left for Houston so I could pursue my Ph.D. at Rice.

It was another six months before my doubts resurfaced, and they did so with a vengeance. Somewhere in those six months the second insight had set it: belief has little to do with morality. I’m not sure exactly what caused it — maybe I just needed to get out of Provo, or maybe it was interacting with a bunch of smart, decent people of diverse backgrounds at Rice. Whatever the stimulus, I no longer believed there was a morally right answer to my doubts. I gave myself moral permission to disbelieve. I began a more serious, and I think more honest, study of my beliefs. I read Amanda’s textbooks on biblical archaeology. I confronted issues with Mormonism that are probably familiar to many in this audience. After a few months, I came to a conclusion: I no longer believed in the truth claims of Mormonism, and I no longer wanted to affiliate myself with the church.

Breaking the news to Amanda was difficult. Of course she had seen it coming. Of course it was something she didn’t want to hear. But she also knew that she couldn’t in good conscience pressure me into continued activity. So I left, and to her credit she came to terms with it. She was too tolerant a person to buy into the rhetoric that apostates are morally degenerate. So once it became clear that I was the same person as an ex-Mormon — once it became clear that I’m an even nicer guy after a few drinks! — she accepted the fact that I had left, and that I probably wasn’t coming back.

But things were still rough, and it was mostly my fault. I was decent enough not to try actively to deconvert Amanda, but I did hold out hope that she would eventually leave. This hope led to a few nasty disagreements. I particularly remember one evening. We were at Arby’s, having a particularly classy night out, and somehow we got to talking about Warren Jeffs and the FLDS church. And I couldn’t resist the urge to stick it to her. I pointed out that FLDS members bear a testimony of Warren Jeffs that isn’t all that different from the one Mormons bear of Thomas S. Monson. How could Amanda have any confidence that her convictions were any more justified than those of an FLDS member?

No amount of beef ‘n’ cheddar could salvage our evening. Arguments like these happened often enough, and were severe enough, to create a sense that our differences were fundamental, that they prevented us from having an emotionally intimate relationship. It was a bleak several months, and we both worried that our marriage was in jeopardy.

The turning point came in October 2010. We were sitting in our living room. Amanda was listening to conference while I wasted time on the internet. And Boyd K. Packer got up to speak. Probably you remember the talk. For all the harm it caused, Packer’s crotchety intolerance may have saved our marriage, and for that I could kiss him on his gruff old mouth. Amanda was outraged. She was too tolerant, and had known too many gay Mormons, to listen to someone she regarded as an apostle of Jesus Christ indulge in hurtful rhetoric she knew to be false.

Now, this wasn’t a turning point because Amanda’s beliefs began to change. Because really her beliefs didn’t change at this point. This was a turning point because it gave us common ground. Here was something about Mormonism we could discuss productively. We were both upset by the damage being done to gay and lesbian Mormons. And we talked about it. Through our discussions I came to a long-overdue realization: Both intellectually and morally, I had seriously underestimated Amanda’s relationship with Mormonism.

I took the two principles that led to my apostasy, and I applied them to believing Mormons in a way I just couldn’t do when I first left. There are legitimate reasons to believe. Even though I think the evidence weighs heavily against Mormonism’s truth claims, there still are intelligent, thoughtful reasons to believe. Belief has little to do with intelligence. Even though Mormonism can do a lot of harm, there still remains tremendous good to be found in it and to be done through it. Belief has little to do with morality. I came to respect Amanda’s belief, and I came to accept that, just as I might never return to Mormonism, she might never leave. From then on, Mormonism ceased to be a wedge between us.

Since then, Amanda has begun to deal with her own faith crisis. She has become increasingly unorthodox in her beliefs. She interprets the Church’s truth claims figuratively. She’s gotten involved in activism for the Mormon LGBT community. She participates in Mormon Stories. But this doesn't cause me to breathe a sigh of relief. It’s nice — it gives us even more common ground, and more to the point it’s made Amanda happier — but her faith transition is not essential to our relationship. If tomorrow she returns to orthodox belief, if she decides never again to listen to a Mormon Stories podcast, it wouldn’t have much impact on our relationship.

We don’t know where our faith journeys will lead us. Amanda especially has an unpredictable road ahead, and who knows what the future holds for me. But we’ve stopped worrying how that might impact our relationship. Our marriage is no longer predicated on shared religious belief. Respect for each other’s intelligence and goodness is what’s essential to our relationship. And our particular beliefs don’t say very much about our intelligence or our goodness.

A big eastern syndicate

2011-12-15T23:26:00.000-06:00

The tubleweed has been blowing around this blog for a few months now, and I expect that I've lost the attention of most of my potential readers, but I can't let the Christmas season pass without making a post. It's tradition!

Right now you're probably wondering: do we have to talk about being a non-believer at Christmas again?

Sort of. Part of the tradition is to reflect somehow on my faith journey in the context of Christmas. But most of the Christmas-as-an-atheist topics are tiresome. The Christmas culture wars exist only to stoke the ire and to stroke the egos of those fighting either side. That Christmas traditions are almost exclusively derived from pagan sources is irrelevant except to set a precedent for my own repurposing of Yuletide celebrations. If we're going to talk about Christmas, we need something a little less trite.

I want to dig a little deeper and probe what people mean when they talk about the "real meaning" of Christmas. Usually when people -- religious people, at least -- talk about the real meaning of Christmas, they mean its religious message, particularly in opposition to its commercial component. Indeed, this is the central thesis of the "A Charlie Brown Christmas".

With all due respect to Charles Schultz, I reject this as a false dichotomy. Lord knows I'm not into the commercial Christmas. In my adulthood gifts have mostly ceased to make sense, and I hardly know what to tell people to get me for Christmas, let alone what to get for others. But in ignoring the commercial aspect of Christmas, am I forced either to embrace its religious content or discard the holiday altogether?

No. Emphatically no. In addition to the religious and commercial components of the season, there's a third meaning that's as widespread as anything else. This is the humanistic message: peace on earth, goodwill towards men; charity, kindness, and redemption; and the meaning found in human relationships.

I can hear the objection from a mile away: the humanistic message is merely a component of the religious message. But that's not usually how the story goes. Usually the humanistic part of Christmas is expressed without mention of any religious message.

And I have evidence. Evidence in the form of Christmas specials. (Of which "Charlie Brown" is the notable exception.)

Our first stop is the original Christmas special, Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". You probably already know that, in England at least, Christmas observance fell into serious decline around the time of Cromwell, and that Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" during a Victorian-era Christmas revival. Dickens' view of Christmas, in addition to being distinctly anti-commericalist/anti-capitalist, is entirely secular. Indeed, it's a rejection of the Cromwellian hyper-piety that pushed Christmas out of the way in the first place. There's a reference or two to God, and of course the Christmas ghosts are supernatural entities. But there's no reference to Christ or the Nativity, no call to remember the religious underpinnings of the season. The Christmas spirit in Dickens' story, as embodied in the redeemed Ebenezer Scrooge, is the innate goodness of humanity, the triumph of people over things, the power of love over loneliness.

Next up is "It's a Wonderful Life". Yes, we do see angels, although their cosmological nature lends itself as well to Scientology as it does to anything in Christendom, and George Bailey does pray to God near the end of the film. But even in post-war America Frank Capra sees no need for religious sermonizing. Much like as with Dickens, the moral is about human relationships: meaning is found in the people we touch rather than the possessions we amass. George Bailey, the richest man in Bedford Falls? There's a double meaning in that.

Our last stop is Dr. Seuss's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". My wife found this wonderful article today. Its paragraph on the final scene of "Grinch" says it better than I would have:

"It’s a lovely moment, and I don’t want to dissect it too much, because its beauty lies in its simplicity. It’s the simplicity that gets me, and it’s what sets The Grinch just that much closer to my heart than any other story of the season. There’s no speech about Jesus, and Santa doesn’t show up to save the day. If you look closely at that glowing mass that rises above the Whos as they sing, you’ll see there isn’t anything inside. Which could mean a whole lot of things, or could mean nothing at all, but what it means to me is that Christmas isn’t anything special in and of itself, not even for the Whos. Christmas is something you have to make happen, not through 'packages, boxes, or bags,' but through the act of warmth and love and kindness."

While I'm posting stuff, it seems fitting to include a song I recently discovered by Australian singer/comedian Tim Minchin. The religious among you might be offended by a mild, albeit rather good-hearted critique of some aspects of your worldview. However, despite his being on the wrong hemisphere for this sort of thing, his Christmastime sentiments resonate with me. (Incidentally, if you want to see me tear up, tie me down and make me watch the bridge starting at 3:51. By the time he gets to "these are the people who make you feel safe in this world", there's a better-than-even chance of waterworks!)

Maybe, as the Grinch realized, Christmas doesn't come in a store. Maybe it doesn't even have to come in a church or in any other institution. It comes in homes, among people and across generations, gathering in the cold solitude of winter for warmth and love and togetherness. It has a meaning that transcends culture and epoch, that reaches back through history into shared ancestry. A meaning that's bigger than assent to or denial of any theological statement. A meaning so universal it can only be described as human.

A google+ tagline, rejected due to too much sadness but deemed okay for my blog

2011-07-14T22:39:00.000-05:00

The world is adorable and absurd and tragic. Like a puppy who can't find his way out of a laundry hamper...

...and dies of starvation.

Sufjan Stevens, you goddamn thief

2011-07-11T23:01:00.002-05:00

Here is "Svefn-G-Englar", from Sigur Rós's 1999 album Ágætis byrjun:

And here's "Vito's Ordination Song", from Sufjan Steven's 2003 album Greetings from Michigan:

It's even in the same key. Sufjan apologists, I dare you to argue that he didn't lift the chord progression, instrumentation, and feel for his song from his Icelandic superiors.

The ergodic life

2011-06-13T22:10:00.011-05:00

Today I flipped off an old lady while biking to campus.

And I liked it. Even now, I'm feeling pretty good about our interaction!

The situation: I was pulling up on my bike to the last stoplight on my route to campus, a quiet intersection on a peaceful, heavily-forested street. The light had just turned red, and I came to a stop about five feet behind a fellow biker. A car, pulling out in front of us, slowed down as the driver—a woman in her sixties—looked at the biker in front of me with unusual intensity. As her face contorted into a disapproving scowl she pointed at the other biker, mimed with her hands onto her head, and mouthed "helmet". She was rebuking him for riding without a helmet!

I don't know what my fellow biker's response was; the light had turned green and we were both starting to pull out. But as I began moving to the intersection, she caught my eye and I realized I was about to get the same silent lecture: a chastening glare, a ridiculous miming with both hands, and an agitated mouthing of the word "helmet".

I hesitated a moment, an irritated scowl undoubtedly on my face, before deciding that my rage was sufficient for all men and that this aggression would not stand. I twisted to face her departing car and offered up my middle finger. My only regret is that, in hesitating that small handful of seconds, I may have missed my chance to make my salute within her field of vision.

Cue the obvious objections. Yes, I realize that riding without a helmet is relatively dangerous and that I probably should wear one. Yes, I realize I returned rudeness for rudeness. Yet I don't feel guilty. If you're a family member or a close friend, it's your prerogative to express your concerns about my safety. If you're a police officer and I'm in a state that requires helmets (I'm not), I'm willing to take a ticket or pay a fine without complaint. I'm more than happy to abide the confines of the social contract in which I participate. But nowhere does that social contract mandate that I be squawked at by an old hen who can't tell her children apart from strangers on the street.

After my retaliatory gesture, my mind jumped to a hasty generalization: where the hell does this old bag get off gesticulating a safety lecture to random passersby? Or, more particularly, at what point in your life do you decide it's your privilege to do so? When do you become Harrison Ford, yelling at the kids to get off your metaphorical lawn?

I bring this up not to deliver a mostly-unjustified diatribe on the generation ahead of me, but to discuss a fear that's been gnawing at me lately.

I've written here before that I'm afraid of growing old and dying, and that really hasn't changed. I'm coming to terms with many of the implications: I've pistol-whipped the first signs of fatness into submission, I'm steeling myself against the indications that my hairline is beginning its flight northward, and I'm learning to live happily under the soul-crushing weight of inevitable mortality.

But I'm terrified of the stagnation of my mind. I'm scared of my brain growing dull and inflexible. I'm worried that as I get older, I'll fall into the fallacy of assuming that life is ergodic: that the average over my life experience is indicative of the average over all people's life experience. I'm worried that at some point I'll become sufficiently comfortable with how I'm living my life that I presume to tell others to live it the same way. That I'll be the one shouting at other people's kids to put their helmets on.

Much of my fear springs from the fact that I have no practicable way of avoiding such ossification. The only way I know to combat this tendency is to continuously discard things I once thought I knew. If you think you've got something all figured out, it's remarkably difficult to learn about that something, so I try to take old conclusions and routinely put them up for review. So far, if I may be so bold, I think it's worked out pretty well.

But it comes at a cost, and don't know that I can keep this up forever. Sure, I'm aiming for an academic life, and an academic life should bring with it constant reexamination and reevaluation. But someday it'd be handy to be an expert on something. (I'm pretty sure search committees and tenure boards, not to mention students, will appreciate it.) And it's hard to become an expert when you're constantly dropping knowledge out the back of your mind in order to preserve your tabula rasa—assuming you can keep up the patience and mental sharpness to do so in the first place. If I want to achieve my dreams, it seems, I'm forced to compromise on something I consider a defining part of my character.

Maybe that's the price we pay for stability. Perhaps the cost of an established life is that I have to grow up, settle down, and entrench myself in a few worthwhile—yet finite—principles. Perhaps I'm doomed to become old. And stubborn. And stodgy. And, like it as not, to incite young, insufferable know-it-alls to make obscene gestures in my direction.

Diversity Order

2011-03-13T21:35:00.001-05:00

I read this today, and I liked it so much that I decided to post it in lieu of a real entry. From the inestimable John Locke:

Since, therefore, it is unavoidable to the greatest part of men, if not all, to have several opinions, without certain and indubitable proofs of their truth; and it carries too great an imputation of ignorance, lightness, or folly for men to quit and renounce their former tenets presently upon the offer of an argument which they cannot immediately answer, and show the insufficiency of: it would, methinks, become all men to maintain peace, and the common offices of humanity, and friendship, in the diversity of opinions; since we cannot reasonably expect that any one should readily and obsequiously quit his own opinion, and embrace ours, with a blind resignation to an authority which the understanding of man acknowledges not. For however it may often mistake, it can own no other guide but reason, nor blindly submit to the will and dictates of another.

If he you would bring over to your sentiments be one that examines before he assents, you must give him leave at his leisure to go over the account again, and, recalling what is out of his mind, examine all the particulars, to see on which side the advantage lies: and if he will not think our arguments of weight enough to engage him anew in so much pains, it is but what we often do ourselves in the like case; and we should take it amiss if others should prescribe to us what points we should study.

...

We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information; and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions, or at least those we would force upon them, when it is more than probable that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs.

For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others. At least, those who have not thoroughly examined to the bottom all their own tenets, must confess they are unfit to prescribe to others; and are unreasonable in imposing that as truth on other men's belief, which they themselves have not searched into, nor weighed the arguments of probability, on which they should receive or reject it.

Those who have fairly and truly examined, and are thereby got past doubt in all the doctrines they profess and govern themselves by, would have a juster pretence to require others to follow them: but these are so few in number, and find so little reason to be magisterial in their opinions, that nothing insolent and imperious is to be expected from them: and there is reason to think, that, if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others.

So good.

Renaissance

2011-02-27T20:37:00.000-06:00

Spring is a time for rebirth!

Clunker

2011-02-20T16:49:00.008-06:00

This is a story that begins at the DMV and ends with my getting all nostalgic. (There is also no mention of Mormonism for all of you who are getting bored or irritated with the topic.)

Last week, the day before my twenty-ninth birthday, I formally became a Texan. Previously I had voted, purchased a house, and registered my car here, but I defiantly held on to my Washington state driver's license. Sadly, it was due to expire on my birthday, so with an entire day to spare I trudged my way over to the DMV in order to fully subscribe myself to the Lone Star State. It was an altogether unpleasant excursion. In addition to confronting the acidulousness incident to aligning oneself with the union's most insecure state, I couldn't find one of the necessary documents in the glove compartment, which necessitated a rather stupid adventure around Houston.

I drive a 1988 Toyota Camry. It was a gift, of sorts, from my grandparents. They had both gotten too old to drive safely, and as a poor undergraduate I was more than grateful to have even an old grandma car to drive. Since I got the car my grandfather has died and my grandmother has been stricken with Alzheimer's, but their car is alive and healthy—or, at least, as healthy as a 23-year-old car has any business being.

A few emotions keep me driving that car: pragmatism (read: cheapness), complacency, even stubbornness. But I also feel a sense of nostalgia for the old Camry. My grandparents were generous, loving people—my grandfather in particular was a seriously classy dude—and visiting them over summers is a fond childhood memory.

So when I got the car, I didn't take much out of it. The glove box was full of old receipts, insurance cards, and maps, but I left them in place. Occasionally, as I rummage around the car looking for something, I'll happen upon something—directions to the store?—written in my grandfather's nearly illegible scrawl. I appreciate the occasional opportunity to remember him through something done by his hand. It's almost stupid, really—if I want to keep them, I should take these mementos and put them somewhere safer and more permanent than my car. But there really is nowhere else for them to go.

Unfortunately, after the debacle with the DMV I decided that, memories or no, the time had come to clean out the glove compartment. Last night Amanda and I went through the pile of stuff, deciding what to keep. Initially I was determined to keep whatever I could, or at least anything with their handwriting on it, but it didn't take long to concede to the practical: if I can't keep this stuff in the car, what am I going to do with it? Am I going to set up a scrapbook of old tire warranties and road atlases? Fortunately very little in the glove box had anyone's handwriting on it, so virtually everything was scrapped.

Before we threw everything away, however, Amanda spotted this certificate, which she expertly photographed:

Amanda loved it in an 80s-vintage sort of way—an old document showcasing the aesthetics of its age—but I decided to keep it as a token of all the things we threw away. A representative of the Les Schwab Tire reciepts and Nationwide Insurance cards that we couldn't keep. A tribute to Jack B. Stout, the salesman who sold my grandparents this car more than two decades ago. And a link to the past. After Amanda photographed it, I took the certificate, put it into the envelope provided by Peterson Toyota, and stuck it back in the glove compartment.

It... belongs there. Is that weird?

By Popular Demand

2011-02-09T00:52:00.004-06:00

Two people called me out today for a lack of blogging. Two completely unrelated people. It's a mandate if I ever saw one.

The truth is, I'm at a bit of a crossroads blogging-wise. So far, I've used this blog as a venue for hashing out arguments about whatever issue—political, artistic, philosophical—I happen to feel strongly about at the time. And you, my faithful readers, have been good sports about arguing with me about them. It gives me no small pleasure to connect with old friends and indirect acquaintances through well-meaning debate.

Now that I'm out of the apostate closet, however, everything has changed. I'm no fool. I know that most of my regular readers are believing Mormons. And while I consider you a pretty open-minded bunch, I'm not sure how well my musings of late will go down. I'm still undecided about posting the story of my departure from Mormonism, which contains arguments that many of you will likely be predisposed to reject as anti-Mormon lies. Reflections on putting my post-Mormon world together are as likely to alienate my audience as they are to enlighten. And let's be honest: a blog with no readers (and no comments!) is no blog at all. So, not wanting to destroy my blog with overzealous apostasy, I have not blogged at all. (It is a Catch-22, you guys!)

Inspired by the statistical unlikelihood of coincident requests for posts, however, I am breaking the cycle of blog paucity. Brace yourselves.

Secularism is heady wine. I doubt that I can fully communicate it to my LDS friends, but I find not being chained to any system of belief intoxicating and empowering. I relish in the intellectual and moral freedom I have claimed since leaving Mormonism. I no longer have to worry about twisting myself into a belief in self-contradictory or unsupported truth claims. If evidence is lacking, I can discard at will from my epistemological deck. Similarly, I am free to follow my moral compass without compromise. I no longer need dissemble in defense of any creed. I no longer need condemn something as sinful merely because a religious leader commands it. If I cannot see the evil in a particular practice, I am under no obligation to regard that practice as immoral.

This moral freedom, I argue, dismantles one of the few truly evil components of religion. Let me illustrate with an example. In New Jersey, a lesbian couple sought to rent a pavilion, owned by the Methodist-affiliated Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, for their civil union ceremony. The OGCMA refused, citing a religious objection to same-sex unions. The couple successfully sued the OGCMA for discrimination, but I don't want to talk about the court case. I want to focus on the following quote, by OGCMA administrator Rev. Scott Hoffman:

The principle was a strongly held religious belief that a marriage is between a man and a woman. We're not casting any aspersions or making any judgments. It's just, that's where we stand, and we've always stood that way, and that's why we said no.

I take Hoffman at his word. He probably isn't trying to judge anyone. He probably doesn't even feel that the couple are bad people. I'll go even so far as to conjecture that, in his bones, he finds nothing particularly evil in this couple's desire to formalize their commitment. (If I am wrong about Hoffman, I am not wrong about some of you; I have witnessed firsthand the widespread moral ambivalence over homosexuality in my generation of Mormons.) But his religious convictions tell him that he cannot support same-sex unions, and he does not permit himself the freedom to disagree.

There will always be homophobes, just like there will always be racists and there will always be misopogonists. Such people don't need to be told to condemn; they will always find justification for their cruel and intolerant behaviors. But to make a decent person like Hoffman commit to those same prejudices requires something more. It requires dogma, which religion all too often is willing to provide. At its worst, religion puts a divine seal of approval on the prejudices of the previous generation, compelling the believer to reject even when, left to his own conscience, he would prefer to accept.

Leaving Mormonism has exacted costs both practical and emotional. I can't avoid that. But the freedom from institutional prejudice, the freedom to be as good a person as I make up my mind to be, has made it worth every penny.

Nowell

2010-12-21T13:59:00.000-06:00

Here is one of my very favorite Christmas arrangements. Take a listen!

(Also: the color changes throughout the video. That is neat!)

A skeptical Christmas

2010-12-12T22:56:00.012-06:00

I have almost no memory of a belief in Santa Claus.

The single memory I have is nebulous at best. One Christmas Eve, when I was four or five, my uncle pointed out the window and told us he could see Rudolph's nose twinkling in the distance. By now the memory is so old and worn-out that I can't say how much I believed him, but I recall that I scoured the sky with at least some expectation of finding a red glow. Of course, whatever hopes I had were for naught.

On the other hand, I have precisely zero memory of finding out "the truth" about Santa. To the best of my knowledge my parents never sat me down to let me in on the secret, and I never accidentally stumbled upon the presents hidden in my parents' closet. As far as I remember, I just grew out of it. (By the time we got our first Nintendo—1988 or so—I didn't believe. I know this because my brother and I found the Nintendo a week or two before Christmas, a discovery which challenged no one's worldview.) I was lucky never to deal with the emotional trauma or feelings of betrayal that (I hear) other kids have to overcome when they learn their parents have been pulling the wool over their eyes. I just stopped believing.

I'm sure my Santa skepticism was facilitated by the fact that my parents didn't try artificially to keep us believing. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) But even so, the fact that I can hardly remember believing in Santa Claus is a symptom of a more general condition: I'm a skeptical fellow, and I always have been. In that spirit, perhaps you will not be surprised at the following announcement, which after all this time I can no longer keep bottled up:

One year ago, I left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I've agonized for months over how to tell this story, writing (and frequently discarding) pages and pages of explanation of my decision to leave. Perhaps sometime soon I will post a detailed justification, but for now let it suffice to say that I no longer find the church's truth claims compelling. It's no more complicated than that. There was no pint of cream nor transgression to conceal. I simply no longer believe.

As with Santa Claus, losing my faith in God has been a surprisingly natural process. That's not to say everything has been easy; if nothing else, managing relationships with friends and loved ones who still believe is a work in progress. But I am the same person I was a year ago, the same person most of you know in the flesh. While I do occasionally mourn my lost faith, on the whole I'm as happy now as I ever was inside Mormonism. Certainly I am as fundamentally good and honest an individual as I ever have been. Indeed, other than the occasional adult beverage (for the record: beer is okay, wine is nice, and whiskey is wonderful) my lifestyle is largely indistinguishable from that of an active latter-day saint.

I consider myself rather fortunate to have survived apostasy with so few emotional scars. It means that I need not reject all of the tradition and culture with which I was raised. It means that, while I no longer believe in God, I still love Christmastime. People have wondered at this, and occasionally I have been accused of inconsistency or even hypocrisy on this point. I admit that my accusers have a point, and while I refuse to apologize I will attempt to explain.

Having experienced one-and-a-half Christmases as a non-believer, I now realize that religious belief is only tangential to what makes Christmas special. Christmastime is an opportunity to spend time with the people we love. To eat food and listen to music that connects us to our childhood. To participate in traditions that not only bring us closer to our loved ones, but also reinforce connections to our shared past. I maintain that one does not need a belief in God to sing Christmas carols, to cook and eat festive food, or even go to a Christmas service. This morning I played the cello in Amanda's ward's Christmas program, and last year we attended watchnight services at a 13th-century cathedral. These experiences were not even slightly cheapened by my unbelief.

But of course I can't ignore the religious aspect entirely, and as an apostate from Mormonism I can testify firsthand of the strife faith can cause. Yet I am entirely untroubled by the religious underpinnings of Christmas. Christmas is religion divested of its propensity for ill. It brings a simple, universal message of peace and goodwill, a God-figure as benign and innocent as a newborn babe. Probably there is nothing true about Christmas's religious message. But there is no harm in this.

This is my third Christmas post. If you look back to previous posts, you'll notice that every year I have made some mention of religious skepticism. Christmas has lately been a particular opportunity to explore the crisis of faith with which I have been dealing for several years now. But never—never—has my lack of faith interfered with my ability to enjoy the season.

Merry Christmas to you all.

When worlds collide

2010-10-29T23:25:00.008-05:00

You guys know that I love Dinosaur Comics, and by now many of you will have (correctly) surmised that I have a possibly-unholy man-crush on its creator, Ryan North. You also know that I hate political extremism, especially as exhibited by porcine ideologue Glenn Beck. Yesterday, in a singular amalgam of rage and glee, those passions merged.

A few days ago, Ryan North released his new anthology Machine of Death. Inspired by this comic, it's a collection of short stories about a machine that tells people—accurately but obliquely—how they will die. The machine might tell you "old age", for example, but instead of settling down for a comfortable, long life you are murdered in your twenties by a raging octogenarian! The collection prominently features the work of the webcomics community: David Malki ! of the wonderful Wondermark co-edited, Kate Beaton of the historically hilarious Hark! A Vagrant provided illustrations, and even Randall Munroe of the overrated and frequently abysmal xkcd contributed a story.

While Ryan North and friends might be darlings of the net-savvy world, they don't have tons of real-world clout. Machine of Death was therefore self-published, and most of its publicity came via the webpages of its various collaborators. Imagine their surprise when their scrappy opus went straight to #1 on amazon.com! It's a feel-good story for the ages.

The release of Machine of Death, however, coincided with the release of Glenn Beck's latest book Broke. And instead of debuting at #1 as he has come to expect, Glenn Beck was beat out by a ragtag group of independent artists (and, adding insult to injury, Keith Richards).

But instead of accepting third place graciously, Beck decided that his loss was due to a liberal "culture of death"—never mind that he was beat out by both "Death" and "Life", which must indeed be demoralizing!—that threatens to destroy our very way of life. You can find the audio clip from Beck's radio show here. What's that? You don't want to listen to Beck's sonorous, mellifluous voice? Very well then; here's the salient quote:

These are the — this is the left, I think, speaking. This is the left. You want to talk about where we’re headed? We’re headed towards a culture of death. A culture that, um, celebrates the things that have destroyed us. Not that the Rolling Stones have destroyed us — I mean, you can’t always get what you want. You know what I’m saying? Brown sugar. I have no idea what that means.

This is where we are heading, you guys! If they are not stopped, small, independent groups of creative, sincere, kind (seriously: check out North's and Malki's twitter feeds; they are populated with enthusiastic interactions with fans), and entrepreneurial artists will, for dozens of hours, succeed in selling more books than pink-faced, corporate-sponsored propagandists. This is a threat to us all.

In response to the controversy, Malki created an infographic helping us to distinguish political thinkers from opportunistic shysters:

Here's how can you tell: Instead of accepting defeat—which conforms to his purported political principles—like a man, the shyster will cry like a baby when his followers don't give him enough money, complaining that subversive, insidious forces are to blame.

Quoth my lovely wife: "Aw, poor Glenn Beck. Here, have a lollipop to make everything feel better."

Noisemaker

2010-09-21T21:51:00.011-05:00

I found this quote on Facebook today:

Intelligence is the ability to hear someone's opinion and not be swayed by it.

It was left unattributed, prompting me to consider the sad possibility that the page's proprietor authored it himself, feeling sufficiently proud of his brainchild to inflict it on the internet-going public. Too bad for him. His quote is blindingly, breathtakingly stupid, and completely antithetical to every intellectual endeavor ever. (Also: it makes me angry.)

At the risk of insufferable white-knighting, let me clear something up. Intelligence never exists in a vacuum. Intelligence is routinely mistaken. Intelligence neither has nor pretends to have all the answers. Intelligence is sufficiently confident that it cheerfully admits its limitations. Above all, intelligence craves further understanding, relishing in opportunities to refine and revise and be swayed by the opinion of another.

Here is a tip for you, O anonymous peddler of Facebook quotations. When you argue, you can nearly always find common ground with your opponent, a reasonable component of his argument that causes you to adjust — ever so slightly — your thinking. When this proves infeasible, there are two possibilities: either your opponent is an intransigent, incoherent noisemaker, or you are. Take care that it isn't you.

I feel guilty having subjected the internet to the above quotation, and my grandstanding is not penance enough. Here is compensatory wisdom, quotes that ought to be on our anonymous friend's profile:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman

The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. - Tom Stoppard

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. - Bertrand Russell

There. Now I feel better.

The best just keeps on getting better

2010-09-09T23:31:00.016-05:00

Sigh. Many of you will remember Jon McNaughton, whose unfettered artistry I sampled in a recent post. Well, he's at it again:

(Incidentally, one of the cutest parts of McNaughton's site is his right-click blocker, which soberly informs you that the images on his site are copyrighted. I just want to pat him on the head and ruffle his hair!)

Perhaps he realized that playing artist-in-residence to the fringe right generates notoriety and its corresponding profits. I can hear Ayn Rand's post-mortem exultation from all the way over here.

I seriously considered not writing about this painting—there isn't much to say that doesn't also apply to McNaughton's previous offering—yet after the enthusiastic response to my previous post I feel duty-bound to share it. It's all here, just as before: the crushingly heavy-handed political message, the workmanlike copy-and-paste historical portraiture, the inarticulate rebuttal of "liberal" criticism. So as much fun as it would be to tear The Forgotten Man limb from limb, allow me instead to offer summary criticism. It's a better use of everyone's time.

Art transcends the prosaic machinations of day-to-day politics. It may reflect on its times, but when it does so it captures their essence rather than regurgitates their tiresome details. Decades from now we will have largely forgotten the political minutiae responsible for the controversies over which we so bitterly disagree, their particulars no more noteworthy than the 1791 whiskey tax or the merits of bimetallism. Yet McNaughton glorifies the petty conflicts, disgorging one-sided talking points as though they were timeless truths plucked from the tree of knowledge. He panders to the immediate present, and the result has a correspondingly short shelf life. He wants us to accept it as art, but it isn't; it's a political cartoon whose medium happens to be oil on canvas.

Deconstructive criticism (or: The Pixar model)

2010-08-22T20:43:00.014-05:00

Getting a Ph. D. is hard, you guys.

As an undergraduate, I could be a guy who knew stuff. Classes gave me material to learn, and as long as I mastered that material I could confidently expect success. It wasn't easy, necessarily—learning subtle and unfamiliar concepts demands effort—but it was clearly defined; there was never any mystery in how to succeed. Classes had well-encapsulated curricula, insulating me from my ignorance, distracting me with newfound knowledge while keeping me from knowing what I didn't know.

Graduate school is exactly the opposite. Your first task is to become familiar with the literature in your discipline, which is no small feat. Even within a single discipline there are more ideas than you can internalize, more papers than you can ever possibly read. And since graduate research is highly individualized, there can be no master syllabus of necessary and sufficient papers. You must therefore decide for yourself what to learn. Rather than being led through a carefully-crafted curriculum, you get a shocking, unstructured look at your ignorance—an ignorance you can only selectively remedy. And, for good measure, there's no one to administer a quiz at the end to make sure you understand it correctly. All of this means that even after reading a bunch of papers it's hard to have confidence that you know enough to carry out successful research.

It's even harder when doing your own research. This isn't just because the problems to be solved are difficult. In fact, I bet most researchers would agree that actually doing the work is the comparatively easy part of graduate school. Instead, the hard part is knowing what to work on. The great struggle of a scientific Ph. D. is finding a problem that is simultaneously important, unsolved, and solvable. And there's no formula—at least, none that works—for finding such a problem. It's relatively straightforward (again, not easy, but usually straightforward) to sit down and start doing a little math. It's hard to know whether or not that math is going to lead to anything important. The path to Ph. D. is a ragged serpentine, full of blind alleys and unintended excursions.

And you have to do it alone. One of the most terrifying realizations of graduate school is that your advisor does not have the answers. He doesn't fully understand what you're working on. He doesn't know whether or not that work will yield publishable results. Hell, he usually doesn't even know whether or not there are mistakes in your work. He doesn't have time to hover over your shoulder and micromanage your progress. He can give you valuable advice from his experienced (but information-poor) perspective, but no one knows your research as well as you.

This shift the burden of criticism back onto you. You have to look through your own work, scour it for flaws and weaknesses, and decide whether or not you're doing fruitful research. In part this is a healthy exercise: anyone who hopes eventually to head his own research program needs to learn to discern good work from bad. And, in any case, healthy self-criticism is an important part of being a well-adjusted member of society.

But let's be honest: self-criticism is hard. Every talented person wants to believe he is talented, secretly fears he is not, and furtively goes about proving to himself and others that his fears are unjustified. Graduate students routinely suffer crises of confidence, and even honest self-criticism can aggravate the symptoms. Yet academic research is sufficiently demanding that confidence—perhaps even unreasoning, absurd overconfidence—is an essential component of success. It's nearly impossible to fruitfully chase down an idea while tending nagging fears of making mistakes or wasting time down blind alleys.

So, as a researcher you face a dilemma similar to that of an artist. Pay too much heed to your internal critic, and you end up paralyzed by self-reflection. Ignore it entirely, and you produce flawed, unimportant, or otherwise self-indulgent output. Every artist, composer, scientist, and writer faces this dilemma, each walking the knife-edge in his own way.

But some walk it really, really, well. I recently came across an article describing the creative process at Pixar. (If you don't like Pixar films, then you're either too cool, have a heart made of stone, or otherwise suffer from crippling personality flaws. Seek professional help.) Pixar has consistently output innovative, high-quality films, and they achieve that success through interesting means. Every morning, animators and directors gather to examine the work completed the previous day and pick it apart in excruciating detail—deciding what works, what doesn't, and how it should be improved. The animators then take the criticism back to the drawing room and implement these changes. Rinse and repeat until you have a masterpiece on your hands.

In one sense it's not terribly surprising that Pixar's formula is successful. Take a bunch of creative and talented people, create a highly collaborative work environment, and you get phenomenal success! How... non-obvious? But their story struck me in a non-obvious way. How much easier is it to silence the self-critic when you know that a group of your smartest, most talented friends is going to go over your work tomorrow, looking for flaws you overlooked? How much easier is it to be freer, more daring, and more innovative when you know that other talented people are going to keep you from going too far off the deep end?

As someone who suffers from an overactive internal critic, it sounds liberating to me. It's not that I want to avoid the responsibility of evaluating my own work but that I could do it much more effectively with constant, systematic oversight from respected, talented colleagues. As I look forward to the (hopeful) future of running my own research group, the Pixar model appeals to me.

Of course, implementing it presents serious challenges. In describing the model I've tacitly assumed that you have a group of talented people, each of whom is secure enough in his talents and secure enough in his colleagues' that he will not only accept criticism without feeling attacked but also give criticism without attacking. That's a work environment that must be difficult to create and even more difficult to maintain—especially among smart, successful people whose overdeveloped superegos have gotten them far in life. It probably requires a strong sense of shared objective that's hard to foster among creative, independent thinkers.

I don't know what the answer is, but Pixar's success gives me optimism. They've proven that such an environment is possible to create and to maintain for well over a decade. Can't I hope to achieve a creative environment that crusty ol' Steve Jobs has pulled off?

[PS: Made on a Mac!]

Who is {yer mom}?

2010-08-13T00:31:00.027-05:00

I found this today. It's very funny. You should go read it, especially if you want any context for the rest of this post.

While I'm waiting for you to finish, I'll share a few of my favorite passages therefrom. Here's one:

The argument we had earlier today didn't need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I'm deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.

Now let me explain why your son was wrong.

Here's another:

You should never feel guilty about your abilities. Including your ability to repeatedly peg a fellow toddler with your Elmo ball as he sobs for mercy.

And another:

Johanna shouldn't be burdened with supplying playthings for every bed-wetting moocher she happens to meet. If you saw Johanna, her knees buckling, her arms trembling but still trying to hold aloft the collective weight of an entire Tot Lot's worth of Elmo balls with the last of her strength, what would you tell her to do?

To shrug. Just like we've instructed her to do if Child Protective Services or some other agent of the People's State of America ever asks her about what we're teaching her.

Comedy gold.

Of course this little piece is satire, and satire is never fair to its object, but it got me thinking about Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which in our current political climate and Web 2.0-enabled world have experienced a miniature renaissance—at least, if Facebook is to be believed. Even more than Ronald Reagan or Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand is the patron saint of capitalism, and her Objectivism is the philosophical creed of choice for hordes of libertarians from here to the Cato Institue.

So lately I've spent a reasonable amount of time learning about Objectivism. Full disclosure: I haven't read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, but I have read quite a few secondary sources, including an interesting article on Objectivist themes in Pixar's The Incredibles. I also read Anthem many, many years ago. In any case, here is a one-sentence summary of my findings:

Objectivism is religion for atheists.

Honestly, that should suffice—if you want to close your browser window and move on, you won't miss too much. There aren't even any good jokes from here on out. But for completeness I'll move on to a multi-sentence discussion. First, let me give a brief—but I think fair—summary of Objectivism's core principles for anyone who may not be familiar:

There exists an objective reality distinct from human subjectivity.
Through logic and perceptual apparatus, humans can obtain objective knowledge of that reality.
The correct purpose of a person's life is to go about pursuing one's self-interest.
The only political system compatible with that correct purpose is classical, laissez-faire capitalism.

I reserve most of my ire for (2), both for its own sake and because it reeks rather pungently of having been reverse-engineered from desired conclusions (3) and (4). If you have sufficient intelligence and patience, Rand argues, you can possess objective, absolute truth about the world. It's a wonderful ideal, one shared to various degrees by a smattering of scientists and philosophers. In an ideal world, reason ought to be enough to lead us surely and inexorably down the path to Truth.

But people aren't very good at being Spockian vessels of dispassionate logic. In fact, we basically can't do it. For all its marvelous complexity, the human brain is pretty shoddy as an objective device. It naturally tries to confirm its preconceptions. It's very bad with probabilities. The full list of cognitive biases runs a mile long, and no one is immune. Even if you neglect the usual epistemelogical hurdles of Cartesian doubt or the analytic-synthetic distinction, the arrogance required to believe that subjective bias does not apply to you, that you can carry out purely objective reasoning, is staggering. (Indeed, Rand does ignore these hurdles—in fact, she considered Kant "the most evil man in history". A rare specimen of objectivity, ladies and gentlemen.)

If we really want to be rational and intellectually honest, let's just admit it: obtaining objective, non-trivial knowledge through logical inquiry is essentially impossible. But Rand won't admit that. In fact, she can't admit it, because doing so would force her to abandon her philosophical (um) objectives. She is not content to argue that rational self-interest is neat or that capitalism is pretty okay. She wants to enshrine self-interest as the only moral purpose in life and laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral social system. And you can't make absolute moral statements if you've given up on absolute truth.

Here's where I stop merely criticizing and start losing my patience with Objectivism. If you want to argue for individualism or extol the heroism of human ingenuity, you'll find in me a sympathetic audience. If you want to argue for the supremacy of laissez-faire capitalism, we can probably find common ground. But don't try to tell me these are moral absolutes. I will laugh at you.

That brings me back to my one-sentence summary. Objectivism offers the atheist the same thing religion offers the believer: absolute knowledge about the world and an inviolable moral code. Rand may have dispensed with religious belief, but she engineered a dogma as rigid as any religious creed. In trying to eliminate subjectivity, she ended up elevating her subjective conclusions to an objective reality. Anyone who disagrees with her would-be objectivism, then, must somehow be doing it wrong. And for some reason that sounds a little familiar.

Retrospective / Autobiography of a face

2010-07-31T23:48:00.016-05:00

One year ago today, we moved into our new house. After a few hectic days of packing and painting and paperwork, assisted by our gracious friends, we finally moved everything into our townhouse and officially became homeowners. Your first home is a life-changing experience, the kind of achievement you mark for the rest of your life.

But we're not here to celebrate that anniversary. Houses are great and all, but a much more momentous change came upon me that day. For on July 31st, 2009, I began growing a beard. Those of you fortunate enough to see me regularly in person know the glory of which I speak. Some of you may even be jealous. Never mind that; today is a day for celebration. My beard has accompanied me through much life in the past 365 days. It saw me across the finish line of my first marathon, journeyed with me on a South African safari, and yes, grew with me as I settled into becoming a homeowner. It may be my truest friend.

Yet it is hard, even for me, to go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the unfathomable wonder of my facial hair. Instead, allow me to turn this moment of celebration into a public service: a how-to guide, written for all of you—and I trust it is indeed all of you—who secretly yearn to emulate my success.

When I first set out upon my beardly quest there were few references available. Esquire had a useless article, and I found a YouTube video or two, but I could not find sufficiently specific information, and I was forced me to make it up as I went. And I made some bad mistakes. Fortunately, after a year of experimentation I have become a fully qualified beardologist. Allow me to share with you my wisdom, lest you fall into the same traps that so ensnared me.

Preliminaries

Before discussing technique, let's first talk about why you should grow a beard. It's imperative that I dispel the all-too-common myth of beard teleology: you need no specific reason to grow a beard. You need no rebellion against the draconian standards of your youth. You need no desire to augment your manliness. These are lesser justifications, put forward by lesser men growing lesser beards. The true beard-wearer grows his beard simply because he wants to. He is nothing more than a dude with an adventurous spirit and a desire to let his hair follicles in on the adventure.

It's also imperative that you maintain confidence through the early stages of beard growth. The neophyte beard-grower is often disheartened by the time necessary to grow out a fully magnificent beard. I will not sugar-coat the truth: as much as a month without shaving will be required to grow a respectable beard, and in the meantime your proto-beard will not be an attractive testament to testosterone but a sparse, scruffy embarrassment. Take courage, friend; all who would achieve beard-dom must pass through this ordeal. Given time, your paltry prickles will blossom into a majestic mane.

Once your follicles have produced the raw material, it must be molded into beardly greatness. I will devote the remainder of my words to introducing the three core principles of beardology: shape, contour, and blend. Each corresponds to one of three tools you will need: razor, trimmer, and scissors. Let's discuss each one individually.

The instruments of beardology. All photos courtesy Amanda.

I. Shape

The first step in growing a beard is choosing the shape, as defined by the portion of your face you choose not to shave. One of the benefits of having a beard is that you won't have to shave as much or as often, but it's still important that you keep your beard's shape well-defined by shaving—with a razor—the area around your beard.

While this chart does a pretty good job of ranking beards from best to worst, shape is ultimately a personal decision determined by the natural coverage of your facial hair and your personal sense of facial aesthetics. For example, I have pretty full coverage (as well as classic, timeless aesthetic), so I grow a standard full beard. Villainous folks will be interested in goatees and soul patches, and those of you looking to make use of your aviators will want to grow a mustache.

Don't grow a mustache.

For a full beard, shape is defined primarily by the neckline. There are a few schools of thought on proper neckline position. Esquire mandates a neckline at one inch above the adam's apple. Others suggest a neckline that closely follows the jawline, resulting in a mostly bare underjaw. I prefer to place my neckline at the corner where the underjaw intersects the neck; it results in a clean, anatomically-defined line rather than one arbitrarily and artificially imposed.

There is room for honest disagreement on this issue. A lower neckline, for example, can accentuate the turkey-neck, so a higher neckline may be preferable. On the other hand, I have seen successful necklines that stretch well below the neck/underjaw corner. Regardless of position, the key to a successful neckline is geometry. Draw an imaginary line from the bottom of your ear down to whatever point you've chosen above or below your adam's apple. The line should curve slightly to accommodate the shape of your neck, but it must be smooth. Shave along this line. This can be difficult, as part of the line will likely be obscured by your jaw, so it's often helpful to pull back the skin around your jaw so you can clearly see where you are shaving.

Some beard-growers will also define an upper shave-line on the cheeks. I think this is typically a bad idea: artificial lines make your face look evil and should be kept to a minimum. Instead, the occasional stray hair on your upper cheek can be shaved or plucked individually, preserving the beard's natural contours. However, if your beard ends raggedly on your upper cheek, you may be forced to define an upper boundary with your razor. In either case, allow your beard to define itself as much as possible.

If you aren't growing a full beard, the shaping principles will be different. In general a goatee's neckline will be much closer to the jaw, and a "philosopher's" beard is best grown with no neckline whatsoever. But for specifics you'll have to look elsewhere.

Left: the corner-defined neckline. Right: a natural upper boundary. There are a few individual hairs that probably could be plucked to clean up the boundary without making it look artificial.

II. Contour

To maintain a beard, you will need to purchase a beard trimmer. They aren't terribly expensive, and they are indispensable for a clean-looking beard. A beard should look classy, not sloppy. Your poorly-maintained beard ruins it for the rest of us.

Decide how closely you want to trim your beard. In general, shorter beards look cleaner and younger, while longer beards look serious and distinguished. Let your age and relative awesomeness be your guide. However: do not, under any circumstances, consider a stubble beard. No, it doesn't look good on you. No, you don't look rugged or roguish or dangerous or debonair. You just look like an ass.

My worst rookie move was to assume that I should trim all of my beard to the same length. This is a mistake. Part of the reason for this is evenness: different parts of your beard have different coverage densities, and trimming at different lengths allows you to create an illusion of uniformity across your face. In general, the more dense the coverage, the shorter you should trim the hair. The other part is aesthetics: some portions of your beard (such as your underjaw and neck) are unattractive on their own, and others (such as your mustache and soul patch) have evil connotations. By trimming these portions shorter than the rest of your beard you can de-emphasize them, resulting in a beard whose components fit together in a unity of form.

Contour is tricky to get right, and ultimately you'll simply have to experiment. It's useful to pay attention to photos of yourself, particularly ones taken from odd angles. This allows you to see your beard as others see it—instead of what you see in the mirror. In my case, I set the trimmer to 11 for most of the beard. I turn it down to 8 for the neck/underjaw, 5 for the mustache, and all the way down to 3 for the soul patch. It's nearly impossible for an honest man to trim his soul patch too short.

III. Blend

On the whole, your trimmer will do most of the heavy lifting of getting your facial hair the length you want it, but it is not a precision instrument. To finish the job you will need a decent pair of barber's scissors. Go out and buy a pair; you can get one at Target for $5 or so.

You need the scissors for two reasons. First, no beard trimmer works perfectly. Since your face is irregularly shaped, there will be sections of beard that your trimmer is not nimble enough to handle. My trimmer, for example, has a particularly hard time with the area just under the hinge of my jaw. Your trimmer will also leave the occasional stray hair. This looks particularly bad on the mustache; mo-hairs encroaching on the lip are particularly unsightly. In either of these cases, you'll need to go in manually with scissors. There's no magic technique to scissor-trimming, and unfortunately it's a bit clumsy at first, but it isn't difficult to get the hang of it.

Second, we've trimmed different sections of beard to different lengths as prescribed by Contour. To forge these disparate sections into a coherent unit of magnificence you must blend them together with your scissors. The trick is to look along the section boundaries for mismatched hair lengths. Most of my blending efforts are spent either fading my jawline into my underjaw or matching my mustache into the rest of my face. Again, there's no trick to blending, but fortunately it's easy to get into a quick rhythm. Be bold; an accidental short patch will grow out quickly.

Left: my trimmer can't get at these hairs under my jaw, so I go at them manually with scissors. Right: notice the individual hairs drooping onto my lip. Not attractive.

Conclusion

There you have it. This guide, while incomplete, gives you the tools and knowledge necessary to traverse the path to beard-dom. Go forth, o my brothers, and make majesty of your faces.

Pushing

2010-07-18T23:18:00.002-05:00

Written last week during a fit of insomnia, and delivered against my better judgement into the cruel hands of the internet:

On my twenty-sixth birthday, I joked that I was "pushing thirty". It was a casual, throwaway technicality, designed to poke fun at the neuroses of those nearer to the mark, borne of an arrogance only possible because my own senescence was a hypothetical whose realization I had never confronted. Now, scant years later I am, unequivocally, pushing thirty. No longer merely discernible on the horizon, it hurtles toward me (or I toward it) relentlessly, and I—fattening, incipiently balding, cognitively ossifying—scrabble for handholds as my horizontal trajectory tilts savagely to vertical, seeing not only the mark but the headlong path beyond it, hanging momentarily weightless at the precipice as fear and anxiety are swallowed up in a single, overriding despair:

I don't want to die.

Meta-post: Rebranded

2010-07-11T13:17:00.004-05:00

You hopefully notice that the blog has a new look. I worked at a web design company during undergrad, and after the successful redesign of my ECE webpage and Amanda's now-mostly-photo blog, I decided to apply my vestigial skills to these humble pages. It turns out that Blogger really doesn't want you to design your own template; they'd rather have you use one of their prefab designs. But after wrestling Blogger to the floor and putting it in a half-nelson, my custom design emerges victorious.

I hope you like the new design—I stole from a lot of good pages to put it together! After a year or so of resisting it, I finally incorporated the "lowercase" idea (which was never intended as a pun; "lowercase profanity" refers to mild swearing, the kind a good Mormon boy might use when he gets upset) into the template. I've tested everything out on a few different browsers, but if anyone notices any layout issues I'd be grateful to hear about them.

On an unrelated note, I've decided to de-list this blog from Google Buzz. Most of those following me are co-workers/collegues, and I'd prefer to have the freedom to write whatever I like without worrying about the fact that I'm explicitly broadcasting it to the ECE department. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to follow (and comment at!) this blog, but I'd rather not deliver it to everyone's inbox. It feels too exhibitionistic to me. I hope that many of you will still keep up with it. That'd be real swell.

The best art of all the art

2010-06-24T19:23:00.013-05:00

We're in Utah this week, attending my sister's wedding and hoping to see some old friends while we're here. We moved away from Provo nearly two years ago, and I'm surprised to find just how nice it is to be back. Not only are the surroundings much, much more beautiful than anything Houston has to offer, but Provo also has a bright, cheerful air that I both admire and miss. Fueled as it may be by equal parts naïveté and self-delusion, Provo's happy-go-lucky optimism makes me feel at home in a way I never could have anticipated while I lived here.

Reconnecting with our Utah roots, Amanda and I wandered around BYU campus for a few hours, eating lunch at the Cougareat, visiting old classroom halls, and eventually perusing the BYU bookstore. In addition to the usual university bookstore fare—hats, T-shirts, and textbooks—there's also a candy store, a floral shop, and a gallery where you can purchase art frames and (mostly LDS-themed) paintings.

You can also purchase terrible, terrible shit.

While browsing the gallery I came across this painting, prominently displayed, by Utah-based painter Jon McNaughton:

Initially I just laughed at what I considered a simplistic, oh-so-Utah expression of religion-cum-patriotism, appropriately rendered in the artless schlock of Thomas Kinkade. As I looked closer and realized the specificity of the artist's "message", however, my emotions began to vacillate between acute annoyance and a long-shot hope that this thing might be a marvelously subtle joke.

Sadly, McNaughton earns no points for irony. His painting may look like an exercise in self-caricature, but the humor is unintentional. That you might understand my frustration—and that I might blow off a little steam—allow me to turn my trained artistic eye on this painting and provide a critical exposition.

The central focus of the painting is Jesus Christ holding the U. S. Constitution up to the world.

This makes sense because Jesus actually wrote the Constitution and revealed it to the founding fathers—devout Christian men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson.

Divine authorship of our Constitution is the main reason that the U. S. is the best country of all the countries. So it's important that we immortalize that in our art.

Along with the requisite historical figures flanking the Author and Finisher of our Constitution, there are a few "modern" presidents whose presence is worth mentioning. Obviously Ronald Reagan, who by construction was the most benevolently badass President, supports Jesus and His pro-American agenda. Curiously, however, JFK is also represented among the Constitutional vanguard. As the only righteous representative of American liberalism, his inclusion can only be explained by his willingness to kill godless Communists.

The lower half of the painting is given over to a depiction of the modern American public, divided into two groups who, significantly, are on the right- and left-hand sides of Jesus. On His right hand, obviously, are the ordinary, decent Americans who Believe in and Uphold the Constitution. Their simple patriotism is rendered in stereotype: there's a soldier in uniform, a mother with child in arms, and a simple, working-class man in plaid and overalls.

In a laudable effort at racial inclusion, a lone black man is counted among the righteous—presumably because he's got his copy of Skousen in hand. (Non-LDS readers should be advised that W. Cleon Skousen was an influential LDS author in the 50s and 60s, writing on both political and religious topics. Whatever his other accomplishments, politically he was a conspiracy-theoretic crank. To wit: Glenn Beck has recently promoted his books in an ill-conceived effort at instigating a Skousian renaissance.)

Finally, we have a school teacher, who reminds us that education is an acceptable vocation among the righteous, but only if you restrict yourself to no further than secondary education and appear as mousy as possible while actually in the act of teaching.

On His left hand are the wicked, unpatriotic individuals whose nation-hating nature is indicated by their association with The Devil Himself!

Most of the evil are easy to identify. The secular scientist looks smugly down on the proceedings through trendy rectangular frames, his arrogance and godlessness manifest in the way he clutches his copy of Darwin's Origin of Species. (Never mind that over 100 yeas ago Darwinian evolution was officially declared to be compatible with LDS doctrine, or that modern evolutionary synthesis is taught as a matter of course in BYU biology classes.)

The activist judge buries his face in despair, realizing that Jesus is here to save the Constitution by eradicating his evil, liberal rulings (including Marbury v. Madison, which set the precedent for judicial review; I wonder what McNaughton thinks of Brown v. Board of Education?).

Others are harder to puzzle out. I suppose the microphone-toting blonde is an agent of the MSM, peddling her liberal propaganda to a populace of proletarian sheeple? It's hard to say.

It's even harder to guess at the money-counting businessman or the near-to-bursting pregnant woman. Their politics seem ambiguous at worst and Jesus-friendly at best. Why are they condemned to kick it with The Devil Himself?

All sarcasm aside, this painting is beyond absurd; it's odious. It seeks to legitimize a narrow, nasty, and monolithic ideology—one that rewrites history, cheapens patriotism, and demonizes disagreement—under the guise of fine art. It's an affront to any who believe that the LDS faith comes with no political strings attached, that Mormonism neither prescribes nor proscribes any political platform. It's discouraging enough that this sort of painting generates enough demand to keep McNaughton's studio solvent; that it's popular enough to be featured at an educational institution is pathetic.

It has been famously asked why the LDS community, while over-represented in business, law, and politics, produces so few great artists. I believe the answer is bound up in the kind of art the LDS community wants to consume, which, based on the preceding, isn't very good. Art challenges, is subtle, is occasionally subversive or controversial. And the rank-and-file LDS community isn't interested in controversy or subtlety, but in consuming media that brazenly reinforces its worldview. So for every Orson Scott Card, Minerva Teichert, or even Arnold Friberg (who managed a much more tasteful synthesis of spirituality and patriotism), there are dozens of Stephanie Meyers, Janice Kapp Perrys, and Michael McLeans. Jon McNaughton is merely a particularly egregious example of the countless LDS artists whose work does not inspire, but ploddingly reinforces stale, suffocating orthodoxy.

And that isn't art. It's kitsch. It's the opposite of art. It destroys art. It destroys souls.

[PS: It turns out you can read McNaughton's interpretation of the painting, as well as his response to "liberal" criticism. I think you will find his rhetorical chops exactly commensurate with his artistry!]

In me you trust

2010-06-11T07:44:00.011-05:00

A quick observation:

Over the last twelve months I've climbed six full rungs up the ladder of facial hair trustworthiness, which places me ahead of Abe Lincoln, Wilford Brimley, and Aristotle. I suggest you all take a moment to celebrate me and my meaningful achievements!

(Image credit goes to Matt McInerney, and thanks go to David Malki ! of Wondermark for sharing the image with the beard-going public.)

Fist of fury

2010-05-02T23:12:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I just want to punch people in the face.

Let me emphasize that this is a new feeling for me. I've never been a physically violent or even hot-tempered person. I never got into a fight in school—not because I was afraid of getting beat up (although that's very likely what would have happened), but because it isn't in my nature. I DO like to argue, as everyone reading this must already know, so I don't shy away from conflict, but typically in an argument my emotions remain in check. I've always felt that arguments come to blows only when people are either too stupid or too cowardly to articulate their ideas verbally. In other words, people resort to violence only when their words are impotent. Turns out I'm a fan of neither stupidity nor cowardice, and I'm certainly not cheering for verbal impotence, so you'd expect anger management to come to me naturally. And usually it does.

But sometimes I still want to punch people in the face.

Not very often, of course. It's actually a very specific set of circumstances that boil my blood, and I've spent a reasonable amount of time trying to figure out exactly why they set me off when ordinarily it's not in my nature. I found common thread: arguments in which I've gone to considerable effort to explain myself, yet the other person almost deliberately refuses to understand me. In these arguments, my words are involuntarily rendered impotent—not because I can't articulate myself, but because I'm dealing with someone who has already deemed unimportant something he doesn't care to understand.

In some ways my frustration is probably obvious and commonplace—no one likes to have their hard work casually tossed aside—but for me it's more personal and not at all trivial. In all my interpersonal interactions—with my wife, family, friends, colleagues, whatever—my overwhelmingly top priority is to be understood. Not to be praised or to dominate or to be the smartest, not even to be comforted or loved, but to be understood. That's why I love to teach, why I sincerely appreciate it when people dissent on this blog, and particularly why I enjoy arguing. Done properly, disagreement gives me an opportunity both to understand someone else and to be understood. THAT is the miracle of human interaction—that after hours of discussion two friends arguing over dinner can breach the lonely barrier of solipsism and arrive at a mutually edifying mutual understanding. For me it's the only really authentic way of connecting with another person: through his ideas. Everything else is superficial by comparison. So when you stomp on that connection because you're too busy pushing your agenda, defending your pride, or just being angry simply because I disagree with you, you stomp on an innate part of me, and you deny me the only meaningful way I have to connect with you.

And when that happens, don't get angry if I want to punch you in the face. Maybe you deserve it.

The excluded middle

2010-03-31T22:41:00.008-05:00

A week ago I posted a link to this article, written by David Frum, to my Facebook profile. There are parts of his analysis that I disagree with, of course, but on balance I found the article to be a thoughtful, constructive, and pragmatic take on heathcare reform from a conservative perspective. Most appealingly, Frum didn't engage in the petty histrionics of the tin-foil crowd: his article delightfully misses the entire {'Marxist','bloodless coup','facist','government takeover','armageddon'} set. I was impressed enough to check out his blog, where I found a collection of interesting, articulate political pieces written from a more-or-less conservative perspective. I also found a relatively intelligent commentariat who, in spite of ideological differences, manage impressively civil disagreement. I thought to myself that, in an age of Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin, Frum is exactly the sort of thing the political right ought to promote: reasonable, self-critical, even academic arguments for conservative ideas without anti-intellectualism and scorched-earth demagoguery.

Alas, it was too good to be true. On Tuesday, two days after the publication of the linked piece above, Frum was fired from his position at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

I won't lie: I was really angry when I found out about it. Of course I can't say whether or not Frum was fired over his politics (if you like you can read his take as well as that of one of his AEI colleagues), but in any case it's disheartening when a political group rejects its moderate elements. People like to complain about the hulking inagility of the two-party system, but one of its chief benefits is that it discourages extremism. Radical ideas are first taken up by third parties, and if they become sufficiently mainstream they are picked up by one of the major parties. This forces the ideas through an incubation period, moderating them before they have any chance at becoming policy. This system works relatively well because the major parties have incentive to appeal to as large a base as possible. Empty political slogans or not, Reagan's big tent, Clinton's third way, and even Bush's compassionate conservatism sought common ground among an ideologically diverse electorate, thereby forcing moderation on the relevant party.

But this system doesn't work if a party caters to its extreme elements. If it continues to pander to the tea party bloc and push out moderates like Frum, the Republican party will give its stupidest and most reactionary elements control over its agenda, which is bad for everybody involved. Energizing a narrow, vocal portion of the base may garner short-term political capital, but it's a losing strategy in the long-term—one that poisons the political atmosphere in the meantime. White-hot partisan noise deepens divides while alienating moderate voters, and it takes more than angry paranoiacs to win elections.

My own politics are a hodgepodge of left- and right-leaning ambivalences, but my loyalties are beside the point: regardless of the party in power, we need a strong, moderating opposition. But when the opposition chooses downtown Glennbeckistan as its ideological epicenter, it relinquishes its claims to credibility and does real damage to democracy.

Here we come a-qwantzling

2010-03-10T14:31:00.018-06:00

I've made it no secret on this blog that I love Dinosaur Comics. I find the strip extremely funny—both intellectually and viscerally—in a way that I can't properly explain to people who don't share my appreciation. If you aren't familiar, you should give it a fair hearing. It could change your life for the awesomer.

Ryan North, the writer of Dinosaur Comics, embedded a puzzle in one of his recent comics. Inspired by the cryptographic messages of early modern scientists like Newton and Hooke, he encoded the strip's punchline as an anagram: "12t10o8e7a6l6n6u5i5s5d5h5y3I3r3fbbwwkcmvg", meaning that there are 12 't's, 10 'o's, etc. He left it to his readers to decode the scripts and offered prizes for the first person to return the correct punchline. That was over a week ago.

So far no one has solved it. It's like Excalibur. Or the Riemann hypothesis.

Realizing that his "qwantzle" is challenging, Ryan has been slowly giving out clues. So far, this is all we know:

The solution is a single, reasonably grammatical sentence that fits the context of the strip. It begins with the word "I", contains a colon and a comma (in that order), and ends with a double exclamation mark!!
Letters in the solution are capitalized as in the code, and there are no proper nouns; thus, combined with the first clue, all instances of capital I must be the word "I".
All words in the solution have been used previously in Dinosaur Comics. (DC is searchable, and readers have put together a dictionary of all possible words. My untrimmed dictionary has 14,000 unique words.)
The longest word in the puzzle has 11 letters, and the next-longest word has 8; these words appear sequentially in the solution.
[RN recently posted a final clue: the largest word is 'fundamental'. It helps, I suppose, but I think most people had already guessed that, and in any case the search space is still obscenely large!]

Even with the clues, qwantzle is maddeningly hard. Naively, there are 97! letter combinations, and even if you incorporate all of the hints the number of possible word combinations is staggering—far too many for a computer to enumerate. So there's a small community of readers working on heuristic approaches to the problem, trying to combine human intuition with brute-force computational strength. But so far, most solutions (interestingly, readers have submitted many grammatical sentences that meet the criteria, but none of them has been correct) have come simply by guess-and-check.

I won't lie: I've spent more time than I care to admit on qwantzle. I've taught myself a new programming language and spent a few idle hours crash-coursing on computational linguistics. To show for it, I've developed two approaches that I thought were clever. One takes a valid solution, randomly deletes a few words, and forms a new anagram with the deleted words; this gives you a way to automatically explore variations on a solution that you think might be pretty close. The other performs a genetic algorithm on letter ordering alone. The letter orderings are ranked according to how well they correlate with DC dialogue, randomly mutated and crossed over, and made to compete in a pseudo-Darwinian process intended to improve the overall quality of the solutions.

But, despite (what I consider) reasonable creativity, these approaches don't work all that well. They WILL spit out technically valid solutions, but they aren't terribly grammatical. My next step should be to include natural language processing techniques—NLP is a new field with surprising success at computationally characterizing language as it is spoken and written—but I'm having a hard time being optimistic. In general, computers are far inferior to human brains at pattern recognition, and I struggle to believe that a computer could be made to recognize the right answer even if it found it.

I'm certainly on the lookout for new solution ideas, of course. But I think that the problem will remain unsolved until Ryan North finally gives out enough clues—at which time it will be solved by a human brain performing (computer-aided) guess-and-check.

[Note: I originally mistyped the anagram, so if any of you were working on the puzzle using my copy—and I hope you weren't—I'm very sorry and it's fixed now!]

Meta-post

2010-02-15T22:01:00.003-06:00

You probably noticed: I didn't do it. It turns out I picked a pretty poor week (maybe the week of your birthday celebration(s) isn't the best one for a challenge of creativity) for daily blogging, and I greatly underestimated how much effort it would take to write a post every day. Perhaps you noticed that I posted the entries just before midnight, or that I edited them significantly the next day, or that I had a hard time simultaneously keeping up with multiple threads of comments while writing the next day's post. I didn't run out of things to say--I have a post or two waiting in the wings--but rather struggled to get the ideas adequately expressed. Finally, on Thursday I just didn't get it done. Originally I intended to pick up and not let it deter me from finishing out strong for the rest of the week, but once you've failed at your goal, it's hard not to give up now. So I did.

Failures aside, it was a useful experiment. Although I ultimately succumbed to the pressure, I managed to write my way through a few complex posts in much shorter time than I usually would. I now also see the value in a few days' wait between posts. It takes a day or two for people to see the post, decide what they don't like about it, and respond; it takes a further day or two for arguments and counter-arguments to converge. A new post's arrival simply stifles the process.

So: where to go from here? Inspired by Marie and Gareth's suggestions, I'll try to occasionally post shorter, lighter, even more superficial posts. Although it's quite difficult for me, probably I can share a thought or an idea or an experience without picking its bones clean with over-analysis.

Finally, inspired by Grant's suggestion, I want to spend some time writing a series of introductory articles to particularly important (or interesting) mathematical ideas. Consider it a sort of "greatest hits" of mathematics, with an emphasis on accessibility to the lay person--sacrificing precision for intuition. Such posts will likely take a good chunk of effort from me, so I probably won't do it unless there's sufficient interest. Thus I ask: is there sufficient interest?

Je pense, donc je suis

2010-02-10T23:24:00.018-06:00

Every modern scientist owes an intellectual debt to René Descartes. In addition to his mathematical contributions--Descartes invented the coordinate axes and made early contributions to calculus--his philosophy instigated the rationalist movement, which arguably forms the basis of the scientific method. Though a Catholic, Descartes' philosophy was founded on ultimate skepticism. Sense experience is subjective and therefore unreliable, he argued, so everything is open to doubt until it can be proven logically. He posited that for all he knew an "evil genius" was manipulating his sensory input, constructing a false reality. His only given (either an axiom or a tautology depending on your perspective) was his famous pronouncement "I think, therefore I am". He (ostensibly) constructed his entire philosophy from this single premise, eliminating the possibility of the evil genius and logically establishing the existence of God.

'Ostensibly', of course, is the key word. I have to give Descartes credit, as his efforts at radical doubt were seminal, but by modern standards he was a lightweight skeptic. His proof for the existence of God is essentially an elaborate repressing of Anselm's ontological argument. Put very simply, Descartes' argument goes as follows: I can imagine a perfect, benevolent God; something cannot come from nothing, but since I am imperfect, the idea of a perfect God cannot come from within me; thus the idea must come from something perfect; that something is God. Regardless of your theological loyalties, this argument is not terribly convincing. It's not at all obvious, for example--and Descartes leaves it unproven--that an imperfect being cannot conceive of something perfect. Yet Descartes rejected critics' arguments and maintained throughout his life that his proof was complete.

Descartes was no fool; in fact, I'm convinced that he was highly intelligent as well as fully sincere in his philosophical quest. In spite of his extreme efforts at skepticism, however, he ended up more fully convinced of his convictions even though the evidence was far short of watertight. His goal was to discard everything he couldn't justify logically, but he ended up unilaterally embracing a logically unprovable proposition. I have no quarrel with Descartes' beliefs, but it's disheartening to see a brilliant and sincerely skeptical man peg his philosophy to a facile, credulous argument simply because it confirms his preconceptions.

Descartes' example highlights a worrying reality: smart people rationalize their preconceptions just like the rest of us. In fact, they may be even worse about it. Intelligence and education can encourage us to be honest with ourselves, but just as often they provide us merely with the sophistry we need to talk ourselves into believing whatever we choose. Every think tank with an innocuous name and a viciously partisan agenda testifies to the fact that, with enough intellectual effort, we can study ourselves into whatever ideological corner we prefer. It's a sobering thought, one that should give us particular pause in our religious and political affairs where intransigence so often prevails. I'm not arguing that we can't believe in anything, of course--I'm nobody's nihilist--but we must be careful with the arguments we accept for belief, ensuring that we don't simply follow tortured intellectual paths because they lead to the conclusion we wanted all along. Our instinct is to confirm our biases, and intelligence and education are not enough to counter it; only sustained, self-skeptical honesty can successfully keep it in check.

B sides

2010-02-09T23:30:00.015-06:00

When I read an article online, I usually spend about twice as long reading the comments section as I do the original article. Partially this is because the sheer bulk of comments--nonsensical or otherwise--easily outweighs that of the article. But mostly I'm fascinated to read other people's arguments--again, nonsensical or otherwise--particularly when the parent article is an opinion piece or somehow controversial. An article, no matter how nuanced or multifaceted its arguments, is almost always a single monologue from a single writer's perspective, and I'm convinced that I learn more from the interdependent swarm of commenters who respond not only to the original article, but to each other's arguments.

I feel the same way about this blog: I think my most concise, coherent writing has actually been in response to your comments, since I have another person's ideas to (a) offer an alternative perspective and (b) give concrete objections on which to focus my thoughts. They're like B-sides: not as polished and audience-friendly as the featured tune, but often a better look into the artist's soul.

Based on the preceding, I've constructed a method for evaluating the quality of a website: instead of trying to judge the content directly, it's easier and more accurate to judge the quality of the discussion it generates. A site that inspires misspelled, all-caps ranting is likely to serve up marginal content, whereas comments thread with meaningful debate usually appear on sites with quality material. "Meaningful debate" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I've decided to rank five corners of the web according to this criteria, from worst to best:

5. Youtube

Youtube comments are perhaps the only compelling argument I've ever heard in favor of voluntary extinction. It's been argued (persuasively, I say) that it's impossible to post a comment on YouTube so stupid that people realize that you're kidding. Spelling and grammar are nonexistent, and any disagreement devolves immediately into name-calling. My only consolation is the assumption that mostly teenagers have the time and temperament to watch videos all day. Oh, I hope.

4. Ordinary news outlets (CNN, NYT, MSNBC)

Comments here aren't terrible. By the mass-appeal nature and easy controversy of news sites, comments tend towards angry posts telling people to "wake up" and "stop drinking kool-aid". But there are usually enough calm, reasonable comments to steady my wavering faith in humanity.

3. Online "magazines" (Slate, The Economist, etc.)

Comments here are often quite good. Magazines tend to cater to a somewhat niche audience--often a particular portion of the political spectrum--and the general readership is well-informed, articulate, and capable of quality debate. The biggest drawback is homogeneity: the vast majority of commenters comes from the appropriate political niche, and so the minority opposition feels the need to comment both loudly and inarticulately. Reading comments on Slate (respectively The Economist) therefore gives the impression that conservatives (respectively Keynesians) are ignorant screamers, which isn't good for leveling one's biases.

2. AV Club

The Onion's sister site is not a joke, but its commenters are very, very funny. They are also mean, crude, and pretentious. Funny trumps nice, however (and anyways, AV Club posters expect to be ridiculed--it's an understood part of the fun), so I give the AV Club a hearty recommendation.

1. Wikipedia

Whenever I encounter a Wikipedia naysayer, I invite them to check out the talk pages behind the articles they read. First, the comments there are the best possible way to discern the quality of an article--of course there are bad articles on Wikipedia, but an article with lots of discussion has probably been pored over, its content verified, and its controversial sections moderated by compromise. Second, talk page debates are fascinating examples of quality argument. While debates occasionally degenerate into personal attacks and edit wars, contributers--for no compensation other than (semi-)professional pride--typically succeed in finding common ground, achieving consensus, and turning out a reasonable article. It's a soul-sustaining specimen of human dignity.

Conclusion and obvious subtext: comments here are encouraged!

How wide the divide?

2010-02-08T22:37:00.020-06:00

[Note: yes, I changed the title on this post. I actually thought of this title last night, but I couldn't remember it when it came time to actually post. So the original title went in as a placeholder until inspiration re-struck.]

So, it turns out that I get made fun of sometimes, which probably comes as no surprise to most of you. I'm usually happy to laugh at myself, but often these attacks are unfair and petty--I'll use a word too large for my audience, and ridicule follows (I get it; sometimes people are insecure, and maybe sometimes I'm unintentionally intimidating. I'm sorry about that, and I've even gone to considerable lengths to avoid it, but there's nothing I can do to help your problem; you need learn to believe in yourself, just like the last scene in all movies!). But sometimes the ridicule is justified. Recently I was made fun of by a friend for using a semicolon in a text message. I'm not sure that I feel guilty, exactly, but I have to admit that this act was completely mockable: only a laughably curmudgeonly prescriptivist would go to all that trouble just to avoid a comma splice.

You read correctly: today is the day we talk about prescriptivism!

The prescriptivist/descriptivist debate perennially pits high school-vintage grammar snobs against college-educated linguists. Simply put, prescriptivists argue that a language is a collection of officially-defined words which are ordered into sentences and paragraphs according to standardized rules. In other words, language is defined by its rules, and "correct" usage simply follows those rules. I admit that I harbor prescriptivist leanings. I believe that correct usage increases the precision and concision of language, thus making written communication more effective. I appreciate it when objective pronouns are rendered 'whom', when the subjunctive is used properly, and, yes, when comma splices are mended with a simple semicolon.

[Side note: any grammar or usage mistakes in this post are placed there intentionally. For irony!]

Linguists, who are almost universally descriptivists, point out that prescriptivism is largely a modern phenomenon. Language has evolved continuously ever since its advent, and it's only been in the last few hundred years that, with a high literacy rates and the ubiquity of print, it's even been possible to standardize language. Since rich, complex languages existed before prescriptivist rulesets--the average Roman, for example, didn't run around worrying about the difference between the indicative and imperative moods--the languages must therefore not be defined by such rulesets. You can make a sort of Platonic argument: the true language exists independent of the ruleset, thus the ruleset only approximates the language as actually used.

Despite my prescriptivist bias, I'm forced to accept the logic of the descriptivist argument. On one hand, prescriptivist standardization facilitates communication. On the other hand, descriptivists are obviously right in that language transcends standardization. Pure prescriptivism gives us the boorish grammatical hair-splitter; pure descriptivism gives us teh intertubes.

Given my penchant for reconciling conflicting viewpoints (yes, kids, I'm inviting you to read my thesis; while you're at it, if you could cite it in your academic work, that would really help me out), allow me to postulate some common ground: what prescriptivists and descriptivists really care about is that, rather than just spouting out words, we think about language as we use it. A prescriptivist, I argue, doesn't care so much that I use quotation marks as dictated by the Chicago Manual of Style, but that I pay attention to the issues when making choices with punctuation. A descriptivist doesn't really advocate wildly ungrammatical writing, but simply points out that a consistent definition of 'grammatical' is a chimera. So, I can use "standard" usage to write as precisely as possible, while acknowledging that language is inherently fluid and mutable.

Phew. Problem solved.

Meta-post

2010-02-07T22:53:00.011-06:00

After more than a year of maintaining this blog, I've come to a sad realization: I don't post here often enough. Seven posts in an entire year--no matter how significant I might consider those posts individually--is not many. The issue isn't a lack of material--I have plenty of ideas to write about and opinions to (try to) articulate--but carrying the ideas from the back of my brain to the tips of my fingers increasingly requires far too much effort. Today's post, for example, took days of writing and re-writing, and after all that it still doesn't say quite what I want it to.

I'm not sure exactly why I struggle so much lately, but--along with today's Jungian theme (this post really is meta)--I blame my internal editor, an ever-fattening curmudgeon who blocks the path between my intuitive ideas and the conscious crafting of words. My rational, quasi-perfectionistic mind judges and discards my prose before I get the chance to chew on it.

Therefore, I'm going to conduct an experiment. For the next seven days, I will write one post per day. Probably the posts will be shorter, less polished, and related to shallower topics, but I'll have an opportunity to work on getting ideas on paper quickly. Hopefully it will kick off a trend in more frequent posting, because let's be honest: people want to hear what is inside my brain.

So, I have a request for my meager readership. I believe that I have enough topics to fill seven consecutive days of lightweight blogging, but I'd rather not come up short and have to write a completely superficial post just to make a self-imposed deadline. Thus, I invite you to submit a topic or two about which you would like to see me spout off a few paragraphs. I won't put hard guidelines on the topics, but make them something worth thinking and arguing about. Political topics are acceptable only if there is a meaningful non-partisan component; I'm not interested in becoming anyone's ideologue. Philosophical and/or theological topics earn bonus points.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Archetypical

2010-02-07T22:23:00.009-06:00

[Editor's note/excuse/statement of victory: I haven't used this blog for personal storytelling--if you want to know what's going on day-to-day, try Facebook--but recently I've been distracted by training for, running, and recovering from the Houston Marathon. I thought about writing about it here, but I decided to spare you the treacly life-is-like-my-sport routine and point you to the official photos instead. I'll leave up the 'marathonous' widget for a few more days to give you all one more chance to admire me.

End note. On with the post.]

A few months ago, W. W. Norton published the so-called "Red Book" by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung worked closely with Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, but disagreements eventually led Jung to establish his own school of psychology. Shortly after his break with Freud, Jung began to suffer from major psychoses--voices, hallucinations, and the like--causing Jung to worry that he was going insane. Rather than shunning his episodes or trying to 'cure' them, however, he embraced and even tried to induce them. He viewed his hallucinations as valuable opportunities to become acquainted with his unconscious self, which was necessary to maintain (or recover) his mental health. For sixteen years he kept a detailed record of his hallucinations, transcribing notes and images into a red leather book. After his death, his family kept the book hidden until finally agreeing in 2007 to publish it.

(I promise I'm going somewhere with this. Please hang on.)

Colored by these experiences, Jung developed an unusual theory of psychology. He saw modern man as a victim of too much rational, logical thinking--too much 'consciousness'--which prevented him from realizing his true self. By tapping into the unconscious, letting it rule over the rational mind, a person's true self was realized. In contrast to Freud's 'rational' psychoanalysis, Jung saw psychology as a 'spiritual' (it's not clear--to me, at least--whether or not Jung meant this in a religious sense, or if it was merely figurative) endeavor, and his theories are characterized by a focus on the mystical and metaphysical. So, while Jung made several contributions to modern psychology, his theories are often marginalized as pseudoscientific.

However, the very qualities that render Jungian psychology unscientific simultaneously render it fascinating. The most notable of Jung's theories, for example, is the collective unconscious, the idea that all of humanity shares a common psychic structure that governs our primordial thoughts. To Jung, the commonality of our myths, folklore, and archetypes is due to a deeply-intrenched, genetically heritable psychological framework. In other words, the orphan hero and the wise old sage resonate with us not because George Lucas is a genius (because let's be honest, he isn't! [Cue angry comments.]), but because these characters have been stamped over millennia into our deepest, most immutable subconsciousness.

(Here's where I get to my point!)

Jung may be discredited among psychologists, his ideas useful only as fodder for works of science fiction genius, but I don't care; I'm more interested in the practical aspects of his ideas. While Jung argued that the unconscious mind should rule over the conscious, most of our success comes by doing the opposite. Whenever we overcome a fear, change our habits, or learn a skill, we make a conscious, deliberate effort to alter our unconscious, instinctive selves. This is particularly true for educational efforts: our we consciously struggle with complex ideas until we successfully embed them into our natural intuition.

With that last point comes a dilemma. As my education progresses, my capacity for precise, disciplined, hyperconscious thought improves tremendously. But I feel my creative, impulsive, illogical brain grinding slowly away--not rusting shut with disuse, but being crushed by the weight of ever-present rationality. I love graduate school, don't get me wrong, but as I sharpen my talent for proofmaking and paper writing--in other words, as I expand my rational self--I crowd out vital elements of my mind. I've argued elsewhere that science is not a mechanical process, but one that demands passion and creativity, in which the most valuable ideas spring from the irrational and are then honed under the care of the rational. So I am left with an important question. How do I expand the capacity of my rational mind without squashing the sparks of creativity? How do I go forward in training without neutering the very neuroticism that nurtures the innovation necessary for successful research?

Since it's Christmas...

2009-12-13T18:42:00.014-06:00

Christmas is less than two weeks away, and I have nothing to post about it. Neither news article nor dinosaur comic has inspired me to write, and none of my own Christmas-related thoughts is insightful enough to share. But I love Christmastime too much to let it pass without a mention. As I said last year, I'm convinced that--despite the garish, over-hawked kitsch flowing freely over the festivities--Christmas brings out the best in people. So, lest the season go unheeded, let me share two small items:

1. Christmas music might be my favorite part of the season, and I've spent the last week or so fine-tuning the ultimate Pandora Christmas station. The very worst Christmas music is ostentatious and diva-driven; the very best is still, solemn, and beautiful. In an effort to sift out the chaff, I've seeded the station with a choice blend of 'classical' and contemporary music. I dare you to judge my choices. This year's newfound gem is the warm, hearthy choral work of Vaughan Williams. Although an agnostic, he was devoted to spreading Christmas cheer, writing a fantasia on Christmas carols alongside a ballet score for Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Listen and enjoy, I entreat you.

2. My wife and I can't stomach the idea of Christmas at 75 degrees. So, instead of staying in Texas, we've arranged to be here on Christmas eve. A prediction: best Christmas ever.

I don't want to forget

2009-10-05T23:38:00.011-05:00

Over the past several months, I've been reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" novels. Or, at least, I've been trying to read them. I enjoy reading, and I usually get through new books quickly, but Tolkien has been slow going--sufficiently so that I've had to take a few breaks to read something more digestible. I could postulate reasons for why that's my fault rather than Tolkien's (and I bet a Tolkien fan or two will leave comments to that effect), but hundreds of pages of irregular pacing, half-hearted character development, and improbable dialogue have led me to a more direct conclusion: whatever his other talents, Tolkien just isn't a great writer.

Having said that, however, I have every intention of finishing the series, for a perhaps surprising reason: I've been profoundly affected by the books. Pervading the series is an overwhelming sense of reverence for the past: the men of Gondor look into the distant past to recall their former glory, history and heros are remembered through songs and poems passed generation to generation, and the preeminence of Rivendell is best understood by recognizing that the elves--having unbounded lifespan--are guardians of history all but lost to the rest of Middle Earth. With Tolkien's emphasis on the ancient and almost-forgotten, reading about Middle Earth evokes images of a medieval monastery on an overcast day--old, dark, and almost depressing, but also inspiring and beautiful.

I've become easily impacted by these sorts of emotions (and, correspondingly, increasingly interested in traveling to places where ancientness is on display). I can't completely articulate why this is the case, but allow me to conjecture a partial explanation: my memory now is not the memory I remember. I no longer remember the details of what I read and hear, and the once-precise recollections of my life are beginning to blur. As with Tolkien's writing, I can come up with purely circumstantial reasons--a grown-up, multi-tasked life precludes my giving full attention to anything, ruining any hopes of ambient memorization; and years of scientific training have reinforced a preference for understanding over regurgitation--but the truth is that my memory is losing its former sharpness, and it can only dull with age.

Trivialize it if you like--dismiss it as the idle navel-gazing of someone whose quarter-life crisis is in full swing or the lightweight drivel of someone who's trying too hard at philosophical depth--but this matters to me. It's legitimately tragic, precisely because there is nothing I can do to prevent it. For example, if I want to relive my childhood, I putatively can fire up the NES emulator and play Super Mario Brothers to my ten-year-old heart's content (actually I do this all the time). But it doesn't really work. Sure, every so often I catch a reminiscent whiff of the plastic cases that held our NES cartridges or a glimpse of what the Mushroom Kingdom looked like that first Christmas morning, but mostly I'm just overwriting old memories. Instead of associating Mario Brothers with my childhood home, now I'm just as likely to associate it with one of several college apartments. Similarly, I can re-read books that defined my life as a teenager (I do this a lot, too), but again I'm more likely to reinforce associations with the present than I am to conjure images of the past. The brain supports only a limited number of neural connections, and any gateway to the past becomes increasingly ineffective the more I use it.

It may not matter in any long-term sense whether or not I can remember my childhood Mario exploits or the feeling of reading Dune for the first time, but as I notice my memory fading, I feel like bits of me are slipping away--both without my permission and in spite of my best efforts. Like a small town trying to preserve its way of life against the press of modernity, I feel the need to protect my past from being swallowed up in the present. And as the gloomy, comfortable fog of agnosticism finally sets in, I'm forced to confront a stark reality: as those memories are forgotten, parts of who I am are lost forever. Not merely misplaced or damaged, but irretrievably lost and irreparably destroyed. And there's nothing I can do--nothing that will work, at least. Entropy knocks down all our sandcastles, even the ones we build of ourselves, and none of our noisy efforts at self-preservation can change the outcome.

I say that's a tragedy. If you still don't think it's sad, well, maybe we can't be friends anymore.

Theme and variations

2009-06-30T21:09:00.017-05:00

I recently promised some friends that I'd post the final project from the composition class I took last semester. I figured that my blog-following audience [as well as you lurkers; I know who (most of) you are. If you're going to read, you might as well leave a comment once in a while. Or, if the subject matter doesn't suit you, you can at least send a surrogate.] might be interested to see it, too.

But this... isn't that project. I'm actually quite proud of my work on the final project (a cello concerto), but I left a few things half-finished in order to meet the course deadlines. So, while I finish up the score for the cello concerto, allow me to offer this as a cop-out: my first composition project for the course, a theme and variations for piano.

The requirements were straightforward: one theme plus five "variations" on that theme, lasting in total approximately three minutes, containing at least one key change and one time signature change. I wrote each of the variations in a very different style, and since I believe that context always enhances the listening experience, let me drag you through a little bit of play-by-play analysis:

- Theme: It's... well, it's the theme, presented very simply in unremarkable four-part harmony. It's a little boring, even, but that's sort of the point, to take an ordinary theme on a wild ride through the variations. Plus, it's only thirty seconds; you can make it.

- Variation I: The first variation is a slow, brooding treatment of the theme. I like its atmosphere, but still the presentation is rather uncomplicated.

- Variation II: I lack the contrapuntal mettle to write a full-fledged fugue, but this variation is at least fugue-like. I love Bach's ability to weave passion and intensity into a tightly constructed musical mass; here is my effort at emulation.

- Variation III: Here I'm deliberately imitating the major-scale sappiness of Rachmaninoff. Although this variation was a good exercise in part-writing, it's a little too melodramatic for my tastes.

- Variation IV: I'm most proud of these last two variations, mostly because they exhibit qualities my of own compositional voice: asymmetrical time signatures, lots of dissonance, unapologetic parallel motion, and an emphasis on harmony over melody. And while the fast tempo forces this variation to be over too soon, it's far and away the best 20 seconds of the piece.

- Variation V: The final variation is an attempt to merge Sigur Ros-style ambience with an Eric Whiticare-style approach to harmony. (There's also a Sufjan Stevens reference; five points to the first person to correctly identify it!) I'm pretty happy with the result and its atmospheric minimalism. I won't pretend that there's some grand artistic meaning to my little school project, but I think this variation gives a fitting end to the piece: after folding, spindling, and torturing the theme, we pare it down to its essential elements and lay it to rest.

Below are links to the piece itself (.mp3) and the score (.pdf). Be forewarned: even though there have been great advances recently in electronic music, the mp3 file still came out of Finale's synthesizer. As far as synthesizers go, it's quite good, but don't expect it to sound like the real thing. And since I don't play the piano, a live recording isn't likely to be forthcoming anytime soon. Also: you may need to turn up the volume or use headphones. Finale is a little sissy about volume.

I know it isn't much, but it's something I created from scratch, and something I'm a little bit proud of. Please enjoy (please?):

Score (Finale)

(Sometime tomorrow I will upload the hand-written score, which will immediately make the whole thing at least 17% more bona fide. I'll also try to get Google player embedded into the post. I couldn't get it working, and I believe that blog jukeboxes are moderately evil, so we're stuck with this for now.)

Statuesque

2009-06-09T15:39:00.012-05:00

If you follow the links embedded in my posts (and seriously, you really should; I spend considerable time hunting them down, and furthermore they are awesome), you know that I'm a fan of Bertrand Russell. Although he probably would have mostly thought of himself as a mathematician, he's better remembered now for his skeptical philosophy and quotable one-liners. Over the past several years, a few of his quotes have helped formalize my thoughts in a few areas I already felt strongly about: the value of questioning one's assumptions, the wisdom in acknowledging uncertainty, and the nobility of the scientific endeavor. He's also occasionally forced me to realize that sometimes I sympathize with the skeptic more readily than with the believer.

But as much as I like him, every so often he gets it terribly, terribly wrong. Consider the following:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Sounds innocuous enough, maybe even something I'd support, given my overexuberance for mathematics. But no. As you might imagine, I take no issue with the idea that mathematics possesses truth and beauty--mathematics is all about the truth and beauty (although, if you want to be picky, we have to be careful about what we mean by mathematical truth. But I don't want to be picky.). Instead, my problem is with the "cold and austere" part. Maybe I misunderstand Mr. Russell, but I think he's missed the mark.

Here we go: it's become a cliche to characterize mathematics (and mathematicians) in simultanously dismissing and reverential terms. That is, it's terribly complicated and we could never understand it and it's SO amazing that someone could, in fact, understand it. But it's also so complicated and abstruse that it's entirely disconnected from our real life, so it's ultimately unimportant and irrelevant. By extension, we do the same thing to science in general: regard it as an impressively difficult, but impenetrably tedious task better left to someone else who happens to enjoy the pointlessness. (I could go on about how harmful this idea is, how it's perpetuated by our approach to math and science education, and what it says about us as a people, but I need to get back on point.)

"Cold and austere" only serves to reinforce this idea. It suggests that mathematics, science, and even logic in general are remote and lifeless and alien to everyday existence. That logical, mathematical thought is a robotic, passionless exercise that leads to a boring and unimportant answer. Even more, it misses so much of what logical thought actually is. Your friends, your parents, and even Yann Martel all want you to believe that logic happens in a sterile, Spockian vaccum of emotion and imagination. But they are all wrong. Logic is alive and hot with argument, struggle, and discovery. It requires (not merely permits) imagination, passion, and creativity. And its results have the power to fundamentally alter how we perceive our everyday reality. (I mean this: I dare any of you to learn calculus [or maybe learn about the Cantor set] without suffering an irreversible perceptual shift.)

To be fair, probably I've significantly exaggerated Russell's meaning. Indeed, he certainly knew something of the joys of mathematical exertion. But I still argue that his imagery isolates mathematics from reality, treating it as something to be curated and admired rather than experienced. Mathematics--and logic in general--is less like appreciating a classical statue and more like creating a Jackson Pollock: an effort to find truth and beauty out of instinct and intuition; an unpredictable, even violent process that forges order from the chaos of human thought.

The state secedes

2009-04-19T18:29:00.020-05:00

Yes, yes, yes. I know. It's been "a while". I'm sure you've all missed me. I have excuses: research qualifiers, paper reviews and revisions, recruitment weekend, composition projects, and a well-connected Finnish engineer have all distracted me from serving up rhetorical goodness for my (four or so) devoted fans.

I started a few posts--one on the tragedy of fading memory as it relates to William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" and one on an unfortunate quote by the otherwise-brilliant Bertrand Russell--but I didn't finish them. Those were shaping up to be complicated posts, and it takes me a lot of effort to organize and articulate my thoughts correctly. So, in keeping with my Gaussian approach to this blog, I've scrapped them--at least for the time being.

But today's topic is perfect for the blogger in a hurry. It's stupid, it makes me angry, and it requires only a minimum of analytical horsepower: Texas secession and the anti-tax tea parties.

On Wednesday, while at a tea party rally in Austin, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that if the Federal government didn't start listening to the American people, secession was a real possibility: "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."

First, let's get one thing straight. Texas has no special "secession clause" built into its constitution or treaty of annexation. (Even crackpot secessionists admit this.) It's as mythological as the idea that Texas's state flag is uniquely allowed to be flown at the same height as the U. S. flag (in fact, ANY state flag can be flown at the same height. Perhaps Texas is the only state insecure enough to feel the need.) Texas is no more allowed to peaceably secede than any other state, and that question was settled about twenty years after Texas joined the union.

There's a lot to pick on here: the irresponsibility of a standing governor publicly (even if hypothetically) suggesting secession, the obvious hypocrisy of waving an American flag while calling out for secession, and the absurdity of invoking the Boston Tea Party when you have elected officials in Congress. But this article covers those issues, so I'll leave them alone.

Instead, I want to make a different point, which is one of timing. Why are people suddenly so outraged over governmental excess? We've been engaged in "unsustainable" government spending for several years now, and no one complained nearly this loudly. The primary difference is that now there's a good (although perhaps debatable, but still: most credible economists [sorry, Ron Paul, you don't count] agree that SOME sort of stimulus was necessary) reason for it.

So I'm forced to conclude that a "secondary" difference is the real reason for all the protesting: there's a Democrat in the White House instead of a Republican. In other words, this is mostly an exercise in mob-driven partisanship. Hard-core conservatives are hell-bent on complaining about the new administration, so they decide to rekindle their rage over something that didn't get them all that upset a year ago.

It's frustrating for me as a (nominal) conservative, because it's becoming increasingly difficult to take conservative leadership seriously unless you're a party loyalist (which I'm not). This sort of redneck populism has all the intellectual honesty of an NRA pamphlet, and it appeals to roughly the same audience. Unless their goal is to shore up political capital in the former confederacy, encouraging people to "tea bag" Obama isn't exactly a winning strategy.

Of course, if that is their goal, I guess it works out pretty well for them if the secession movement takes hold. It'll simplify the problem of choosing a presidential candidate.

Who knows what might come out of that?

Inaugural thoughts

2009-01-20T23:49:00.012-06:00

Somehow, Rice is a little more liberal than college campuses that I'm used to, and many classes were rearranged for today's inauguration, which lots of people watched on campus. I joined them, and I'm glad I did. And while I'm surely entering blog-cliche-land by doing this, here are a few scattered thoughts:

I enjoyed the quartet performed just before the oath of office. I rarely think of John Williams as a great composer, even for films (he's tall on simple, brassy bombast and short on subtlety; for my film-scoring money, Thomas Newman is your man), and I'm required as a cellist to remind you that Yo-Yo Ma is overrated (but I like him anyways: he's a superb--but probably not the greatest--classical cellist, and I appreciate his efforts to transcend genres and spread awareness of great music). Other than the fact that the clarinet part seemed to exist only to channel (or rip off) Aaron Copland, it was a great little piece that perfectly matched the tone of the inauguration. It was somber and occasionally dissonant, it had the (again) Copland-esque wide-openness that's uniquely American, and it had moments of genuinely exciting intricacy (right after the clarinet introduces the "Simple Gifts" theme). I was pleasantly surprised, and they did well to class it up after Aretha Franklin's over-divaed "My Country 'Tis of Thee".

I was bothered by commentators' frequent attemps to turn Obama's election into the culmination of the civil rights movement. I doubt that anyone honestly believes that Obama's election marks the eradication of our nation's racial difficulties, and conversely I don't think the goal of the civil rights movement has ever been to elect a black president. I realize that his victory is an important token of how far things have progressed, and I think it's entirely appropriate that the inauguration should occur the day after MLK day, but it's simply inaccurate to speak as though the problem is finally solved.

If you watched the inauguration, you probably noticed that Obama and John Roberts stumbled a bit on the oath of office. I did a little digging, comparing the transcript of what was spoken to the oath as specified in the Constitution. It appears that Roberts made the initial error and prompted Obama incorrectly, tripping Obama up (perhaps he recognized the mistake; he's likely been looking forward to taking the oath for a while) until Roberts corrected the mistake. Interestingly, though, Obama eventually repeated the first (and incorrect) prompt given to him. So if you're starving for another constitutional conspiracy theory to throw at the president, you can complain that he never properly took the oath of office...

And that brings me to my last point:

I'm optimistic about Obama's presidency. I didn't vote for Obama, and he almost certainly will enact policies that I disagree with, but I've spent time sticking up for him among conservatives. Maybe I've been brainwashed by all the Facebook and the YouTube and the Google, but I think the goodwill we've seen towards him is well-founded. I believe he is both intelligent and intellectually honest: despite his far-left record, he's shown moderation, pragmatism, and a cool head since his election, hardly the hallmark of a closed-minded ideologue. I believe that his bipartisanship is more than lofty rhetoric: he has repeatedly sought the advice of his rivals. And I've come around to the idea that these principles--intellectual honesty, restraint, and moderation--are more important than ideological compatibility. The time for shrill cries of "terrorist" and "radical socialist" is over and, in all honesty, never was here. The incoming administration will undoubtedly have its deep flaws, but it's been a long time since we've had the opportunity to let ideological loyalties take a secondary role and unite in optimism for our nation. Maybe we'll end up disappointed by yet another career politician whose campaign message was only rhetoric. But I think that now's a unique opportunity to take a chance, give the benefit of the doubt, and offer hope for the country.

Dumb enough to think it's important

2009-01-01T21:21:00.012-06:00

Whatever my shortcomings, I'm an honest person. Honest to a fault, perhaps. I'm usually undiplomatically blunt, flattery makes me uncomfortable, and I'm awkward when social circumstances prevent me from speaking my mind directly. But, for all its drawbacks, I'm passionate about honesty, particularly intellectual honesty. By that I mean that a person should admit his biases, honestly strive to understand and appreciate opposing arguments, and readily acknowledge that he is often wrong. Intellectual honesty is an honesty with oneself, an aim that should supersede ideological loyalties and personal allegiances. Anything less diminishes our epistemological autonomy, which is (I submit) the fundamental ingredient of being human.

As a result, I hate the assumption--which is nearly ubiquitous in political debate--that your opponent disagrees with you because he is uninformed, deceived, or somehow morally deficient. It's the nasty stuff of partisanship. It drives the meta-partisan venom of Ann Coulter and the shrill pedantry of Keith Olbermann. It leads a person to believe that his party is the party of facts and logic and the lone defender of goodness and decency. It makes us believe that if only our opponents were a little smarter or had our possession of the facts, they would obviously agree with us. It reinforces the idea that political opponents are the enemy, encouraging a person to describe his opponents in cheap caricature: Republicans are portrayed as selfish rednecks while Democrats become lazy entitlement-seekers.

I find such a mindset more harmful than just about any political position. It encourages divisiveness and prevents us from understanding one another. But it also obscures one of the few reliable truths in politics: everything, no matter how well thought out, has its downside. Nearly all political positions involve a compromise of principles.

At its best, socialism (I use the term loosely, both for simplicity and to dilute the stigma unfairly attached to it) encourages compassion, protects the disadvantaged, and discourages materialism. At its worst, it promotes laziness and mediocrity. I think that's precisely why artists, writers, and academics typically lean left. It's not because they're naive or don't live in the 'real world' (whatever the hell that means). It's because--as evidenced by their career choices--they're motivated by something other than material gain.

At its best, capitalism (again, used loosely for similar reasons) promotes self-reliance, industry, and the value of excellence. At its worst, it promotes greed, selfishness, and the exploitation of the weak. That's why businessmen and entrepreneurs tend to lean right. It's not fair to assume that they're too selfish to care about the disadvantaged. Instead, they think financial reward is the best possible incentive to help people realize noble ambitions.

(Of course I'm being a little too nice. I'm aware that there do exist troglodytic conservatives and dole-bludging liberals. But the point is that it's better to assume good faith than to uniformly paint your opponents with a caricatured brush.)

Personally, I tend to lean right, especially on fiscal matters. But I'm not trying advocate a particular ideology, even mine. Instead, the point I want to bring home is that a person can be just as smart, decent, and well-informed as you and still espouse an entirely different political ideology. I do believe in absolute truth. I just don't think we encounter it very often. And almost surely we do not encounter it in the political arena.

For goodness' sake

2008-12-09T08:59:00.005-06:00

As my wife will tell you, I love Christmas time. I love the little-kid nostalgia, cold weather, Christmas music, even the occasional trip to an over-crowded mall. I'm convinced that fir trees and Christmas lights generate palpable joy and good cheer that bring out the best in humanity.

But, good cheer or no, it wouldn't be the holidays without an argument over the secularization of Christmas. I recently found this article describing two Christmas "protests".

The first is a placard placed at a nativity scene in Olympia, WA by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It asserts that religion is a mind-ensnaring myth and (correctly, but trivially) complains that Christmas celebrations intrude on the ancient celebration of the winter solstice. Both the placard itself and its surrounding drama are sufficiently unremarkable that I'll only say this: c'mon, guys, it's solstice time! Don't stomp on people's festivities just so you can make a trite, predictable statement.

The second "protest" is more unusual and much more interesting. In Washington, D.C., the American Humanist Association launched an ad campaign featuring bus posters with the tagline "Why believe in a God? Just be good for goodness' sake". Even though I believe in God, I think there's a wonderful germ of truth to be harvested from these ads. They aren't arguing that people shouldn't believe in God (although I'd wager they tend to believe that). They're saying that there are better reasons to be good than the threat (or reward) of eternal consequences. That you don't need a belief in God to live a happy, moral life. (This last point should be particularly relevant to the believer; we should have better reasons to believe in God than because we think our lives are happier that way).

Humanism gets knocked around in religious circles because of its agnostic associations, but I imagine that if you asked a humanist, he'd cite this idea--rather than agnosticism--as the fundamental unit of humanism. That each of us has a innate spark that drives us towards goodness and greatness. That we reach a purer form of goodness when we do more than just respond to the threat of punishment or promise of reward. And I'm convinced it's an idea that even--or especially--the God-fearing can adopt as their own.

Peaceable assembly

2008-11-30T21:17:00.007-06:00

Today's topic is sufficiently controversial that I feel the need for a disclaimer. My goal is to (forcefully, perhaps) speak my mind, not to insult people. I realize that many reading this strongly disagree with my position. Please believe me when I say that I do not intend to offend.

If you're LDS--in California or not--you probably were looking forward to election day as the end of the Proposition 8 wars. Sadly, you were mistaken: Prop. 8 is as contentious now as it has ever been. People are already calling for its repeal, and protests against its supporters--particularly the LDS church--have increased in frequency and severity. In response, the LDS community is largely crying foul, claiming that the protests are tantamount to religious persecution.

Blunty put, I disagree. It makes perfect sense for the 'No on 8' community to focus their protests on the LDS church. Further, rather than treating protesters as religious persecutors, LDS members need to show them proper respect--in spite of their deep ideological differences.

[Disclaimer 2: I didn't support Prop. 8, and I wish that the church hadn't gotten so involved. But I maintain that this doesn't compromise my commitment to the LDS faith. It's quite possible (and usually the right answer, if you ask me) to disagree with a particular lifestyle choice without supporting a constitutional amendment restricting the expression of that lifestyle.]

I'll argue my second point first. People have every right to protest whomever they want, for whatever reason they want, as long as they do so peacefully. Same-sex marriage advocates have every right to protest around LDS temples and boycott businesses owned by church members. That's not exactly groundbreakingly insightful, of course, so I'll go further: LDS members need to respect the legitimacy of their perspective. You might wish they wouldn't protest against the LDS faith in particular, or you might even wish that they would agree with you on this controversial issue. But none of that should stop you from respecting the fact that same-sex marriage supporters feel just as strongly about their convictions as you do about yours. You could even admire them--at least a little--for standing up for what they believe in.

I concede that it would help if the 'No on 8' crowd showed more respect. Surely they can oppose the policy of the LDS church while still respecting its beliefs. (I saw a photo of a protester, for example, whose sign went something like "Keep your magic underwear out of our bedrooms", which is needlessly insulting.) It's also insulting that Prop. 8 supporters have been painted by default with the "homophobic" brush. I know plenty of Prop. 8 supporters, and they simply aren't homophobes. In spite of all this, however, LDS members should still show respect--even if the favor isn't returned.

(Disclaimer 3: I don't in any way condone or advise respect towards those who have damaged property or made threatening statements in their protests. Neither should same-sex marriage advocates. As far as I'm aware, though, such protests are the exception. And at least one 'No on 8' group has spoken up against them.)

Now I'll address the claim that the LDS church has been unfairly singled out for protest. The usual argument is that the LDS church is only one of many religious groups endorsing Prop. 8, and that African-Americans and Hispanics overwhelmingly supported the proposition. Why aren't protesters setting up shop outside Catholic masses and black churches?

More bluntness: it's hard for me to see this defense as anything other than ideological cowardice. Where else should protesters go? No one else gave as much money or supported the measure as conspicuously and uniformly. No one else comes close. The Catholic church may have endorsed the measure, but Catholics didn't give the support--in dollars OR votes--that LDS members gave. A solid majority of blacks may have voted for Prop. 8, but they didn't donate significant effort and money to the Prop. 8 cause. It's quite possible, even, that Prop. 8 would have failed without the efforts of the LDS church. So LDS members who fought for Prop. 8 should bloody well stick to their guns and admit that they wielded strong influence in getting Prop. 8 passed. If anything, they should be taking pride in successfully realizing their convictions. Instead, as opposition intensifies, the effort is to spread the "blame" around, which I find cowardly and evasive.

Texas, our Texas

2008-11-26T16:59:00.001-06:00

Texas is a great place to study patriotism gone wrong.

In our Thanksgiving road-tripping, we've seen a few "Texas edition" F-150s and Silverados. As best as I can determine, though, Ford and Chevy don't actually produce Texas edition trucks. It's just a custom decal kit, something you can put on your truck to promote the my-state-can-beat-up-your-state arrogance for which Texas is (justifiably) well-known. And I'll be honest: I'm often convinced that the "everything is bigger in Texas" mentality can only be explained by widespread small-phallus overcompensation. So maybe dealers should put one of these in the glove compartment of each "Texas edition" pickup.

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care...

2008-11-23T20:09:00.008-06:00

Many of you know that I'm usually annoyed at blogs. I mostly see them as a manifestation of the twitchy narcissism of my generation: "I'm so awesome that all of you should read my scattered thoughts!" And, while I won't pretend to be the humblest guy around, I have no desire to be that vain.

Yet here I am, relenting anyways. I have two reasons. First, people occasionally make me angry, especially in this (post-)election season. People (smart people, even) have said all sorts of absurd, childish things that need to be opposed. By me. But since I'm (healthily, I say) ambivalent politically, I've restricted my opine-ings to random sniping on Facebook posts. But that's not enough anymore. I feel the need for a forum in which to air and refine my arguments. Second, my election-season arguing has reminded me of how much I miss argumentative writing. Writing technical articles is fun and all, but the writing is precise, slightly dry, and not sufficiently impassioned to be satisfying viscerally.

So this isn't going to be one of those blogs where I post photos of myself or write amateur poetry. This is a place for me to express myself when I'm too worked up about something (political or otherwise) to remain silent. And, hopefully, a place to enjoy the process. So don't get too offended when you encounter an occasional 'damn' or 'hell'. It's only for emphasis.