As insurrections go, the attack on the capital on January 6 was not a political success. However it may well have been the best documented such effort in recent memory. All of us, I am sure, have watched the cell phone videos taken and posted by participants. Talk about the assumption of white privilege! But I have also been fascinated by the precision and detail with which law enforcement can identify and pinpoint the location of individual participants from the GPS functionality of their phones. Since I daydream a good deal about adventures I have with or without superpowers, I was curious whether I could avoid detection simply by turning off my phone. Fairly quickly, Google informed me that although turning off one’s phone does deprive eyes in the sky of a good deal of information about one’s location, it is actually possible with really sophisticated equipment to locate phones, and hence their owners, when the phones are turned off. Apparently the only way to ensure that this does not happen is to remove the battery. This led me to a very helpful little video that showed me how I could replace the battery in my iPhone, an effort, let me assure you, but I have no intention ever of attempting.
That was about as much technical information as I could
absorb, so I turned my thoughts to a more interesting subject: the anonymity
which all of us these days take for granted as a condition of our existence. I
was born and brought up in New York City so I know a little bit about
anonymity. During the time I was teaching at Columbia, I lived in a Columbia
owned building across the street from the campus. 415 W. 115th St.,
Apt. 51, as I think I have remarked in the past on this blog. There were, I
believe, 20 apartments in the building. In the seven years I lived there I met,
indeed I even talked, only to the people next door in apartment 52 – Bob
Belknap, a tall drink of water who taught Russian literature, and his wife,
with whom once or twice I played string quartets. Think about that for a
moment. I walked in and out of that building, rode up and down in the elevator,
for seven years and never met anyone else except the Belknaps! It goes without
saying that as I walked to class or to my office or went shopping, I passed and
was passed by thousands of people whom I did not know.
I took all of this for granted, being as I say a New Yorker,
but in the long sweep of human history and prehistory this condition of
anonymity is really extremely unusual. For most of the past 200,000
years human beings have lived in very small groups or in small villages where
everybody knew everybody else and pretty much knew everybody else’s business.
If you lived in such a setting, you knew everyone’s name, you knew when a baby
was born, you knew when somebody died, and when somebody not from the village
came into it that person stuck out and was immediately noticed. For most of
human history that has been the normal human condition.
With the Super Bowl looming, this is not the moment to
meditate on the larger significance of these facts but surely in very
fundamental ways how we think about identity, personal knowledge, moral
obligation, and politics must be affected by the contrast between what has been
true of human beings almost all of our history and what is true of us now. One
final comment: as an old guy, I am always inclined to root for the athlete
still playing at the top of the game in his or her final years in the sport, so
I would naturally root for Tom Brady. But I have never liked Brady, who seems
to me a poisonous human being, so I am torn. Perhaps I will even watch the
game.
17 comments:
A few years ago I read a book titled “Bursts” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicists and computer scientist. The theme of the book was that the contemporary collection of data via computers can be used to predict how individuals will behave in the future, based on their computer and cell phone habits. Most of us follow rather routine patterns in our lives, which allow us to be tracked. Occasionally there will be a “burst” of random behavior, but such bursts do not occur with sufficient frequency to prevent our conduct from being predicted by those who have access to the data. The book was fascinating, and covered many interesting topics – like the trail of a hundred dollar bill in circulation; the flight patterns of albatross; and the failed revolt by a 16th century Hungarian, Gyogy Dozsa, who led a rebellion by peasants against the Hungarian nobility, was captured and was subjected to horrible series of tortures. The point of the latter story was that the unpredictability of Dozsa's revolt could not recur today.
Why was Lou Dobbs canceled?
Here’s the answer:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/06/media/lou-dobbs-fox-news-last-show/index.html
The condition of anonymity in large-scale urbanized society comes up, of course, as a theme in modern discourse, for ex. in the 1950s "mass society" lit. Some writers linked this to attitudes toward nuclear weapons and the prospect of extinction (not slow, but sudden), for ex. J. Herz in certain sections of his _International Politics in the Atomic Age_ (1959).
Herz's argument on that point was, roughly, that the perceived value of each individual's life gets diminished or diluted in a population of "anonymous" millions. I should append the caveat that it's been a long time since I read the book.
For s.w.:
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/review-santiago-rising/
As you no doubt know, Brady captained his team to another Super Bowl win. I am curious, however, why your refer to him as a “poisonous human being.” Are you referring to the deflategate controversy; to his support of Trump; or both? Or is there something else about his character which offends you? Just wondering. His skills as an athlete are indisputable.
I recently read an article (unfortunately I can't find it anymore) in which anthropologists and human medicine specialists report on a research project in which it turned out that the metabolism of modern humans around the world is still adjusted to the conditions that existed before a hundred thousand years ago in Africa. Details of the results were extensively explained in the article.
It seems clear that all divergent conditions encountered by those groups of people who were on their way “out of Africa” had to be balanced out by cultural techniques in the broadest sense and have been balanced up to our present day. Apparently, biological evolution is on a different timescale than the evolution of Homo Sapiens, through whose center it runs (figuratively speaking). Incidentally, it does not seem to be the only invariant of our prehistoric heritage.
If you stay at home during the pandemic and sometimes feel bored, I recommend the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949691B199
This is a series of lectures by Prof. Dr. Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University on "Human Behavioral Biology". 25 lectures that are easy to understand even for non-biologists.
In addition, one should practice the motto “life long learning” as long as one can think “clear and distinct”. 😊
Quick response to two comments: it is Brady's support of Trump that I was referring to. He is clearly the greatest quarterback ever to play the game.
I am a very big fan of Sapolsky and have watched a number of his lectures on YouTube as well as having read one of his books. As a lecturer he is really a class act.
life long learning...
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Off topic but of possible interest to some here:
I just listened to a Washington History Seminar zoom session about a quite topical, it turns out, book by historian Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179469/white-freedom
(I don't really have time to say more or engage in discussion right now, but if interested the above link will take you to the book at the publisher's website.)
P.s.
A 2018 journal article by the author, "White Freedom and the Lady of Liberty," which I think became a chapter or section of the book, happens to be ungated (i.e., open-access) at The American Historical Review.
For those of you who are suffering from the tedium of the covid pandemic, as well as recovering from the traumas of the Trump presidency, and are looking for a well written work of fiction to provide some literary relief, I have a recommendation for you. I just finished reading “The Woman In The Window,” by A. J. Finn, and it is one of the best mystery novels I have read in long time. The protagonist is a child psychologist who has recently suffered an undefined trauma (the details of which the reader learns some 1/3 into the book), which has left her suffering from agoraphobia. She refuses to leave her Manhattan apartment, in which she occupies herself giving online advice to others suffering from agoraphobia, playing online chess, watching vintage film noir movies, taking care of her cat – and observing and taking photographs of her neighbors, using the telescopic lens of her camera, in the course of which she believes she has witnessed a murder which has occurred in an apartment across the park from her apartment. Everybody – the police, her psychiatrist, her best friend – believe she is delusional. Is she delusional?
The plot pacing of the book is outstanding, as are the dialogue and the writing itself. If you like the well-turned metaphor and well-structured sentence, you will enjoy this book. For example: lighting a candle, “a little claw of flame scratches at the air”; “She’s been so playful, so jolly, that to see her looking serious produces a kind of jolt, a needle skidding off the vinyl.”; “She spurs the wheel of her lighter with her thumb, kisses it to a cigarette.”; “He pauses, his mouth ajar. Then he flashes an absent smile and leaves without another word.” It is hard to believe that this is the author’s first literary venture.
The plot has traces of Hitchcock – “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” - but still has two plot twists that I am confident will take you by surprise. After the first twist, you will be strongly tempted to skip to the end of the book to find out what really is going on. Resist the temptation. The wait will be well worth it. The book is a tour de force, up there with my own novella, “The Third Man”; Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”; Chandler’s “The Big Sleep”; Rendell’s “Death Notes”; and MacDonald’s “The Chill” (if you have never read this superb jigsaw puzzle of a mystery, I strongly urge you to find it and immerse yourself in it).
In closing, I would like to say this to my American friends. You surely have made a mess of things. After Winston, Franklin, Alan Turing and I made the world safe for you, you went ahead and muddled things up by electing that egomaniacal, fascist idolizing idiot Trump. Well, hopefully you have learned your lesson. You have to learn to recognize the Harry Lime frauds in this world, otherwise you will only be taken advantage of. Today, your wonderful country is going to embark on a test of its true grit, a trial of the only President to be impeached twice. It will be a painful process, likely to end in a political acquittal. But you must go through this trial by fire, and be done with it. You will be a better country for it – and you will get through it, hopefully inoculated from any further fascistic infections. Be strong.
Best regards and Cheerio!
Graham
A bit of historical trivia, related to Trump’s impeachment. Regarding the question whether a former government official can be impeached and tried by the Senate after s/he has left office, the Democrats have cited the case of William Belknap, President Grant’s Secretary of War who was charged with corruption, resigned, and then was impeached in the House and tried in the Senate. He was acquitted. However, this caught my eye from the Wikipedia article about his trial:
“On March 29 and April 4, 1876, George Armstrong Custer testified before the Clymer Committee, which continued to gather evidence for the Senate trial. Custer's testimony was a national media sensation because he accused both Grant's brother and the Secretary of War of corruption. Although Belknap had resigned, he had many political allies in Washington, D.C., including Grant. Custer had previously arrested Grant's son Fred, an Army officer, on the charge of drunkenness. As the result of that incident and his testimony to the Clymer Committee, Custer incurred Grant's displeasure. It took more than a month for Custer to resolve the situation and obtain Grant's permission to return to duty, leading his regiment in the expedition that would culminate with Custer's death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.”
One can hypothesize that, while Grant mourned the loss of so many soldiers at the Little Big Horn, General Custer was not among them.
The apocryphal advice said to be given to lawyers is: When the facts are against, pound on the law; when the law is against you, pound on the facts; when both the facts and the law are against you, pound on the table.
I expect that we'll be seeing a lot of table pounding this afternoon.
David Palmeter,
The advice, in a bit different version, was not apocryphal. It was taught to me as an apprentice lawyer, and I taught it to others, as, “If the law is against you, emphasize the facts; if the facts are also against you, emphasize policy; if all three are against you, make it up.” The lawyers who are representing Trump are doing not so good a job at the last option. The montage of Democrats asserting that they will “fight like hell” - in rooms inside the Capitol, not outside; at press conferences, not in front of an angry mob – was a particularly amusing version of “making it up.”
Talk about what, now? The assumption of white power? Talk about just painting with a broad brush. Personally, I do so wonder where these wonderful humans fall on the bell curve and what the incidence rate of mental illness is, social media has allowed mentally ill people to find each other and congregate, making it much easier to convince themselves that they are 'normal' and it's everyone else who is wrong, so maybe we could talk about the assumption of morality or such, but on the other hand, you think that's a bad thing?
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