The Sage Forge

Following up on Border Bungles from a few weeks ago. I have posted a question on my website homepage. "Is the Bush Administration involved in an effort (the original wording was 'criminal conspiracy') to cripple border enforcement?" It is an intentionally inflammatory question.

See: http://www.pardontheagents.com/ and: http://www.firesociety.com/article/10263/?src=105

Our freedom is not a product of cheap labor.  Had it been so the Old South of the early 20th century, with its legacy of apalling wage rates, would have been a virtual heaven of liberty,  and a business haven. It was no such thing.  Freedom is the fruit of having laws the people insisted their representatives enact enforced- even if they are bad law.  The first step to tyranny is the temptingly logical choice by the elite to ignore the expressed will of the people because they are sure the people are wrong.  How soon is the next step, that the friends of the elite insist on ignoring the law simply to make themselves more profitable?  Are we sure that step has not already been taken in the administration's refusal to respect the people's desire that the borders be enforced?

American democracy is not simply a form of government.  It is an instrument for the reform of culture, a process by which a whole society, by virtue of making the people feel the consequences of their choices, educate the society in self-governance.  The greatest danger to the governance of the whole world is that this great experiment should fall to the hand of an elite convinced that the populus is too stupid to have their choices respected. 

This is the dark specter presented by the administration's contempt for our borders.  One senses that these people trust the private capital oligarchs that are empowered in the elimination of national sovereignty more even than they trust the competitive pressure American government places on the rest of the world when it is operated as designed.  Such is simple foolishness.

The world will not be made a safer place by compromising our governmental values with a nation like Mexico, a place more corrupt and socially stratified even than the antebellum South.  Nor will the world become safer by so empowering the financial elite of China, or the well-dressed hoodlums of Russia.  The British East India Company didn't make the world a better place.  American government has.

Is border enforcement bad law?  Convince us.  Enforce the law.  If that hurts US too much we will cry to change the law.  Otherwise the government just proves their contempt for the American people, and leaves us with the suspicion the whole business is just an arrangement to make friendships among the aristocracy profitable.

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It is hard to know if the writer(s) of Job fully understand(s) what has been set to text.  Indeed it is difficult to tell if MacLeish has more insight himself.  Job, the character, thinks the story is about justice.  Many biblical scholars, in fact, think they detect, in the redemption of Job at the story's end, meddling hands attempting to insert what men would recognise as justice where there may once have been none.

In Job God has permitted the devil to take all that this good man has after having been told the loss of his wealth and health would turn the man against God.  The uncomprehending Job endures all and refuses to "curse God and die", though all his wealth has been destroyed and even his children have been killed.  He does, however, fail to understand how this is just.  He believes, as many do today, that what has been done to him must reflect on some sin in his life.  The book, at least up to the suspected meddling, shows God not to think this to be the case.

Stop here for a moment and think about what this really means.  What Job has had he has thought to be his.  He felt he had a right to an expectation of the continuity of his possession- a kind of economic relationship with the Almighty.  His children were somehow "his".  His things were somehow "his".  Where, he wonders, is the economic reciprocity in the loss of what is "his"?  what "cost" (sin) did he inflict on God?  Search though he might he can't find it.

God sets Job straight (at least up to the meddling).  There is no economic relationship.  In an (all too) roundabout way God lets Job know he is, in effect, a guest.  It's all God's from the foundations of the Earth to the fixing of the lights in the sky.  The kids were God's.  The wealth was God's.

If you think about it most of the problems we have with faith stem from this misunderstanding of Job's.  God has us live where we are now, whether we were in sackcloth or in splendor yesterday.  Your kids?  They are God's.  Your stuff?  It is God's.  The things you can't bear to imagine living through?  They happen all around you.  Your faith means nothing until the moment you are swept up in the unthinkable.  How do you live then?  What do you do then?

Job, though he misunderstood, lived his faith,  In the midst of uncomprehension, with the wise and his beloved jeering at him and giving him up for dead, Job stood up for the faith that seemed to have abandoned him.  Even before the meddling he wins the victory- he sees God face to face.

In a book full of unfathomable wisdom for being so old, a book that never makes a promise of heaven, or even an afterlife, Job sees the fruit of his pain in the presence of God.  At the heart of what may be the oldest monotheistic text on Earth there is a man who understood something very few of us understand today.

If you really believe in God it all belongs to God.  It is His story.  He makes the rules.  Ultimately, it's all between Him and You. 

In the midst of the Unthinkable what will You do.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Well,  when I started the blog I said there would be times when I'd actually have to make a living.

At the moment I'm frantically working on a commission that should have been done last week.  I'll have a photo of it on the regular website later this week.  You know, it's just a crime when one's vocation gets in the way of one's avocation...

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Coercing Generosity

It is said that Rome became a Christian nation when Constantine declared , in about 313 A.D., that it was. That is nonsense. If anyone was headed for the flames of hell on the day before the Edict of Milan the same person was still headed for the same flames on the day after. Nothing in Christian theology allows for collective conversions.

Salvation, and thus the very nature of the Christian faith, is personal and individual. It happens between a person and God.
This simple fact means that what one does to honor God is also individual. If I feel compelled to do good things I honor God to do those things within my own means. If my goals extend beyond my means I can show leadership by enlisting the aid of others so inclined. That permits them to make their own personal commitment to God’s service.

On the other hand Christian service does not permit the coercion or theft of other’s means. It is wrong to rob a neighbor even to feed the poor. It is wrong to leave someone who is inspired to serve God no choice in how their services or resources will be distributed.

Compelling people to do what we think is good is not necessarily evil but at best it is morally neutral. It can never be good. The politician who spends out of your pocket to do what he advertises as good has not demonstrated a Christian commitment.

Much of what has been done in the name of goodness over the last forty years has accomplished things Satan himself could not have hoped for by more direct means. The black family has been devastated. The black father is often little more than a sperm donor. The single greatest predictor of future criminality and poverty for all ethnic groups is welfare’s legacy of single-parent households in communities once dominated by nuclear families. A white baby boy born to an unwed teenage mother is as likely to become a criminal as his minority counterpart.

Government’s prescription for conscripted charity has become hell’s definition of heaven.

Professionals

Government’s usurping of the role of voluntarism in charity tends to have other unchristian effects. It distances us from the difficult realities of service to others and it creates the artifice of "careers" in that service.

As parents of infants we are often on the receiving end of various bodily functions. This is not a horror to us, though. As a kind of sacrificial giving in the service of love this acceptance of something unpleasant has the effect of serving to bond us more closely with our children. We simply can’t idealize our children into some romantic artifice as their reality is running down our shirt.

Such is not the case when we set service away at a safe distance.

When we are insulated from the needy by professional servers we develop an idealized vision of who they are and how their needs should be met. Furthermore we establish a class of people who serve two masters. The professionals’ services are rendered to one group of people but are paid for by another.

Because the professionals have become our proxies in a relationship with the needy, and their livelihood is dependent on our view of the needy, a perverse pressure is placed on the professionals to distort our view of the need.

Professional service carries with it a pressure to enhance the security of the field. The needy can’t provide that security. The artifice of a professional bureaucracy into which we insert people who may or may not have a personal faith commitment to the original goal of service can, as a result, impede the accomplishment of that goal.

We and the needy are served better to find and fund people committed to servicing the needs they see regardless of the insecurity to which their efforts expose them. Government does not do this sort of thing well.

Establishing a Religion

Mr. McNeely’s articles reveal a man who seems an unlikely candidate for overtly eliminating the Constitution’s prohibition against the establishment of a state religion. It is difficult, however, to see how the establishment of mandatory public charity in areas outside of public health and education is not the exercise of a religious sensibility.

We do not require that this service reduce poverty in poor communities. By the most recent measures it has not. Yet we continue the vast transfer of resources that shows no tangible positive results. These services are an act of faith. The fact that people would defend the services by couching their argument in religious terms unmasks the blatantly religious foundations of the national church.

One can demonstrate that the groups most supportive of this national religion are the same groups who demonstrate the greatest hostility to the religions that most effectively compete with it. Not only do these groups resist permitting the government to provide funding to effective faith-based charitable organizations they are actively hostile to the free exercise of the religious principles on which they are founded.

This debate is not over whether a religious sensibility will drive our efforts to do good with the government. Religions are only conceptions about the source and meaning of life. Even those who pretend to themselves not to have a religion are driven by such sensibilities. They are inescapable. The debate is over whether we will permit one of those sets of sensibilities to use the power of government to dominate, and ultimately to suppress, the others.

Call it Secular Humanism or Political Correctness, over the last forty years we have slowly given the government the power to do just that.

Lee Jamison can be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com

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Human beings are self-aware.  We not only ponder subjects such as our own existence and the nature of our finitude, we ponder our consideration of those subjects. To come to grips with the nature of these explorations we establish concepts to help us bridge the gaps between what is ponderable and what is knowable.

Such mental work starts with our earliest experiences, even with experience prior to birth.  We have experiences.  We seek to orient our minds to those experiences.  To do so we develop cognitive structures that allow us to order our responses to sensory experience.  Because we are social creatures some of these response/cognition structures are adapted to communication.  We can share our adaptations to novelty and help others to develop cognitive structures analogous to those we have created for ourselves.  Two major communication processes function to do this, the highly fragmented, symbolic, linguistic method, and the more fluid, but less tangible, inductive-artistic method.

For any Theory of Art to make sense it must be a part of a larger theory of human cognition.  To do that one must address both internal and external cognitive motivations.  For that reason I have put quite a bit of effort into illustrating the importance of the cognitive structures of human awareness, what I have called in earlier entries "mental models".  In as much as my own conception of the whole picture of this overarching idea is still developing, this is not yet a formal paper presenting a complete theory of both Art and human cognition.  It does, however, represent more than a rough sketch of the shape of the concept.

This will take a while.  It won't all be done today.

If one wants to teach a child how to hammer a nail into a block of wood it is possible to do so with language alone.  Alternatively one may simply demonstrate and, by careful steps, assist the child in those first efforts.  Experience tells us demonstration and personal assistance convey the necessary information more efficiently than language alone. 

Invariably, in a text intended to convey similar knowledge the author will utilize graphic representations to augment the text.  In the absense of being present with the student this is the next best thing to the sort of fluid, interactive presentation permitted by actual personal contact.  Language, while effective at conveying precise packets of information in a manner which can be easily repeated, is so fragmented that it fails to easily communicate all the necessary nuances of a complex experience.  As the Chinese proverb says " A picture is worth a thousand words."

In the process of self-conscious consideration of an idea humans, as visually oriented creatures, will often do the same sort of graphic representation to capture the "essence" of an idea.  Alternatively we may simply use imagery to give ourselves a better grounding in the consequences of moving from one step in the evolution of an idea to another and another.  All of these actions designate the use of a representative process more fluid than is possible with the broken quanta of language to assist in the development of cognitive structures by which we may comprehend our environment.  This use of graphic imagery is not generally considered to be "art", but the nature of its functioning leads directly to use as art.

The same fluidity of expression made possible by graphic presentation of tangible information becomes all the more important in dealing with information of such intangibles as emotional states and internal self-consideration.  In the social context of human communities the use of graphic representation establishes within individuals cognitive structures (programming) capable of interpreting such representations.  These can be extended as individuals explore and expand the expressive capacity of the programs with more adventurous graphic efforts. (In this context I am lumping three-dimensional objects and two-dimensional graphics together for the purposes of the discussion.)  This logical extention is recognized within a connected community, which extends the program for all the members.

The process of extending cognitive programming is a vital part of human adaptation.  This is particularly so for children, who will expend tremendous effort in processes that recognize the establishment of skills (program extentions) with some reward.  We can see this in games, interpersonal play, and in self-directed exploration.  The human brain is designed to reward itself for the creation of cognitive structures the brain itself finds useful.  These structures may be of vital importance in dealing with the environment, but they may also have more nebulous internal significance.  Such would seem to be the case for a capacity for self-examination, for example.

To close today's consideration, then we have arrived at the point where the brain, in the course of its natural rewarding of development of cognitive structures, rewards the development of structures that examine the internal emotive state of the brain itself, and, by extention, may consciously examine the emotive states of others within the community.  In the process it engages the mechanisms of graphic representation as a part of both internal self-representation and interpersonal communication.  Apprehension of the information conveyed in this representation assists others in extending their cognitive model (program), for which they, too, receive a reward from their brain.

This I will call an Aesthetic response or reward.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Perspective is all-important in understanding a new approach to an old, but intractable, problem.  It is well to remember the lesson of Gallileo's education of the Pope.  From his own perspective it was so obvious he was correct that in writing his "Dialogue" on the motion of the planets he made out the character supporting the Ptolemaic position to be an obvious fool.  This didn't play well with the Church and earned the scholar a life of house arrest.  It probably also meant his ideas waited an extra generation to be accepted.

If one is going to be right it is a good idea to be civil about it.

Yesterday I discussed the problems I have with Art Theory as revealed by the writing of a young philosopher well versed in the "best" ideas of the early part of this decade.  What one finds in Micah Sparacio's paper- "The Artcore: Aesthetic Scaffolding and its Disjuncts" http://astro.temple.edu/~sparacio/artcore.html  is a well planned, well thought out, well constructed conceptual edifice.  It fails, however, to explain art.

As I said at the time this is not Sparacio's fault.  It is the fault of the whole field of Aesthetics/Philosophy of Art and the practitioners thereof.  As a college boy Aesthetics struck me as little more than a theology of Modern Art.  There were ad-hoc assertions such as 'there can be no art associated with smell' which seemed stupid to me then- and have not improved with age.  Additionally, we were immersed in such unverifiable metaphysics as Clive Bell's immortal "Significant Form".  (See: http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r13.html )  The whole field was fraught with statements only loosely connected to the art it meant to explain and often connected to the beings from which art emanated not at all.

Bell's assertion is a good example.  Art has a significance in and of itself that we somehow detect.  In an earlier age it would have been deemed a kind of holyness.  Art was, in a way, transcendent.  Bell does not require that art's significance be totally independent of human perception, but he ventures close to the flame.  In doing this he fails as art theorists have failed in every age.  He seeks to find a rationale for our aesthetic response to what is essentially a local phenomenon- art as we self-consciously know it.

Art, and in a larger manner, the aesthetic sense is not a local phenomenon, though.  It has a range beyond our personal horizons.  Strangely, we are able to recognize it when we see what came from beyond that edge of the known world.  This is the reason the young Mister Sparacio has something to write about.  Art is virtually universal among human cultures.  Among those divergent cultures it takes widely divergent forms.  If we formulate a theory of art that explains to some satisfaction the work of the Minimalists, as we see those works, the same theory would probably have no application at all the the art of seventeenth century Chinese landscape painters.  Still, we recognize both sorts of creation as "Art".

Bell places the significance in the form of the work, and in so doing drifts dangerously close to giving inanimate objects something akin to a 'soul'.  Though more than six decades separated us from Bell's writing on Significant Form as I took my Aesthetics coursework the field had advanced little in the time since.  The significance of Art somehow remained in the objects themselves.  To the best of my current understanding this appears to be the case today as well.  It was from this singular feature that my mind flew in the late seventies.  At the time I had no theoretical foundation from which to form a compelling alternative theory, but I knew where the foundations of that theory would have to be built.

It would have to come from cognitive sciences.

In yesterday's discussion I brought up the matter of the aesthetic apprehension of natural objects.  In my family home natural objects such as rocks and pieces of driftwood were displayed for their aesthetic value alone.  This blurring of the line between art objects and natural objects (The natural object, purposely taken out of context and presented as an aesthetic object, becomes a work of art.)   This is a challenge to most prevailing understandings of Art.  But there are other, more serious challenges.

In the sciences there is a term, "beauty" which refers to the conceptual power or authority of an idea or theory.  This is what Gallileo was up against in his attempt to explain his theory of the motions of the planets.  The planets, including the Earth, rotating around the Sun simply and beautifully explained the motion of the planets against what had once been thought to be the sphere of the heavens, however terrifyingly it magnified the size of the creation.

Einstein spoke of the same beauty in his utter confidence at the correctness of his General Theory of Relativity.  This sort of beauty has, in the sciences and Aesthetics alike, been described as being different from the beauty of art or aesthetic appreciation.  Is it really different, though?

The discussion yesterday also spoke to the matter of conceptual models.  Both of the scientific theories mentioned above are conceptual models.  Utilizing them to comprehend events happening in the larger world, the world outside our heads, helps to bring the picture we have of that larger world inside our heads in line with the behavior of the real larger world.  My personal experience at such realignments of my conception of the universe is that these moments are psychologically powerful aesthetic experiences.

Also as I was a college student I served as a student assistant at the Meadows Museum of Art on the campus of Centenary College of Louisiana.  There I worked with the Despujols Collection of paintings of French Indo-China, a series of paintings by the classically trained French artist Jean Despujols.  The experience, as a painter-in-training, of seeing these works is difficult to describe.  As I learned how to accomplish some skill in painting I would recognize his accomplishment of the same thing.  Seldom was I able to see techniques for what they were far in advance of my capacity to accomplish the same skill.  The fact of the matter is that most people would not be able to recognize the techniques at all.  They would simply see these paintings as a kind of impenetrable sorcery in paint.

With each advance as I developed greater understanding of the skills of painting I would experience a new aesthetic epiphany at seeing Monsieur Despujol's work.  As I developed a more sophisticated model for applying paint to make more effective images, and that new "software" became part of what generated awareness in my personal experience, I would have an aesthetic reward.  My world had become larger.  Not only would I sense a larger cognitive world, my consciousness would be literally expanded.

This has been part and parcel of my experience as an artist.  As I learned how to DO what I could see my experience of seeing itself changed.  I not only saw, I experienced HOW I saw.  The experience of greater scientific understanding is not substantially different.  I not only know, I know HOW I know.  This expansion of comprehension is the seat of aesthetic awareness.  it is all the product of the mind being able to plug our worldly witness into a more sophisticated modelling of that world.

Tomorrow I will try to talk to that process a little more deeply.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

From time to time I commit a terrible error and actually read someone's theory of art.  What is amazing to me is how undisicplined such thought can be even among minds which presumably have some of the training in the keys to understanding.  If you wish you can take a little time to see a case in point in the writings of a young philosopher named Micah Sparacio:

http://astro.temple.edu/~sparacio/artcore.html

These are the musings of a graduate student in Philosophy at a very good school on the nature of art.  Given the other areas of his philosophical study, philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence, he should have the foundations of understanding.  He is, none the less, clueless.  This is not to his discredit.  His teachers and the whole philosophical world, as far as I can see, are likewise clueless.

What the young Mister Sparacio seeks to explain is the fact that art can often be understood across widely divergent cultures.  From this he extends the notion that there is a central concept of art he calls the "artcore" that is universal among cultures.  Sadly he, and those from whom he gets his sense of direction, have it all wrong.

If we are really serious about understanding art let us ask ourselves a key question.  Is there a realm beyond which art ceases to be art?  In fact there is.  Beyond the human mind we can't be at all sure any form of sentience can recognise what we humans see as art as art.  Some great apes raised among humans have created art-like expressions on a level analogous to that of a young child.  Those examples invariably resulted from some prodding by their human hosts, however.  The conceptual foundations of their apprehension of these objects can hardly be separated from their exposure to human culture.  There is no unequivocal example of other animal forms spontaneously creating the kind of symbolic and totemic objects humans recognize as art.

This leads me to a blanket statement.  Absent a conceiving or perceiving HUMAN mind there is no art.  In other words the human mind is the medium in which art exists.

I believe this recognizes a simple truth.  The human animal is essentially the same creature regardless of the differences of the cultures in which it is nurtured.  Art is cross-cultural because it derives from the mechanisms we share more than from the cultures by which we are separated. 

An example of this at work can be seen in the fact that many people are prone to perceiving artistic forms in nature.  In the home of my youth, for example, there were hung numerous formal works of art, prints of Picassos, oriental paintings from my grandparent's days as missionaries in Japanese occupied Korea, and the like.  There were also, however, pieces of driftwood hung and appreciated as works of art, and my parents would collect rocks on family vacations which would be displayed for their aesthetic value alone.

This blatantly Oriental sensibility obviously was not beyond the comprehension of Western minds.  Had it been so on cultural grounds my grandparents, who had no contact with Oriental culture until they were in their twenties, could hardly have been sufficiently affected by their exposure to immerse my mother in this form of art-perception as she grew up in America's seeming cultural backwaters of Mississippi and Louisiana.  Nor would it have been possible for my father, whose primary aesthetic exposure prior to meeting my mother was to the wonder of a curveball, to fully internalize this love of any art at all- had art been a primarily cultural imperative.

Douglas R. Hofstadter's work should be intimately familiar to anyone who has had significant graduate study in both the Philosophy of the Mind and in Information Science.  This is one of the frustrations I have with the advance of studies of the mind in the humanities of the last thirty years, now that I am aware of Hofstadter's work. From last week's entry http://leejamison.com/blog4/2007/02/geb_a_lesson_in_humility.html , in which I discussed the foundations of the human mind, one can begin to draw the outlines of a comprehension of how a mind that derives consciousness out of conceptual structures could also become facinated with images and forms suggestive of such conceptual structures.  At its heart this is, in fact, what art is.  It harkens in various ways to the conceptual structures (Those of you wishing to "make room" for the avant gard in art theory listen up!) of our minds, causing them to ring, as it were, as a sharp sound might set the strings of a harp or piano to ringing.  A rock may evoke a model of our ideal place, or it may more purposefully depict an actual person.  Placed apart from humanity in the midst of nature it is, none the less, a rock.  It is the conceptual structures in our mind that accept (or even seek) a conceptual impression in the first instance or that recognize a conceptual expression in the second.

In coming entries I will continue to pursue this train of thought to strengthen the connections between the manner in which higher conceptual modelling make us what we are and how it also creates an imperative for visual, tactile, aural, and emotive expression.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Lee Emmerich Jamison

Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." Well, he said it in French but that's what he meant. How we deal with the singular way humans are that is different from the way we see every other animal being is really quite remarkable. We do seem very different. It’s an important enough point to us one might think we were a little insecure about it. The fact of the matter is, though, that a lot of our behaviors are modeled pretty well in a number of other animals, particularly in chimpanzees. The behavior of small human tribes, or small groups in large tribes (you might call them "cities") is really remarkably like that observed in chimps. These animals and some others, such as dogs and horses, may lead solitary lives but they usually do not. As a matter of fact they seem to derive a tremendous sense of purpose from the communal context of their existence. So, indeed, do we. Is thinking really the essence of being, or is there something to the jostling we experience among these inconvenient other humans that is important to being? Smart as Descartes was, and believe me he gets a lot of credit in that area, was he right?

As a thirteen-year-old sitting in the car window waiting for my parents to get finished with shopping one day I had a sort of epiphany. I had been reading my father's Scientific American magazine on the subject of particle physics and it occurred to me to consider the nature of the existence of a single particle in an otherwise empty space. Parental shopping was probably more interminable in a decade when one could safely leave one's children sitting, elbows on the car roof, in a parking lot. In any event this position gave a lot of time to consider that lonely particle's lot in life. Given the way my mind had framed the issue it didn't take long to understand that the difference between being in the empty frame of reference and not existing at all was pretty slim.

Being involves more than a consideration of being. The particle, all alone in the empty space, experiences nothing. It is irrelevant whether it is traveling or standing still. Space itself has no meaning. The particle has no challenges. It cannot recollect the non-events of the past, nor can it anticipate non-events of the future. If it were sophisticated enough to ponder there would be nothing to goad it into the effort of doing so. That scary scenario is the very essence of the word "annihilation".

Conflict is the key to existence. The particle in a room full of particles has a place. It is revealed by the fact that any other particle trying to be in the same place at the same time is compromised in some way. It has to be slowed by our hero's momentum, bounced away, or in some other way denied that exact spot. All those others also make possible a context beyond the particle’s place. In so doing they define the space around it. The incessant jostling our particle, lets say a molecule of oxygen, experiences at the behest of all its fellows may be inconvenient, but it is also defining and affirming. Others affect it. It experiences its effect on others. If it is sophisticated enough to ponder it now has a reason to ponder.

Mr. Pedigo, my high school writing teacher, used to challenge us to show him the conflict in our work. He had had his leg shot off in the Spanish Civil War and had earned some insight into conflict. (His prosthesis gave him quite a little cachet with starry-eyed teen-aged writers, too.) For a story to be interesting, said he, something had to go wrong. He said there had to be some storm and stress. People had to die. Hard hearted people had to do well, at least a little. The lesson he taught was that, as we played god with our own little worlds, if nothing ever challenged our characters there would be nothing to keep a reader interested in our abominable prose. (Cachet could entice us to put up with a lot.)

I recognized from his teaching that, in some imagined perfect story world, the absence of conflict was an invitation to lonely particle status. A lot of work would be an-nihil-ated. For the work "to be" some witness or witnesses, have to keep bumping, as it were, into it. Welcome to gravity, in a literary sense.

When you remember are the memories of the unencumbered beating of your heart? When you anticipate is it about maintaining your body temperature? Probably not on both counts. Now, for the rest of the day do you think you will be able to remember where you were for the last four minutes? Might it be because something challenged you?

If so you can say "I was jostled into thinking, therefore I am".

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Lee Emmerich Jamison

Very early in my career, when I was still teaching in Shreveport, one of my students caught me off guard with a question. "You can do so many things." she said, "Why did you choose to be an artist?"

I recall being uncomfortable at trying to answer, and taking a moment to understand myself. My reply was unsatisfactory. Indeed I have struggled with it ever since.

I learned much more teaching than I learned learning. One reason for that was that my students at the Barnwell Garden and Art Center were, for the most part, twice my age and more. I "taught" people like Charles Ravenna, my daddy's high school vice principal and Hank Stoer, the pathologist for whom my mama had worked in her twenties as a cytotechnologist for the city's charity hospital. Dr. Stoer went on to become a regionally known artist, and deservedly so. People like these and others kept me well challenged. They were the embodiment of Daddy's wise words to me.

 "You have to know ten times as much to teach as you have to know to do."

What I knew then was that no extended human society has ever existed that did not create art. I also knew that when the creativity expressed in that art falls from its apex it virtually always presages the collapse of a civilization. Art had crept into my mind as a kind of intellectual puzzle. I kept doing art, never feeling particularly brilliant as an artist, because the flame of that puzzle was irresistible.

Consider this. While there were landscape artists before the founding of the United States landscapes had always had to be validated by a human presence of some sort. The very fact that the greatest European tradition of landscape paintings was in the Netherlands proves the point. There the land was literally wrested from the sea by human effort. The human effort involved in the very presence of the land made the landscape worthy of consideration as a subject for art.

Early in the life of this country that changed. A school, or tradition, of artists grew up around a reverence for nature probably influenced by our contact with American Indians. These artists, expressing a uniquely American viewpoint, influenced the way the people of the whole world saw nature.

By the time John Wesley Powell made his explorations of the Grand Canyon in 1869 and again in 1870 people were able to perceive in that wildest of places an almost holy majesty. Photographs of the second expedition and Thomas Moran's early paintings of the West were a worldwide sensation. They helped to define us both to the world and to ourselves as a nation.

This kind of transformation is not unique to landscape. From the plainsong architectural chant of the Taos Pueblo to the geometric sorcery of the Brooklyn Bridge over and over the impact of things we would normally see as emotionally blank are given a kind of life through art. Images of desert vegetation mean something to us as Americans. Log cabins mean something to us as Americans. The meanings of these things are interconnected with our sense of self and our place in the larger world. Starting with people like Thomas Cole and Asher Durand sending their paintings of the Hudson River Valley back to the civilized folk of New York City art did that to us. They painted a picture inside us of being American. We became that picture.

Does this seem "pie in the sky" to you? Taos was nothing before artists taught Americans to value it as beautiful. Woods Hole was the same. People now spend huge prices to buy, and preserve the ambiance of, land that once could have been purchased for pennies an acre. Closer to my home, thirty years ago Houston's now-fashionable Rice Village was drifting toward slum status. Artists and crafts people transformed the area, made it a destination, and now can't afford the rent.

Today I would answer my student's question differently. Artists have it within their grasp to be powerful in ways that can change whole nations from the inside out. They do so by teaching people to see and identify with beauty in places they had not seen it before. Artists can be masters of the vision that tells us who we are. We need not be prisoners of the limited visions of others.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Lee Emmerich Jamison

Thought I'd recycle something from last fall to remind Republicans who think their constituency is among the Washington press for whom they REALLY work.

Conservative voters actually care.

Not so surprising is this, one supposes. Political science paints a picture of a world in which one can preach to the "rabid" political types to gain an office and then run to some Nirvana-like middle ground to actually govern. This image of the political world was fashioned in a universe in which the "rabid" folks were people who wanted the government to take care of all their problems. In point of fact, though, as long as the world didn't fall apart between elections and things did get a little better for them these 'take care of me' people really didn't pay a whole lot of attention. Politics could be a game of marshalling small groups of people to gain incremental advantages in getting what the government could give to the friends of the powerful. The rabid types, in this view of the world, are really kind of scary. One tells them what they want to hear so they will vote. This is good because one can be sure they will not vote for those who occupy the opposite end of the political spectrum.

There is a fly in this soup, though. Political science appears clueless about conservatives.

Conservatives have figured out a little secret about the middle ground so beloved of politicians. It empowers politicians. This is what troubled them about Democrats. The power they had acquired exploiting the pain and insecurity of the needy went primarily into making government big, luxuriant, and safe.  And, oh yeah, it made their friends very rich. 

Republicans gained power by assuring people angry with this imposition on us by our employees that government would become smaller, leaner, more effective with our money, and more responsive to our desires. When they gained the upper hand did they throw a lasso on the government? No. They ran to the all-important middle ground and started empowering themselves and enriching their friends.

Democrats used to tell us that we peons didn't understand the workings of (your favorite capital city here) so we should leave governing to the experts. Over time we threw these usurpers out and replaced them with Republicans. Now the Republicans tell us we peons don't understand (your favorite capital city here) and we should leave governing to the experts.

Well, now we have a humorous choice, at least. We can choose the people who insult the intelligence of those who want govenment to make their lives easy, or we can choose the people who insult the intelligence of the people who want the government to get out of the way of those who actually make the economy function. In as much as we find them occupying pretty much the same dank alleys when they get down to governing the question seems to have come down to whether we prefer being mugged by our enemies or people who call themselves our friends.

Here is a proposed train of logic. See if you agree. The person who is observed to be mugging you is probably not your friend. It is logical, therefore, assuming you have the power to choose in whose presence you will be, to cause the person who is mugging you to depart. Then you can at least try the company of another person. Repeat this process until the person with whom you keep company does not mug you. This may not win friends in every instance, but it would seem to be a good way to reduce the number of muggings to which you are exposed.

Republican office holders could also look at it another way. When choosing whom to insult, go with the people who care less. Otherwise people around you may be whispering "Remember Pennsylvania" in your ear.

Lee Jamison can be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com

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Lee Emmerich Jamison

It is frustrating to be human.

Let me tell you, briefly, a story about humility.

For some years I have been doing a sharper and ever sharper exploration of consciousness as I knew it.  As a natural artist the probe I use for this process is art.  As the child of parents trained in the sciences I knew to check my impressions before I spouted them off as findings through the lens of the best science I had available to me.

This process led me to an understanding of consciousness that included a realization that Human understanding is founded on a process of building models.  It is not hard to find examples of these models in even relatively primitive cognition.  Mice have, in their brains, structures that correspond with each of their whiskers.  All mamalian visual cortices include areas that map the retina essentially point for point.  Studies during brain surgery have shown equivalent mapping of the entire body for motor and sensory purposes.  When I looked into scientific studies of consciousness, however, I saw studies of neural responses and, more recently, on "mirror neurons".  This was stuff as useful to the understanding of consciousness as a study of rivets would be to the comprehension of the function of a submarine.

An example of finding inspiration in daily life was my epiphany at seeing the function of a television antenna rotator.  In this device the interior unit and the exterior unit have identical motor and gear sets.  The exterior unit rotated as long as the interior unit was running to get to the point the user chose.  As long as the two units ran the same way the correlation between the direction one chose to assign the antenna and that it actually assumed would be accurate.  In the same way our model of our body inside our brain learns to simulate the responses of the real mechanism so that they become predictable.  As long as this correspondence is strong we think nothing of it.  When the correspondence breaks down we become alarmed.

Human consciousness extends this model-building process to include conceptual modelling for more abstract notions like human behavior.  When we say we "know" someone what we mean is that we have constructed a model of their behavior that inhabits our mind and behaves in a way that helps us to understand how they act in our presence.  The more important that person is to us the more we modify our own personality "map" to function in concert with this "an-other map".  All one need do to comprehend the mapping of important others in our minds is to think of the latency that haunts us when we must let them go in death.

As I would talk to people about these things the ideas always seemed to be filled with novelty to others.  I could pat myself on the back, even imagine myself pretty darned smart.

Well, until Monday evening this week.  Thumbing through my Scientific American this week I find a review of a book by Douglas R. Hofstadter  who, it turns out had pretty thoroughly explored the realm I imagined myself discovering.  Only he did it back in 1979 in the Pulitzer Prize- winning book "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"

1979 was the year I graduated college, which slipped me out of contact with computer people for about half a decade.  The wave of Hofstadter's insights crested, crashed upon the intellectual shore, and receded from the larger public's view in a time when I was looking elsewhere.  While people in the field of computing were enthralled with the promise of these ideas I was oblivious.  Somehow I remained sufficiently out of touch to continue to be oblivious.

There is some solace in finding that one has generated a set of good ideas.  It is nice not to have been embarrassed in the process of finding out those ideas weren't original.  Still, it is a reminder of the human condition, of our innate limitations, of how finite one is in the face of a larger world.  Like Robert Scott, dying with his men on the way home after failing to reach the South Pole first I've spent a lot of my mind on a quest, only to find another man's flag at my goal.

Oh, well...  The winds may howl here and the tent flaps shudder, but at least I now know of a few books I need to read.  Unbeknownst to me a lot of people have been to this pole.  It's a big continent, though, and there is a lot of snow on which no foot has trod.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This one was too much to pass up.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070213/pl_nm/usa_politics_romney_dc;_ylt=AjTLNtsGxtMrKtr_1HZeu9LMWM0F

One of the ways the press seeks to control the public mind is to skew the definitions of terms the public considers important.  "Conservative" is one of those terms.  To call the Governor who presided over the most liberal state in the union as chief executive a conservative is either a sign that the press has no clue what the word means, that they consider non-Communists conservatives, or it is simply a lie.

If they can get us to buy this laugher anyone to the right of Lenin becomes a "Moderate".

You've got to be kidding!

Posted by emmerichjamison at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember the old saw about prejudicial questions?  How about just plain prejudiced assumptions?  If I find a man planting a bomb in my basement when is it offensive for me to tell the police? 

When the police want me to die.

Thus is it these days with the international press.  So, when American military officials lay out a case for the presence of Iranian munitions in new and more sophisticated bombs meant to kill American GIs Reuters finds it "provocative" that they have gone to the trouble to tell the world.

OK, Iran is simply doing what Reuters would have them do.  We don't have to shut up about it.

See:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070212/ts_nm/iran_usa_dc;_ylt=AvE8Jbp_UnXmL1wFUvC22hOs0NUE

Posted by emmerichjamison at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Take a look at this article we found on Yahoo:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070212/sc_afp/chinaenergyenvironment_070212104027;_ylt=At2OEzsLu2MuWkXrx.fsVMbMWM0F

For a little historical background in 1950 the United States produced 69% of the world's man made CO2.  For the most recent year for which we have records (2004 or 2005) the U.S. produced 25% of the man-made CO2.  Well- the danger must be over!  right?

Wrong. 

If there is a smidgen of good news it is in the sulfur dioxide emissions, which are believed by many scientists to be the cause of the global cooling from W.W.II to 1984.

How long will it be before China is a pollution pariah among the media?  I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lee Emmerich Jamison

Today on the web we find an article in the Washington Post which attempts to use herd mentality and flattery of an imagined consensus in the public to drive the U.S. out of Iraq.  This would, of course, do exactly what I have predicted for several months the Left has been attempting to do: Abandon Iraq so that millions could die in a carnage completely discrediting America as a world power.

See:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020901917.html

This is part and parcel of what I call leading with prejudice.

When the public is asked if they are in favor of the war in Iraq in surveys they say "No" by fairly wide margins.  They love this and widely report it at the Washington Post.  When the public is asked if they want to pull the troops out of Iraq they say "No" by wide margins.  This is an answer not much liked at the Post and reported alongside the weekly activities of local book clubs.  The former reporting has been used to fan a flame of disgust and reports like the one highlighted above are a part of this effort.

The use of herd mentality to drive public opinion is a sign that those who lead the media of the country have given up on education.  We are, so they believe, too stupid to be educated.  Never mind that we have long been addressing exactly the issues they claim we can't understand.  A look through the past articles of this blog will show how someone in no way directly connected to public policy has thought long and hard about these issues, heard the arguments of both sides, and concluded that the political Left is more interested in discrediting the United States than it is in achieving a sustainable peace.

The Left is telegraphing to the world their equivocation over our intention to stand by our promises.  People who depend on us for their very lives see that equivocation as a message of impending doom for those who persist in depending on us.  THEN the Left trumps what appears to be their failure to live up to their side of the bargain and uses that as an excuse to abandon those who remain loyal to OUR PROMISE.

In following the course above the Left is planning the murder by neglect of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of those who stood by us.  Why would anyone ever stand by us again after such a repudiation of our own honor?

The article is absolutely correct.  As far as America's political Left is concerned Success is Not an Option.  If they succeed in this failure don't expect them to stop with America's embarrassment.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I probed again the idea of the foundations of government in once-criminal activities.  That brought to mind how mafias (or today's gangs like M-13) actually compete with governments for primacy in environments where governments fail to effectively maintain good order.  Look carefully and you will see imbedded in that observation an evolutionary process.

This is why I've made a point over the years of playing up evolutionary themes.  The environments in which structures of any kind function favor certain manners of organizing such structures.  This fact leads some structures to perceive threats and to attempt to manipulate their environments.  One way for an organism to do that is to get big.  From the genetic standpoint there is a payoff in stability.  As long as the macro-environment, that larger world over which the organism has no control, remains stable organisms will tend to get bigger.

Bet you can see where this is going...

Look for a moment at the basics of evolution.  Small organisms (and organizations) are less stable, more volatile, easier to institute, easier to replicate, easier to kill individually but harder to eliminate as a group than large organisms.  Successful small organisms, because of these traits, adapt readily to a rapidly changing environment.  Inflexible or inefficient small organisms rapidly fail.

In the biological world small organisms can institute rapid changes in an environment, such as the production of a toxin or increasing oxygen levels in their immediate vicinity, to favor their survival.  About 600 million years ago single-celled organisms did this to dominate their environments and completely overthrew Earth's ecosystem, changing the atmosphere from CO2/ methane/ ammonia to our current nitrogen/ oxygen mix.  This was the single greatest ecological calamity to befall the planet.  Well, except that we owe our existence to it.

Also looking at the biological world, large organisms are usually made up of collections of small organisms that gather together in such a way that, by the loss of individual flexibility and function, there is gained a capacity to control the environment in which individual cells function.  A heart muscle cell can't survive in the wild environment alone, but it also needn't bother with a whole range of functions an amoeba must master to survive on its own.  The heart cell becomes expert at a single function in a carefully protected environment.

By this specialization large organisms can supress the volatility small organisms often produce and begin to spread the sphere of their influence beyond their immediate internal environment.

This stability has another cost as well.  While individual cells may "turn over" as rapidly as the single celled organisms in the larger environment the information on which the organism is founded, the genetic code, is dependent on replications of the entire organism.  Inherently this slows the process of adaptation should the macro-environment change rapidly.  A single-celled organism may replicate, often with very minor mutations, every thirty minutes.  If the macro-environment changes dramatically over the course of a century there are millions of opportunities for these mild changes to improve the species' chances of survival.   An organism that reproduces only every two years will have only fifty such shots at survival and each genetic change must first not threaten the cohesiveness of the larger organism just to get the chance to help.

The lesson of all the above?  Large organisms and large organizations inherently favor stability and disfavor dynamism.  To the extent they can control their environment they will seek to limit dynamism and extend the reach of the kind of environment in which they thrive.  This is not a conscious thing.  It is inherent in the manner in which organisms and environments interact.  Those parts of organisms that promote the sort of environment in which the organism thrives will be perpetuated.  Those that do not will be supressed.

This is why is is counterproductive for people who favor smaller government to fail to understand evolution.  Only by comprehending environments, organisms, and evolutionary processes can they come to grips with how they must alter the environment in which government lives to favor a smaller, more adaptable form of the beast.  Those who grow government are not evil.  They are just functional.  It is we who have created the environment on which they grow.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Lee Emmerich Jamison

When we discuss government we think we know what we're talking about.  That is one of the problems of the human mind.  What we really know is a narrowly drawn conception we accept with little examination from our culture.  It is a paradigm, a sort of thinking on rails.

I'm going to toss out a redrawing of the concept of human governance.  Let's see what you think of it.

When I started thinking about this in an organized way some years ago it didn't take long to realize that "government", that process that drives the purposeful narrowing of our personal options, comes in three major forms.

The first of these forms is individual self-government. We all develop a set of values, starting in childhood, that guides our use of time and energy. When you see people at play, at church, involved in civic service, and interacting with family and friends you are witness to this purposeful narrowing of possibilities. Our personal image of this form of self government is drawn from family life, from community values, from churches, and from the cues left us by the larger society. These are sometimes frankly conflicting. Over a lifetime we choose which of these values, if we accept any at all, will guide our use of free time and how we will treat each other.

The second form of government is commerce. For the benefit of ourselves and the larger community and society we sacrifice a portion of our freedom, both of time and of choice, so that the needs of the community might be met. People are fed, clothed, housed, and provided transportation. Services are rendered and goods are shipped and sold. This process is done in a way that provides for the replenishment of those resources necessary to continue the provision of the services and goods people need. This process is heavily, even critically, dependent on individual self-government to run smoothly. Where that fails to constrain what people would do to satisfy personal greed and hedonism commercial service becomes grossly inefficient.

Hence it is we are finally delivered to what has become official government. Official government rises from the need society has to protect itself primarily from people unrestrained by individual self-government, but its roots are blatantly criminal. Bullies first developed government to tap the surplusses of tribes. That's how we got tribal chiefs.  Now think carefully on this point, because the first instinct of many is to point to the organizational functions of government. Government is "good".  Government is only good to the extent that the vast majority of a population submit themselves willingly to the inherent loss of freedom the government entails.  Failing that it has reverted to simple organized crime.

Were we all sufficiently self governed and open to our own foibles and weaknesses as well as the strengths of others society could naturally fall into an order. "Anarchy" would carry positive connotations. We would have no need to choose some set of leaders, or permit them to be imposed on us, for the organizing of functions people in commercial service are usually better suited to guiding anyway.

As a result of its bully heritage official government is inherently inefficient. In fact it encourages those who would insulate themselves from responsibility to the public they "serve". This is because it relies on the individual self-government of officials to enforce honesty as they look after our resources.

On top of the problems inherent in Government's criminal heritage, taxes, the source of those resources we give government, are divorced from the services they make possible. This means the provision of an unneeded service or the redundant and inefficient provision of a needed service can be continued without regard to the opportunity doing so costs society.  Ending waste would cause those providing the service hardship. Government officials feel closer to people efficiency compromises than they feel to those who must pay for inefficiency. Thus it is there are full-time employees operating automatic elevators in the nation's capitol.

We hear a lot after every election about "values voters". Look at the description above and it becomes clear why this is becoming more and more true. Official government, the former criminal enterprise, competes with individual self-government. An honorable society needs little government!  In recent years many of us have begun to feel instinctively that government is actively working to erode the self-government that diminishes the necessity of the inefficient and often quasi-criminal beast official government can become.

Government has attacked the family structures of the nation's poor. It has attacked expressions of religious symbolism. It has rewarded and encouraged the failure of self-government. It then attacked and trumpeted the resulting failures of commercial service as a means of increasing its own power. Values voters are just people who know that standing up for self-government is preferable to conceding our hope to the faithfulness and honor of what was once simple organized crime.

The people who want official government to do more and ever more must divorce themselves from at least one reality. They must believe the people in government are inherently better people than those in the rest of society. Nothing either in official government's history or in the way works today encourages such a faith. If we don't stand for the values by which we can govern ourselves we will fall to those who benefit from the loss of those values.

Sam Houston said , "That government governs best that governs least." Now you know why.

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Lee Emmerich Jamison

A peculiar inconsistency reigns in the worlds of politics and religion.  In America the religious right too frequently eschews the concept of evolution as a fact in the development of species while embracing it in the economy.  On the other hand the other end of the politcal spectrum wholeheartedly endorses evolution among species while decrying it as a form of economic dynamism. 

What goes here?

It is fairly simple, really.  Neither side knows what the heck they are talking about.

In the link below you can read from an article by Jonathon Keats, published in the April 2006 'Popular Science' magazine.  The article outlines the work of entrepreneur John Koza's "invention machine"

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0e13af26862ba010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

For a printer friendly version:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/printerfriendly/science/0e13af26862ba010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

We need to ask ourselves what intelligence is from time to time. 

In an article some years ago, possibly in 'Scientific American' magazine, I read of an exploration of the algorithms of intelligence.  This is the notion that the brain sets up numerous models of possible explanations for issues and then runs those models through a sort of obstacle course of the problems the explanation must face in our conception of the real world.  By that method we do two things.  We narrow the range of possible explanations we attempt to expose to the world (present to our friends, etc.) and, we are ourselves exposed to the disconnect between our conception of the world and the characteristics of the REAL world.  (see "Reality" in "The Mind" section of the Sage Forge from last week)

This proposed model shows the environment shaping the idea making process in a way that refines ideas and encourages new ones.  As long as information is preserved from one generation of encounter with the world to the next the capacity of these ideas to deal with the subtleties of the environment can be improved.  That process is evolutionary.

Now compare the description of the process above with what Jonathon Keats writes in his 'Popular Science' article about John Koza's invention machine's method for devising a new telescope wide-field eyepiece:

"What Koza has done is to automate the creative process. To begin, the invention machine randomly generates 75,000 prescriptions. It then analyzes them in KOJAC, which assigns each a fitness rating based on how close it comes to a desired set of specifications—in this case, a wide field of view with minimal distortion. None of the 75,000 members of the first generation will be usable wide-field telescopic eyepieces. But a few of these primitive systems will be marginally effective at focusing a wide field of view, and a couple others might slightly reduce distotrtion in one way or another"

"From there, it’s Darwinism 101. The invention machine mates some systems together, redistributing characteristics from two parent lens systems into their offspring. Others it mutates, randomly altering a single detail. Other lenses pass on to the next generation unchanged. And then there are the cruel necessities of natural selection: The machine expels most lenses with low fitness ratings from the population, kills them off so their genetic material won’t contaminate the others." 

"Koza asks Jones to pull up the stats on the wide-field telescopic eyepiece. Amid a rush of figures, he reads off the number “295.” That’s how many generations it took for genetic programming to engineer around the Koizumi-Watanabe patent. In fact, the invention machine’s lens is better than the Koizumi-Watanabe system: Because it keeps breeding until all design specs are met, often some performance requirements are exceeded by the end of the run. The final field-of-view for Koza’s eyepiece is a remarkable 10 degrees higher than the 55 degrees achieved by Koizumi and Watanabe."

Again, an evolutionary process.  Evolution is all around us.  I like to think of it as the mind of God at work in the visible world.  What is interesting about the evolution to which we are exposed in the real world is that it so often is involved in the improvement on the best efforts of the minds of mankind. 

The Langley aeroplane was more a work of human intelligence than the overtly evolutionarily produced Wright airplane.  Langley, working with the assets of the U.S. government firmly behind him, never tested anything in a wind tunnel as the Wrights so assiduously did.  He designed his craft as his intelligence demanded he should.  In so doing he persisted in fatal error while the bicycle makers from Dayton built a working aircraft.

Once the Wrights had built their craft, however, they committed themselves to a fight over patent rights and abandoned the evolution of their "perfected" machine.  By 1909 they had been left in the dust of the Europeans, their contributions consigned to history.  Most airplanes today owe at least as much to Bleriot as they do to Orville and Wilbur.

The political Left thinks it important that intelligence be engaged in the planning of economic and even daily life.  They decry the forces of economic dynamism that would leave decisions, bit by bit, with the common working stiff.  This, when one sees the results of the rawest kind of accident as described above and how those accidents can outperform the best minds in any field, ranks at outright stupidity.  The working stiff is smarter than the computer that designed the high-performance eyepiece above. 

The religious Right can't imagine something so complex as a person being designed by, as they say, "accident".  Ignoring how much "accident" seems to have been necessary in the development of such works of human "intelligence" as the airplane, the autombile, watercraft, law, and innumerable other things, they demand that God have created the world according to their prescription.  Never mind that they embrace the highly evolutionary capitalist system of economics.

These objections to dynamic processes are simply logical inconsistency run amok.  Both sides believe in evolution when it suits them, but run away from it when it seems to threaten their more dogmatically founded political strengths.

Evolution is a fact.  Running away from it closes our minds to the understanding of all manner of things having nothing to do with species and how we will spend our tax money.  It is all over politics, economics, the rise and fall of nations, and the comprehension of corporations and dinosaurs alike. (two things with more in common than you might imagine)

It matters not whether you believe in God or are an atheist. If you don't have a basic comprehension of evolution everything, EVERYTHING you think you know about the world is superstition.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Lee Emmerich Jamison

I got an e-mail with an article from Dr. Timothy Ball, a Canadian meteorologist who does not believe in human-induced global warming.  I read through the article and noted, as I often have recently, that the article spoke a lot of the psychology being applied to strong-arming the political process and stampeding the world's people toward drastic economic change.  This is all well and good.  Unfortunately it does not specifically refute the science on which the drivers of worldwide panic rest their case.

In short, this man's refutation, however much we may agree with his concerns, is nothing more than obfuscation.

Read the article referenced here:

Posted by emmerichjamison at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Omnipotent God

Good science is humble. It plays with ideas about how the universe works and seeks to devise ways of measuring the world to answer the question of whether or not those ideas really explain anything. Creation science is not humble. Its objections to the answers these measurements suggest are based not in the data themselves, but in assumptions founded in what may be both badly flawed understandings of scripture and an assumption that an inexplicably insecure God feels the need to be known beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The mechanisms of evolution in genetic code are not difficult to understand. We have evidence of their functioning in the natural world and we can witness evolutionary pressures in the world of nature, business, technology, and politics. That there is a form of natural selection at work in almost every manner of process is a function of entropy. It is natural. God ordained that it should be so. How do I know this? Faith.

One of the fundamentals of Christian faith is the concept of the omnipotent (all powerful) God. That is a big concept. Most people of faith, because they live in a world where powerful people are more impressive for the harm they can do than for the good, think of omnipotence in terms of the damage God can do. They seldom consider it in terms of the creator God. As a result they never challenge the boundaries they tend to draw around their own concepts of God. Without realizing it people define God, place the definition in a box, and then worship at their box.

If Christians and other monotheists would ask themselves a few frank questions about their beliefs and prejudices their understanding of faith would change dramatically.

No. 1. Can God participate in this world? If you don't believe he can you're not a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim.

No. 2. Is God creative today? If you are a Christian, Jew, or Muslim dare you say "no"?

No. 3. Can the God who, by breathing the Word, created the world create history? I'll bet you never asked that question before! Human beings do so all the time in literature. People in my unpublished fiction have heritages stretching back hundreds of years. So, am I greater than God in that regard?

No. 4. Imagine that God created the universe and then set it in motion. How recently could the moment at which he set the clock ticking have been? 13 billion years? Ten thousand? Well, why not five minutes? Roll that over in your mind. How could you tell?

No. 5. If we accept that God could have set the universe in motion five minutes ago what would that make of all your memories of people, of suffering, of the biblical creation stories, or of contrasting scientific creation scenarios? Would their existence not then fall within His will?

Christians have traditionally been pathologically afraid of giving God too active a hand in the world. They fear that if God is an active participant in our world of sin and suffering his perfection is somehow broken. Such a fear, however, is born not of our faith in God's power. It is born of the boundaries we imagine constraining that power. If we accept full and complete omnipotence on the part of God the fact that the clock of the universe could have been set in motion only moments ago, and with it all our memories and experience, becomes part of the most intimate imaginable relationship.

That relationship includes dinosaur bones in the rocks beneath our feet and a human genome separated by less than one part in 50 from the genome of chimpanzees. At a single stroke evolution becomes both a part of God's will and largely irrelevant to the most intimate relationship in our lives. If you accept the omnipotent God your relationship with God can't be threatened by any bit of fact in His world. Instead, all those facts become part of His challenge to, and preparation for, you. They also serve, when considered together, to display the majesty of Creation, its depth of detail, and its vastness in the face of such detail.

Mind you, I don't require that God created all that is fifteen minutes ago. On the other hand I do believe in the omnipotent Creator God, not some flaccid hands-off former creator contrived by the angst-filled to keep Him distant enough to remain "holy". If this is the price modern believers must pay to keep God clean it makes a purchase of such sterility that nothing of value can be made to grow in what they have won. If good science, asking God's creation questions and humbly measuring for the answers, presents us with a world that challenges our understanding of Scripture perhaps our understanding of Scripture is wrong.

Perhaps Genesis is not about the establishment of all creation and all of mankind. Perhaps that story is about you and your personal relationship with the Creator who could have set the whole world in motion as you began to read this essay. Poof! You were, along with your whole back-story (to use a literary term). Now what will you do in this new creation from this moment?

From the burning bush God told Moses "I Am that I Am". He defines Himself. The first two commandments warn us against creating our own images of Him or any other god. He refuses to fit in our boxes. He does, however, give us a universe that, through scientific examination, answers our humble questions when we’re clever enough to frame them very well. Most of all, He is not so insecure that he will make His presence certain and thus negate the need for faith.

Even an atheist scientist, carefully measuring the universe to see if what he thinks should be there really is, is living by a form of faith. We’ll talk more about that later.

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Lee Emmerich Jamison

See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070205/cm_usatoday/thebiblevsscience;_ylt=AmmfS.FR5eNgew05F8sK0G3MWM0F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3YWFzYnA2BHNlYwM3NDI-

There apparently is a controversy about whether the shops at the Crand Canyon should offer for sale books giving a creationist point of view abou the creation of the Grand Canyon itself.  Gee...

I find both creationists and those who get all hot and bothered about them rather humorous.  In the story referenced above what is referred to as a "protesting group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an alliance of scientists, land managers, environmental advocates and others, calls it distressing that the park service is not sticking to pure, mainstream geology in the information it dispenses at the Grand Canyon.", as the story states.  The overwhelming body of publications offered at the canyon shops support the prevailing scientific view.  Why on Earth are they so upset?

For one thing there is no such thing as "pure, mainstream geology".  All good science is forever in a negotiated state of flux.  It is a 'do the best we can with what we know' adventure of the mind.

 I am a Christian.  None the less I have no doubt whatsoever that the universe is billions of years old, the Earth is billions of years old, and the Grand Canyon is millions of years old.  Creationism is flat wrong.  It is both bad science and very, very bad religion.  All that said it is foolish in the extreme to suppress the views of the very wrong in the service of what we think to be the truth.  If we suppress the expression of error we lose most of the best opportunities the world grants us to teach and most of the best challenges we are given to express what we know so that laypeople can understand.  We can't eliminate foolishness by forbidding expressions of foolishness.  People have to be trained out of not knowing and inaccurate knowing.

By all means keep the creationist books at the Grand Canyon shops.  Keep the science books right beside them.  Play up the controversy!  Write books that answer the creationist complaints point for point.  What is the great danger?  If the creationists win the argument in the eyes of the public does that mean the canyon is 4,500 years old?  No.  It will still be billions of years old no matter what human beings believe.  If the science texts win the argument does that mean God does not exist?  No.  God is as God is, well beyond our feeble comprehension, even if the canyon was not created by Noah's flood.

There was a picture I saw from one of the Voyager spacecraft about a year ago, looking back at the central solar system from beyond the orbit of Pluto.  In it there was a little blue speck against a field of utter blackness.  That was us.  Neither that speck nor the opinion of its inhabitants have any bearing whatever on God's existence.  Nor can all the combined volume of the crania of its inhabitants contain the information necessary to describe the wonders of all the rest of the universe.  Nobody here has the franchise on truth.

Don't be real fools and make dogma of science.  Keep both the stupid and smart books in the Grand Canyon's shops.  ...And let time tell us which is which.

Posted by emmerichjamison at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Lee Jamison

In view of the previous article it seemed appropriate to mention one of my sources for information on this story, specifically the information about Richard Armitage.  This is from the September 8th, 2006 edition of the Washington Post-

See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701781.html

There are two statements I find absolutely amazing, considering the lengths to which Patrick Fitzgerald has gone to detsroy the career and life of someone who, it appears should never have been so much as questioned. (If it is purjury to fail to recollect when one first heard of the identity of someone, what is it to maintain [and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on] an investigation in search of a leak for which one already KNOWS THE SOURCE?)

"The confirmation of Armitage's role has provoked criticism of both him and the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who learned of it shortly after his appointment in 2003. Some have questioned why Armitage waited so long to speak up about it, and why Fitzgerald spent two years appearing to chase a question that had already been answered."

 ...and:

"Armitage said yesterday that he did not disclose his role before now because Fitzgerald had asked him not to. But word of his role eventually began to circulate, and on Tuesday, Armitage said, he asked Fitzgerald to be freed of that promise. Fitzgerald agreed."

How much of the coverage of the Libby trial has made mention of this set of fact?  None I've seen on TV!

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Lee Emmerich Jamison

In the summer of 1995 I wrote an article for the Huntsville Item about the then-current state of affairs in what was widely referred to as "PLAMEGATE" in the Washington-New York-Boston center of the known universe.  The issue at hand was who "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame.  The problem, as I saw it then, was that there so clearly was NO STORY.  Virtually all of Plame's aquaintances knew she worked for the CIA.  It was common knowledge, too, that she has been "under cover" (Her children even famously spouted off as much in the Boston Airport about the time this article was written.)

This is all current today because the only person indicted in the witchunt for a way to put Karl Rove in jail, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, is now on trial for perjury.  Was he the leaker?  No.  Everybody who does not depend on the network news shows or the front pages of a major liberal newspaper for their news now knows not only that Richard L. Armitage admitted in September that he was the leaker, but we now know that Plamegate special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald KNEW FROM DAY ONE that he was the leaker.  Libby's prosecution turns on whether he really remembered who first told him Valerie Plame was a spy and when or if he really forgot and misreported his first knowlege during the unnecessary investigation.

This blog is not just about whatever pops into my head.  It is about prejudice, bigotry, and how some people use those foibles to empower themselves.  I have stated that bigotry is the bias we can't see in the mirror.  That is an innocent form.  There is a form that is simply unmitigated evil, though, and this series of events is a clear case of a bigoted media mis-, dis-, and un-informing us for the sake of practicing and keeping power for themselves and their friends.

I re-print the article exactly as I first submitted it below.

Lee Jamison can be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com .

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Lee Emmerich Jamison

Imagine that a man decides to trespass on my property.  He sets up shop though he has no right to be there.  I don't want him to stay, but law enforcement authorities refuse to make him leave.  Some in my family even disagree with me.  After all the man will do chores they want done even if they are not willing to pay a living wage for those chores.  Why should we not take advantage of him if he is willing to be exploited?

As time goes by more of the man’s kin come to live at my place.  I hear rumors about their intentions toward my home once their numbers have grown large enough, but these are widely discounted both by the lawmen and my exploitative relations.  There is no question, though, that these people feel no particular loyalty to me for not having pressed harder to protect what is mine by law.  Lately they have shown something approaching contempt for my right to decide how I should use or protect my own property.  Now they are so sure of my kinfolk’s dependence on their willingness to do chores on the cheap that they threaten to go on strike periodically if they are not given some rights to my home.

If someone were to do this with your home you would be outraged.  No one would fail to protect their individual property.  Most people are even clever enough to try, at least, to protect their commercial property.  Unfortunately for two generations the nature of citizenship has been so abysmally taught in this country that our countrymen fail to see the clear parallel in the immigration debate.

Framed as it is in the festering rhetorical stew of both class conflict and greedy exploitation the immigration debate has been a fiasco of misdirected attention.  The political left wants a large class of pliable, ignorant pawns that can be kept aware of their disadvantaged station in life so that as they become politically empowered they will restore socialist ideals to the ascendancy in the United States (as this same population is doing in Central and South America).  Though no other nation on earth save Canada has looser immigration standards than the United States these people propose that it is morally wrong for us to restrict our hard-won political stability and economic power to our own people.

Contrasted with this and, ironically, augmenting it, major industries, seduced by the siren call of something akin to a slave labor force subsidized by taxpayer-financed indigent medical care and schools, cry that this labor force is vital to our prosperity.  This argument persists though it can be demonstrated that wage competition from a population devoid of political legitimacy has tremendously enlarged the gap between rich and poor in the years since 1960.

Side arguments despair at the difficulty of dealing with the maze of bureaucratic problems facing those who wish to enter the country legally, an issue that would disappear in a heartbeat if politicians from both parties felt illegal immigration harmed them, and families that could be torn apart if illegals were deported.  This latter should not be an issue at all.  The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution qualifies the granting of citizenship to those born in the U.S. with the phrase- “…and under the jurisdiction thereof…”  Those who wrote the phrase said they intended it to mean that the children of foreign nationals would be excluded from automatic citizenship, a point they magnified with their attention to excluding American-born Indians from such rights.

Citizenship is a property, as real a part of your heritage as a child of American citizens as your claim to the car you drive or the clothes you wear.  Indeed the security of your deed to any piece of property is founded in your resolve to preserve and defend your first and foremost property right- your political voice and power as a citizen.  Your grip on this property right is badly eroded by winking at the exploitation of a virtual slave class for petty material gain.

Legal immigration is good for America.  It brings us a deep resource of people committed to human freedom. The perpetuation of illegal immigration and residency is a bargain with Satan.  Illegal residents are a true oppressed people, exploited for their illegitimacy on the one hand and for their resentment on the other.  The immorality is not in their presence here.  It is in the fact that people in power saw them as more useful in a state of powerless limbo than as legal productive contributors to society.

Those who preserve that state of affairs, and President Bush is among them, have perpetuated an unmitigated evil.

Lee Jamison can be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com

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