Corpo Desko
My favorite cartoon currently in syndication is the politically incorrect, occasionally dark, sometimes self-referential, and often pun-filled
Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis. I love the wordplay of the strip; I love the sheer idiocy of many of its various characters; I love the cowboys who settle their disputes by discussing their feelings, the vikings who like to watch Oprah, and the nonsequitorial misadventures of the ill-fated Angry Bob.
This is why, for Christmas (or Hannukah, or New Year's Day--it's not entirely clear to me), a friend gave me the 2006 Pearls Before Swine desk calendar.
This is how I know I'm a grown-up now.
The corporate desk calendar was always the domain of my father. Round about December 20th, my brother and I used to coordinate closely in order to make sure that my dad received one, and only one, desk calender at Christmas. (This has dropped off now, but it certainly used to be
de rigeur.) I find it a bit odd, to say the least, that such a gift has now become practical and appropriate to give to
me.
The trappings of adulthood are interesting. How is it that flying off to Ireland on my own, hosting dinner parties for friends, and reading serious history books don't appear to me to identify myself as particularly grown-up, but the possession of a calendar full of amusing comic strips
does?
Weird and Wonderful World
This wired, interconnected world of ours is amazing. I am writing this from New York, where I've just eaten supper. I had lunch in Charlotte, breakfast in Jacksonville, and I'll wake up tomorrow in Dublin. I've got a wireless daypass, which means I can surf the web in these airports. I have a Skype headset, which means I can chat to friends in Europe and New York.
But what really gets me is how easy and accessible these things are. I was given my headset for free, and Skyping people the world over costs precisely zero dollars. I say I have a wireless daypass, but the fact of the matter is that in neither Jacksonville nor Charlotte did I have to pay to use the airport's internet (and it seems that, by some fluke of the system, I'm on for free here in New York, too--though I don't think that's supposed to happen). It's not just possible for me to call Dublin to confirm flight times--without a phone, from an airport--but it's free.
Of course I had to buy my wireless-enabled laptop, and I had to hang out near an expat cafe in the city (where Skype was giving away free headsets), but these particular services still really do cost nothing. I didn't buy my laptop in order to chat every once-in-a-blue-moon when I'm having a long day of traveling.
And of course, the travelling isn't free. (In fact, given the decline of the dollar, international travel is insanely expensive.) But it still never ceases to amaze me. How the ancient Greeks--or even the colonial Americans--would have been stunned to see our cell phones, satellites, airplanes, and internet!
I'm stunned, too.
The Value of Money
Unusual Sign the American Economy is Going Down the Tubes: Last Thursday, the U.S. Mint
banned people from melting down their pennies and nickels. Given the price of metals on the open market, a new penny is now worth 1.12 cents, pre-192 pennies are worth 2.04 cents, and nickels are worth 6.99 cents. (Note that it costs more than this to
make a penny; this is just the market-value of the copper and zinc (and it's the same with the nickel - 6.99 cents is the fair market value of the nickel.) Making a coin also requires paying for the shaping, melting, setting, and stamping that go into the whole deal, of course.) People are also banned from exporting the coins (because, obviously, somebody in Nefarious Foreign Country X could melt them down perfectly legally), though this has some
practical exceptions for tourists and pneumismatists (and banks?). Now you tell me that if this keeps up there won't be a black market in United States coinage.
Surely the whole point of money is that it is a convenient
proxy for a thing of inherent worth, not a way to artificially legislate that something inherently worthy... well... isn't.
If you go to
www.coinflation.com, you can get a live tracking of the inherent value of coins currently in circulation.
Thinking about this stuff is really quite an interesting exercise. That's because, for money to work efficiently, we have to pretend that it doesn't
have any inherent worth. This is an illusion, of course, and it's an illusion that financiers take advantage of all the time (even without melting coins--all they have to do is a bit of exchange rate arbitrage to show that money is itself valuable.*)
But, when I go to spend a nickel (or, more practically, a greenback), I never keep it in my pocket because of the worth of its constituent parts--
and that's the idea. This is not the same as a claim about inflation. It might well be that my nickel doesn't go as far these days, and so I am more careful about how I spend it--but then, I'm hanging on to it because I'd rather spend it on product X instead of product Y, and it no longer is worth enough
in the market to buy both X and Y together. But that's a different scenario. What I'm talking about is the kind of scenario where I say, "Look, I could pay for this $4 item with four one-dollar bills--but I'd be willing to give you 200 pennies instead." Nobody ever thinks that the 200 pennies would be a better deal. Why? Because the penny is a proxy for 1/100 of a dollar. That's the whole purpose of the penny--to stand in some relationship to money itself, to allow us to easily exchange our work and worth for our things (and for other peoples' works).
But if you really think about it, if those were old-style pennies, at 2.04 cents-on-the-dollar, you'd really rather have those penny rolls. And that's a bit screwy.
It seems counterintuitive to want your money to be inherently worth
less, but in fact, it seems to me that that worthlessness is ennabling. It keeps people from hoarding what is, essentially, an instrument of exchange (unless, of course, they want to be able to exchange it for something else in the future). If we do hoard dollars, it's not because we want the paper they're printed on; we hoard them because we're going to buy that yacht in ten years' time, or because we think inflation is going to fall and they'll be able to buy more stuff tomorrow, or for some other reason that actually has to do with the economy and not the dollar bill.
This makes me optimistic about the cyber-economy.
*Exchange rate arbitrage: a simple concept that people like to pretend is complicated. Let's say I have 10 US Dollars. Here in New York, I can buy 1,200 Japanese Yen for 10 Dollars. Well, in Tokyo, perhaps I can buy 6 British Pounds for 1,200 Yen. And back in New York (or in London, or Chicago, or wherever at all), maybe I can buy 12 Dollars for 6 Pounds. Voila! I have just made Two Dollars, a rather ridiculously high return for rather ridiculously little risk. (Oh, and yes, of course we can buy currency--it's what you do when you go to the foreign exchange window when you get off the plane in Paris, it's what companies do when they need to pay producers in a foreign country, and it's what banks do when they want to hold their reserves in stable dollars or when they need to cover massive withdrawals in a different currency.)
this is what happens when you don't democratize science
Today's
Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the best football roundup on the web (or in the papers, or on TV), explains that the Chandrasekhar limit isn't actually a limit. Gregg Easterbrook (who writes TMQ) elaborates better than I could, and I urge you to read at least that bit of this week's column, because the implications are dazzling.
But you're not going to go read it, are you? No. I know at least some of you are never going to make your way over to ESPN just to read about the latest research into type Ia supernovae. But you should.
That's it. I was going to give you the rundown myself, but Easterbrook is so readable, and this is so cool, that I really mean it when I say you ought to go over there and read it yourself. I will give you the implications, though:
1. Cosmic expansion is not accelerating
2. There's no such thing as dark matter or energy (or at least, no reason why there should be, which amounts to very nearly the same thing)
Now. Today is Tuesday, day not only of ESPN.com's TMQ, but also of the New York Times's Science Times. Why is it that the latter is not telling me about Chandrasekhar? (I did a historical search. The latter
never told me about this.)
And here's an interesting story that Easterbrook doesn't tell: Chandresakhar himself was an Indian Astrophysicist. He won the Nobel Prize for his work, basically hypothesizing the existence of black holes, neutron stars, and (as yet undiscovered) quark stars. But when he presented his work to the Royal Society in the 1930s, his old Cambridge advisor Sir Arthur Eddington attacked him with what Wolfram calls "nonsensical and contradictory arguments." It was a particularly vicious move: Eddington had been inquiring into Chandra's work for months and had never commented upon it. When Chandra was finally invited to lecture to the Royal Society, Eddington had the secretary schedule himself into the following timeslot, which he used to roundly denounce what Chandrasekhar had just said. Chandra was prevented from replying, and (because of how the very influential Eddington had closed the doors to the young man) he only really had an opportunity to publicly defend his conjecture four years after the whole episode. Chandra wrote home in anger (some choice words: "Prejudices! Prejudices!" and "Eddington is simply stuck up!"). Then he packed up and moved to America.
Oh, to read the relevant TMQ bit yourself: go to http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061128, search for "Chandrasekhar," and read Easterbrook's brief, clear explanation of the whole thing. (You could also read it in
Nature, but that version is rather less comprehensible to the intelligent Average Joe like me.)
Turkey Day
I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. I think that's because it's such a communal event. In a place with no state religion (a good thing, by all means), we don't have the equivalent of the national religious holiday the way Indonesia has Ramadan, Athens had the Dionysia, or Britain used to have Christmas. Most of our civic holidays are undercelebrated, too: we've still got the Fourth of July, to be sure, but Veterans' Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day are no more likely to be celebrated than not to be, and anyhow, we all celebrate those days in different ways. There is no standard, shared celebration. As a nation, we might all get the day off of work (or not, given the way the service industry works these days), but we're not particularly likely to spend that day doing the same thing (much less doing it together!).
Not like Thanksgiving! Sure, we
might do different things, but there is a norm from which we will be deviating: turkeys and stuffing, football and feasting. And while there are strong religious overtones to literal thanks-giving, and strong Anglo cultural overtones when we eat meat and potatoes and gravy, fundamentally this is an inclusive and not an exclusive holiday. It is reasonable to presume that one's neighbors are celebrating--and, if they're not, obviously one should invite them over to join in the feast. There can be no offense taken: it's their holiday as much as our own. We all get to share in this day's celebration.
There are exceptions, I suppose. When I was little, we put on plays about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and religious freedom from the mean old English. Subsequent years have seen the reinterpretation of the whole Pilgrim thing, of course; a cynical reading of the first Thanksgiving says that it was just the beginning of the end for the Native Americans on this continent, and that the pilgrims were themselves Puritanical crazy-crazies who refused even to celebrate Christmas because it would be, you know, too much
fun (and we can't be having any fun around here). The great thing about Thanksgiving Day, though, is that we can grant the truth in these more cynical claims, and
we still get to celebrate the day. That's because, fundamentally, Thanksgiving is not primarily about remembering the past but rather about celebrating the present with friends and loved ones at one's side.
That's quite an interesting phenomenon. Other holidays are explicitly memorializing, and this comes back to haunt us when Revisionist historians get their hands on them (or even just, when time passes). Christmas, Easter, Sukkot, Passover: these are religious holidays by which we remember particular events. Independence Day and Veterans' Day: these are national holidays by which we do the same. The importance of each of these wanes and waxes in popular imagination as the importance of their underlying events shrink or grow. As we reinterpret the past, we lose sight of the celebrations; Easter becomes a less salient holiday as the life (or divinity) of Christ becomes a less important piece of our social and cultural fabric, and especially as we become less willing to believe in the literal ascension which is celebrated on this day. Veterans' Day suffers simply from a removal in time: there remain a huge number of veterans of foreign wars, to be sure, but the significance of the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" is quickly disappearing along with all of our World War I veterans. The day is not necessarily doomed to oblivion; we could redefine it in the same way that we've redefined Independence Day to be as much about hot dogs and fireworks and our present nationalism as about the Revolutionary War or the way we ass-whupped the British (who, I hasten to add, are our very good friends these days). But Thanksgiving is a special case, I think, precisely because it doesn't commemorate a particular event, and it never really has. Nobody celebrates Thanksgiving to remember the first Thanksgiving (though obviously the one evokes the other). The celebration has, from the beginning, been about togetherness, a shared meal, and, indeed, a sense of thanks for what we've got. It is and always was about the
present. And it is great.
my mind on my mind
Not long ago, Q introduced me to the Zuboff-Unger Brain Explosion, a thought-experiment that seems to indicate that there is a sliding scale of consciousness (as opposed to definitive 1-or-0-like states of either consciousness or not-consciousness). Between Mr. W's fantastic 11th-grade philosophy class, the cognitive neurolinguistics lab where I worked for a pittance as a college freshman, and engaging conversations with JH, Zq, and SS (among others), I've seen by now my fair share of interesting thought-experiments trying to tease out
something tangible about consciousness. Here are a few of the best:
1.
Hofstadter's Anthill, Putnam's Bees: Consider an ant colony. Each of the ants has a specific role: there are food-gatherers and soldiers, breeders and the queen. Ants are themselves unintelligent, instinct-driven, instinctual creatures that act predictably. (Indeed, we can model the behavior of a food-gathering ant almost perfectly with the following two rules: 1. if you run into something edible and you aren't holding anything, pick it up, and, 2. if you run into something edible and you are holding something, drop it. These very simple rules create ants who wander, find food, bring it back, and pile it up. Ant behavior is malleable in predictable ways, too: spread scent, and an ant will follow it.) We can feel reasonably confident that no ant consciously directs the running of an ant colony in a way that a king or CEO might consciously direct the complex interactions of a community of people. Nonetheless, however, a full ant colony seems to be an adaptive system that can defend itself, move itself, rebuild when injured, and store resources for the future. We might say that when a child stomps on an anthill, many individual ants die, but the colony itself "heals" as the anthill is rebuilt and new ants take on the function of the old ones. Roughly speaking, we might even conclude that an individual ant is to the ant colony what an individual skin cell is to a conscious person: a useful but expendible part of the whole, rather than a significant thing in itself. An ant colony may thus be seen as a system rather than as a collection of individuals.
Hilary Putnam (or possibly Barnett summarizing Putnam--I can't remember where I read it) takes this a step further with his swarm of bees idea. Imaine a swarm of bees that is organized into the shape of a giant human being. The bees perform the same functions as all of our own parts and systems: a group move together like the heart, another group relays information internally just as neurons do, etc. Nonetheless, we don't call the swarm conscious. To take Putnam's example again, if we shoot the swarm, we aren't worried about the pain that the
swarm will feel, though we might worry about the pain of individual bees (or at least we might worry about the morality of killing a bunch of bees, while we aren't worried at all about the morality of hurting the swarm, which we don't take to be any sort of morally relevant agent). Conclusion drawn from all this: organized systems can look surprisingly like conscious beings--but we nonetheless have the strong intuition that organization is not itself sufficient for consciousness.
2.
Searle's Chinese Room: Consider a person who sits in a room filled with books of Chinese characters. Let's call him Fred. Sinophones come to Fred with questions written in Chinese, and they pass them to Fred through a window in the wall. Fred's job is to take the pieces of paper that come through the window, follow a set of English-language instructions about how to use the books behind him, and write down whatever characters those books tell him to. Then he passes the paper back out of the window with his drawings on them.
Fred doesn't speak Chinese, but we can imagine that the Chinese-speaker on the other side of the window might think that he does. After all, if a person asked the sum of two and two in Chinese, and Fred's process led him to write the symbol for four, it sure would appear that he knew what he was being asked. If we gave him really good books, Fred could probably answer really complex questions. If we made Fred a computer, and made the books his database, and made the Sinophones ourselves, it would follow that, given enough speed of looking-up, we couldn't tell the difference between a computer that understood us consciously and a computer that was simply a dumb machine like poor old Fred in the Chinese room. Conclusion: the appearance of conscious thought not itself sufficient to prove that conscious thought is actually present (and, moreover, we can't ever know whether the thing on the other side of the window is conscious or not). Unlikely skeptical spin: Well, Fred doesn't understand Chinese, but Fred-plus-the-room-and-all-its-books-and-instructions
does understand the language. So we can say that the whole room, with Fred as just a predictable cog in it, understands what it is doing in a conscious way.
3.
Block's Chinese Nation: I don't know what's with philosophers of mind and the Chinese, but... imagine a person who doesn't have a brain. Every time a neuron senses something (feels, smells, tastes, etc.), the electrical impulse is conveyed not to a cranial neuron but instead via satellite to a guy in China. He looks up and sees a big sign that shows a symbol on it, and he knows that, when he gets the combination of the symbol and the incoming call, he should send an outward call back to a motor neuron. In this way, when I stub my toe, the sensory neurons in my toe wire their normal electrical impulses to the particular people in China to whom they are connected by satellite, and those people press the buttons that collectively instruct the impulses that cause my motor neurons to have me suddenly pull back my foot here in New York. If we have 100 billion neurons in the brain, then we'd need 100 billion people for this to work, of course (along with a big sign, which is just to allow for some parallel to "brain states"--so when I am excited and my brain is full of pain-inhibiting adrenaline, I might have a different reaction than when I am in a more subdued state). But pretend there were 100 billion people in China; if we had them instead of neurons, would they collectively make up my brain? Intuition, of course, says no. Conclusion: functionally brain-like conscious people can't themselves make up another conscious brain. Corollary that some folks have thrown in there: we just defined a mind to say that it interacts with the body in such a way as to cause physical reactions via neurons. But we can't really say that the Chinese nation constitutes one mind (my mind) while individual Chinese people continue to have their own minds, because then you end up with two different minds, ostensibly working off of two completely separate sets of sensory input, both affecting one Chinese person's physical actions. (Not sure why that's impossible, but so goes the claim.)
4.
The Zuboff-Unger Brain Explosion: Consider a disembodied brain sitting in a vat of whatever nutrients disembodied brains need to survive. Now cut it in half. Any neurons that originally had connections to neurons in the other half are fitted with tranceivers that send and receive electrical impulses to the neurons with which it was connected before (using electromagnetic waves, say, so as to be able to do this at the speed of light). Now the brain still works as usual, but we can move the two halves really far away from each other. Well, okay, so cut each of those in half and do the same thing. And halve those, and so on, until you have the brain's individual neurons sitting in nutrient vats spread out across the globe, all sending and receiving electrical impulses via tranceiver. Is this still a brain? Is that extended network conscious as a normal brain is conscious? Zuboff and Unger suggest that it isn't. Conclusion: proximity matters. But this leads to the further conclusion that there are
degrees of consciousness. When the brain is all put together, it's a brain. When it's all spread out, it isn't one. When it's only a little bit cut up, or if all the neurons are separated but really really close, then maybe it's mostly a brain. More spread out, less brainy. Less spread out, more brainy. Gee, that's weird.
My reaction to all of these is roughly similar, and it is roughly the following: why can't consciousness be big? It seems to me that self-awareness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems that hold a sufficiently large amount of information in them. I mean, the thing that makes Hofstadter, Putnam, Searle, and Block all skeptical of the consciousness of their constructs is that there is no identifiable place for knowledge to inhere. If you say that 3 billion bees together are conscious, or that a room and books and a machine-like man together are conscious, we want to say, "yeah, but it's absurd for a room to be conscious" or "lots of bees interacting don't have any more conscious knowledge of what they're doing than lots of bees NOT interacting." But by these arguments, we could as well say, "yeah, but it's absurd for a single neuron to be conscious" and "lots of neurons interacting shouldn't make anything more conscious than individual neurons NOT interacting." Clearly, the first is true but doesn't tell us a darned thing about the consciousness of a lot of neurons, while the second is just false.
The thing is, lots of
interacting parts together really are more than the sum of the parts seperately. There's an awful lot of information stored in the state of their connections to one another, and this is value far above and beyond the information and substance stored in their individual being.
An illustrative example: when talking about artificial neural networks, we consider nodes and weights. A model of natural language might include the nodes "cat," "dog", "a," "ran," "bit," "the," "brother," "my," and "spotted." Pretend that Geraldine repeatedly feeds the model the following sentences: "The dog bit the cat;" "The dog bit my brother;" "The spotted dog ran;" "The cat bit the dog;" and "My brother bit a cat." Every time the system sees that two words appear near each other, it adjusts the weights between those nodes to be a bit stronger relative to the other weights between nodes. At the end of it all, you'd see that the network had learned stronger and weaker weights for the interconnections between relevant nodes. "The" and "dog" would be very closely linked, as would "the," "dog," and "bit." "Cat" and "dog" would also be strongly linked as an effect of how other word linkages would readjust the weights across the system. "My" and "the" would be slightly connected, while "spotted" and "cat" would be quite unrelated. If Geraldine looked at the network and saw just the nodes, she'd know something about what this network "knows" and "doesn't know"--but she wouldn't know that the system understands that "My dog ran" is a better sentence than "Spotted ran my the." (Amusingly, this particular system would be absolutely fine with "My spotted brother ran," however.) Trying to look just at the specific nodes, rather than the relationships between them, dooms the observor. (I should note here that I find all this quite compelling and I have scientific studies to back up the idea that simple grammatical systems like this can work well--but Chomsky and others still want to locate grammar somewhere, and this is a creditable alternative view. They essentially want to say that there also exists a node that explains the rules of grammar in detail, and with it we no longer need to know the weights because now we know the rules of word-combination being used. I confess, I think this is naive and stupid. It is awfully like the internet, though: all the information on the internet is contained in individual servers; the connections themselves are not very dynamic but rather simply allow the nodes to share their information. There's not much further information stored in the state of this network.)
Back to consciousness. In the example above, we can see how most of the relevant grammatical information is contained not in the nodes, but in the connections between them. Similarly, I suggest, a bunch of ants reacting simply and predictably to the pheromones left by fellow ants contains a lot more than just a bunch of ants. That
colony of ants also contains an enormous amount of information about how the ants are related to one another and how the actions of one of them affects and will affect the actions of others. This complex, even intractable, set of interconnections is, to me, precisely the first building block of conscousness. Consciousness, I'd argue, isn't located in any part of the brain (and I suspect most of the above philosophers would agree with that statement, though I think doing so would be inconsistent of them); it's located in variable and varying electrical connections between neurons. Enough neurons--indeed, enough ants--and there's a mind-boggling amount of information being stored in those connections (and that, I propose to you, is where and what memory is). Consciousness is just a side effect, an emergent property of any similarly complex system (of which there are, I think, not very many of a size that we can comprehend). If the necessary billions of constantly connected, constantly re-weighted parts are spread out around the universe (a la Zuboff and Unger), I don't see any reason why it is counterintuitive that that is conscious, too. And if the ants and the bees and the guy in the room all seem intuitively unconscious, maybe that's because we aren't thinking about them on the grand scale that is required. Once we start talking about 100 billion ants all interacting together (a truly inconceivable exercise), we'll be looking at something of similar complexity to the brain. Until then, we can all agree that a bunch of ants in an anthill don't form any conscious community.
As for Block, there's no reason that conscous beings can't themselves make up some other consciousness. I just don't get it. Frankly, it seems to me that the way biology works is roughly that less complicated things join together to make more complicated things. Cells work together to make organs. Organs work together to make human bodies. Human bodies work together to make... superbodies, or something. I mean, why is that weird and unusual? Evolution starts with the simple and builds up to the complex.
More than that, though, I just don't understand the whole deal with consciousness at one level precluding the possibility of another, similar consciousness on a much greater scale. Can someone explain it to me?
Finally, I suppose I should point out that this interaction-based model of consciousness that I propose has neither an upper bound on size nor a lower bound on speed. At some point, there just aren't enough interacting parts to allow for (10^11)! connections--there is a minimum degree of complexity required. But, within the constraints of a very large universe, there's no maximum size that a conscious system could be--the elements of that system could be atoms, or neurons, or ants, or people, or even planets. Additionally, we are used to thinking of intelligence on our own time scale (and for good reason, since we live by it). I see no reason why consciousness could not be a much more lumbering thing than our own experience shows it to be, though. Our neurons take only a few miliseconds to fire, and action potentials carry electrical signals across our cells at a speed of anywhere from 10 to 100 meters per second. It seems at least conceivable to me that a system that was 1,000 times bigger and 1,000 times slower would still have as much information and as much consciousness as we do, but we might not recognize it because we simply cannot anthropomorphize things like that.
Anyway. A long post. Thanks for bearing with me. Let's talk artificial neural nets sometime, shall we?
it's easy to be disenchanted at home, but i can't help wanting to defend my siblings while abroad
I've been doing lots lately.
1. Went to the Whitney with Zq.
2. Halloween Party! Lots of fun. Sadly, I subsequently found myself quite low because of how uncommunal, uninspiring, un-autumnal, and generally un-unusual Halloween is for the kids of this city. (I mean, what's the point, anyhow, if not to have a special day for dressing up, meeting one's neighbors, and carving large garden vegetables, the last two of which, at least, no Manhattan child does?)
3. Listened to The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4.
The Moral Maze is a program in which various smart people talk to various interested or well-informed parties about some issue, and try to tease out the moral implications thereof. This week's topic: is America a force for good in the world, or is it a force for bad?
The perspective that one gets hearing intelligent, well-informed foreigners analyzing one's country is shocking. I was extremely taken aback by the misrepresentations of my country that I was hearing on the radio. These were not born of malice, by any means; in fact, people were speaking from both sides of the debate (some suggesting that America has largely gotten things right and that our sense of American exceptionalism and strong moral and religious sentiments are admirable and noble, others suggesting that they are frightening and hubristic and that our actions in the world and even our motivations for actions are deeply immoral or at best are amoral). But despite, I think, a genuine interest in the question and real knowledge about the world (as well as a very commanding grasp of statistics about the US), these panellists seemed to me to miss something deeply essential about the relationships between religion, popular culture, and government in this country. Consider the following well-intioned, real, and to me ludicrous suggestions from the program:
1. Americans don't care about global warming because 59% of us believe that we are in the End Times, so why would we be worrying about anything of this world?
2. Songs like our national anthem and "America the Beautiful" are indicative of the deep and alarming faith of Americans, and just go to show how we constitutionally can't have patriotism without irrational religious fervor (that is, it's not in our constitution, not, it's not in our Constitution, if you see what I mean).
3. Evangelical Christianity directly and
predictably drives foreign policy, and those who disagree with it are a strongly persecuted minority.
Here's what I have to say about all that.
1. We've argued that global warming is not real. We've argued that addressing it through state regulation is unlikely to be effective and may hurt businesses. We've argued that signing the Kyoto Protocol in some ways compromises our sovereignty. As a nation, we've argued a lot of ridiculous and not-so-ridiculous things about global warming, but never once in my life--about this or, indeed, about
any issue--have I heard the argument that we can let the world go down the toilet because Armageddon is upon us. I don't doubt the statistic, and indeed I think it is reasonable to find it alarming. But surely,
surely we don't think that Christianity in America is this crazy? Because, well, it isn't. Americans, Evangelical and not, care deeply about our country and our world. Indeed, it makes sense to argue that those who are religious believers care
more about the world and doing good in it than those who do not, though I don't particularly know that that's so. I just think it's worth pointing out that one can come with a seemingly reasonable bias from either side of this equation.
2. What? Surely you jest. This from citizens of a country whose national anthem is "
God save the Queen," and whose fellow countrymen sing "Jerusalem" at every sporting event ever conceived? A country with an established Church? Look, turn the mirror inward for a moment. If you're not crazy and frightening in your religion or nationalism, perhaps the existence of similarly anthemic patriotic songs in our part of the world, sung in similarly patriotic and not-so-patriotic contexts, is equally non-indicative of any scariness on our part. Yes, we're more religious than you. But again, we're not crazy. And more than that--and here's the fundamental disconnect, I think--these are
patriotic songs for us. Do they mention God? Yes. Is that important to some of us? Absolutely. But singing them expresses primarily a certain patriotic fervor, and certainly cannot be taken as indicative as any sort of religious belief. People who don't believe in God sing them. Jews sing them, Christians sing them, Hindus sing them. It's okay, because what you're saying just doesn't have much religious significance for us. Not singing can be reasonably presumed to be a protest against government, not a call for further separation of church and state.
3. Finally, this is just clearly ridiculous--not in its soft form (Evangelical Christianity certainly does
inform many people's judgments of our foreign policy), but rather ridiculous in the very strong form taken for granted by the panellists on this radio program. Did my Evangelical friends in school genuinely want to bring me to faith? Yes. Did they think less of me for my apostacy? Perhaps, but if so, it was a private thought. They were, genuinely, my friends. I don't think I was a social outcast, by any means, for my broad disbelief.
Of course, it is not false that religion pervades much of the public sphere in America--indeed, far more than I would like--but you can't quote a statistic that says that more than 80% of Americans are actively religious and then say that our shared religion drives our foreign and domestic policy. Surely if that were true, 80% of the population would be voting in the same way in most elections. Guess what? It isn't. The missing link is a fact that we take for granted on this side of the Atlantic: the religious lobby is clearly an interest group here in America, and it represents many but not nearly all people of faith. Whether we agree with the Moral Majority or not, we know that an affiliation with it is a political one, very like an affiliation with the ACLU or National Right to Life or any of a million other interest groups. The role of religion in our government is extremely complicated, and, I think, is
not engrained in our national psyche in the way that The Moral Maze presumes.
Perhaps this is the main point I want to make, actually. Religion is deeply engrained in the personal and communal lives of many Americans, but as a
people I do not think we are religious to nearly the extent that the panellists in this radio program took for granted. That is to say, Americans do not share explicitly religious ideals as national values, and indeed we all value freedom of religion. You can be a full and good American without being Christian, but it's harder, at least, to say that you're a full American if you don't believe in liberty and democracy. It's nowhere near a legitimate talking point for Bush to say we're going into Iraq because God told us to. We'll tolerate the statement happily, it's true, but nobody would accept it as justification.
We
do share strong national ideals here, though. Liberty may well be the most fundamental of them all, in fact; if you suggest that we should be going into Iraq because we have an obligation to spread freedom and democracy, you certainly will get people thinking.
That seems at plausible, even if we're given pause by other issues ("but Iraq is a democracy!" and "are we more right to go in to better the lives of Iraqis (pretending for a moment that we might have been remotely successful) or staying out to allow a certain amount of national self-determination?" and "but isn't this moralistic stuff just a ruse when it's really about oil?"). Freedom and democracy are elements of some shared national character, and whether you're a unilateralist (a Bush "liberating" Iraq) or a multilateralist (a Wilson trying to build self-determinitive nations), a protectionist (Washington fostering his new democracy) or an interventionist (George H. W. Bush overthrowing the military
junta in Panama), these tropes inform your decisions and rouse the masses. That is not, of course, to say that all American foreign and domestic policy holds true to these ideals--after all, one can believe lying is wrong and still lie occasionally (and that does not make one's belief wrong, either), just as one can espouse the virtues of democracy while sometimes propping up undemocratic regimes. But it is to say that maybe it's a little more compelling to think that our national fervors are born of a real and, indeed, moralistic belief in certain secular ideals than in religious absolutism. To be sure, some of us may think these ideals are grounded in religion--but this is a bit circular; after all, our religion is
predicated upon our sense of our (God-given? smirk. circularity.) religious freedom. And we tell that story--the story of America, the land of freedom where the pilgrims could come practice their religion without the hand of the government upon them--much more often than we tell the story of America, the land of institutionalized Christianity.
I don't mean any of this as a judgment on any of these perspectives. We have legitimate (and not-so-legitimate) arguments in this country about the role of religion among our Founding Fathers, the appropriate place of religion in civil society, and moral questions which necessarily touch on religious belief. All I mean, here, is to suggest that these are real points of debate in our public sphere, rather than internalized and agreed-upon parts of our national psyche. It bothers me that the program made someone with my own perspective, doubts, and centricism seem as if I was on the political fringe in this country. Frankly, I just don't think that's true--and moreover, I don't think others make me feel that way, either. I have big problems with prayer in schools and religious opposition to stem cell research, among other things. But this doesn't mean my fellow Americans who are religious think of me as a lesser American or a crazy liberal or something; I mean, these are the difficult issues of our day, and everybody grants that the country is in debate about them, with mainstream, respectable, and competitive political parties coming out on opposite sides of these issues.
I don't know how one goes about making one's culture transparent to the rest of the world, but I do wish we could be more successful about it. I mean, the British share our language and our news sources; we vacation in each others' backyards; we share a basis for Common Law and are clear political allies with close historical ties that go back at least to the Magna Carta. If
they seem to have such a skewed sense of the role that religion plays in our society--an important role, to be sure, but completely unlike the role they seem to suggest--then what of the rest of the world?
And, as Zq pointed out to me over the phone, the excercise should suggest to me that we must be missing an enormous amount about
everywhere else. Cultural tropes are impossibly hard for foreigners to pick up on. But we must try, if only because I feel right now that my own country is so gravely misunderstood, and that it would serve the world better were it not so.
17
It's about 10 p.m. on a Sunday and I'm on New York State Route 17, just outside of the village of Hancock. The night is crisp and autumnal, with just a faint and lovely precipitation that freshens and cleanses.
One day soon, this road will be a part of I-86, running from Erie, Pennsylvania to the New York Thruway at Harriman, New York. Perhaps it will fill with cars. Service stations might spring up. Policement might even start to patrol the highway.
For now, though, we're the only vehicle on an empty road in upstate New York (and we, too, are empty: I am on a dark and unpopulated bus, with the two front seats to myself and with almost nobody behind me). The view out of the front window is of stars, sky, unending highway, and darkness.
Route 17 winds through Fishs Eddy and Downsville, Killawog and Liberty and Horton. If this part of the country were not so poor, it would be idyllic, nestled as it is among the Finger Lakes and rolling hills of pleasant greenery. Right now, though, the winding highway is beautiful only if one ignores the tiny clapboard houses and broken-down barns that occasionally dot the landscape. Indeed, I-86 will be something of a catalog of American poverty in the Mid-Atlantic states when it is finished. Erie, Pennsylvania, in Appalachia, is surely the highlight of the route; it's a port city that has recently been growing in population and, though heavy industry is fleeing the area, it is being replaced by numerous light-industrial plants that suggest a promising future. Corning is a nice little town, too, home to the Corning Museum of Glass, a couple of IB World Schools, and the Corning Country Club where the LPGA makes a tour stop. Other cities on the proposed route are not so lucky, though: they include Jamestown (median per-capita income: $15,316, or $33,675 per family), Olean ($17,169 and $38,355, respectively), and Elmira (a horrible amalgam of jails, strip malls, and psychiatric hospitals--with a per-capita income of $14,495 and with more than 23% of the population living below the poverty line). I-86 will also go through Binghamton, the Carousel Capital of the World. I have a soft spot in my heart for Binghamton, a city characterized by great attendance at and affinity for minor league baseball games, and a kind of picture of an out-of-date Americana that is at once enticing and far past its prime. In New York state, high school students studying for their Regents exams have to learn that Binghamton is home to a thriving shoe manufacture industry--but this is false, and has been for decades; our facts have stagnated like the city itself. In fact, the biggest local employers include Lockheed-Martin, Frito Lay, and Verizon (which operates an enormous series of call centers in the city). Once-beautiful brick buildings are falling down. A greater percentage of the population lives in poverty in Binghamton than they do even in Elmira. There's a thriving university in Binghamton, but there is nothing else.
But those are just the cities. There are no suburbs here (though sometimes people refer to "greater Binghamton," but this is a way to include the folks living in Johnson City rather than a way to talk about urban flight), and the vast space between population centers is characterized by a few ramshackle houses, a racetrack, a coal mine, and several amusingly named rivers.
As we're driving down Route 17, there are several exit signs of the blue, federally-controlled, Interstate-highway type, which are awaiting the full inauguration of I-86 down this deserted stretch of road. At exit 92, there's a sign for camping spots and I learn that one can turn off for the Russell Brook Campground. At exit 89, there's a sign for food; there's nothing on it. At exits 96, 90, and 89, somebody has put up signs labelled "Gas"--but these, too, are blank. At exit 72, there's a sign for attractions. There's nothing on it but the label.
Of course this is not yet an interstate, and I know these signs will be filled in with the relevant restaurants and gas stations soon. I can't help thinking, though, that it is somehow appropriate to pass these signs, so optimistically erected, and to see that there is nothing on offer here in the middle of nowhere. And so we drive on.
Why I'm Not a Character in A Farewell to Arms
There is a saying about Hemingway: "He never says someone is sad; rather, he makes it rain."
There is in this a great conflation of setting and character, a way of taking the mood of an individual and making it environmental. (There is also a lot of truth in the sentence, as well, and it reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. Q: Why did Ernest Hemingway's chicken cross the road? A: To die. Alone. In the rain.)
It was always hard for me to understand the "mood" of a novel. People have moods. Houses, trees, activities, the stuff of fiction: no moods. It's all an elaborate metaphor. And that would be fine, except that they test for this sort of thing on the SAT.
The flip side of this metaphor, however, I understand. My own moods are tightly linked to the weather around me. Yesterday was the first wind-whipped day of the year, and walking outside, I felt the same energy that I could watch blowing tree-leaves upside-down and newspapers across the avenues. When skies are grey and greying, or even tinged with a menacing green, I internalize a certain excitement that anticipates the electrical storm that is to follow. When the air is cool and brisk I want to play; when it is hot I am miserable (and not just, I think, because of the uncomfortable temperature or the too-bright sun); when it snows I am happy.
This is not entirely crazy. I may be highly attuned to the weather, but everybody is somewhat attuned to their environment. When lights are bright, we are all less likely to sleep (and this explains the well-lit garishness of malls and casino floors); when it's warm, we're more likely to be drowsy; if there's techno music and strobe lights, our pulse is likely to be relatively fast (even if we're not dancing); if we smell food, we're more likely to salivate and to feel hungry.
Still, I can't help but think that I take this to a strange extreme. So I don't think books have moods, and I certainly don't think rain makes this day sadder than the next (even if I do think Hemingway uses the conceit to excellent effect). But I do like to entertain the notion that I am myself a metaphor for the environment around me, that my moods reflect the world (and not the other way round). It is a nice reversal of the literary.
Jimmy's from Georgia
I went to see Jimmy Carter speak last night. In many ways, he was a compelling and interesting man, full of a desire to do good in the world and pleased to be using his post-Presidential time realizing that desire. Much of the event I was at was a question-and-answer session, and that, too, was interesting, with discussion running the gamut from the role of the UN and the appropriateness of the Iraq war to people's moral obligations in everyday life to this country's changing political landscape.
With all of this as food for thought, it might be a bit surprising that the thing I have been chewing on is the fact of Carter's amazing identification with Georgia. Carter, so a friend tells me (I haven't looked it up), is 82. And he is firmly, staunchly, happily from Georgia. He lived there, he built his Presidential library there, he returned after his time in the White House, he talks with an old Georgia twang and he made a point of centering the Carter Center in Atlanta. This is Carter's home. He doesn't want to live anywhere else, and when he was in Washington, by his own admission he missed his home.
People of my generation just aren't like that. We are citizens of the world, or at least of America, far more than we are of this or that state. There is a kind of cosmpolitanism that has taken hold across this country.
That's not to say that we forget where we come from, or that New Yorkers and Bostonites aren't in some ways fiercely loyal to their cities, but that those identifications are no longer as geographical as you might think. A friend of mine here in New York thinks of himself as a Chicagoan, to be sure, but it isn't anything geographical or even practical that he misses. He has explained to me that he will probably never live there again, in fact; his preferred jobs are in New York, while his idealized retirement is in Europe. Clinton may have grown up in a small house in Little Rock, and he may have put his Presidential library there, and he may even have been governor of Arkansas, but he's a New Yorker now.
Or, no, scratch that. He's not really a New Yorker. He's a citizen of the world, in a way that Jimmy Carter simply is not and could not be. Clinton could be at home in New York or Arkansas, London or Tokyo or Seattle or Toronto. Jimmy Carter could spend time in each of these places, could live there, but he'd never make them his
home.
I don't know what to make of this. It's just a reflection...
now & forever
Q has given me a fantastically good book about Cicero. Reading it, I find myself coming back to the oft-considered idea that the narrative of historical progress is largely a myth. I am struck by the fact that the Roman Republic, even in decline, would in many ways have been surprisingly familiar to us today: warring political factions, questions of the role of populism in the governing of the democratic state, issues to do with citizenship, courtroom trials and legalistic loopholes, land reform, taxation structures, professional sports, class woes, and on and on and on. The debates and problems of Cicero's Rome are precisely the sorts of debates and problems that I could easily imagine preoccupying Congress today. Some of them give me a ridiculous sense of
déjà vu; redistributing somebody else's land to soldiers as a reward for and incentive to service is a common feature of both ancient Rome and
modern Zimbabwe, while a political rival's decision to raze Cicero's home on the Palatine Hill and to replace it with a state-sponsored temple smacks to me of the common tactic of using
eminent domain to further one's political ties to friendly, well-connected developers--or, even more, it makes me think of the recent politically-motivated
attempt to seize Justice Souter's home in order to teach him a political lesson.
It's not just the politics and psychology of ancient Rome that we would have found familiar, however. There were physical similarities (if also great differences), and we would recognize everything from sports arenas to the library. There weren't really recognizable banks, but people did give loans and there was even a legally-mandated maximum interest rate. There were tenement blocks, single-family houses, homeowners, renters, and even occasional running water. Roads had mile markers. Girls had dollhouses.
It's not surprising that one can paint an engaging picture of Cicero and his life, either. It's got to be relatively easy to write a book about the historically distant politician--after all, we have his extensive correspondence, his books, and his speeches (improved for publication), just as we have for somebody as recent as Adams or Einstein.
But this is not meant to be a lament for progress in the world, or even an exposition of the lack thereof. I do think there are some ways in which we have undeniably learnt, built, created, and improved over the years. Modern medicine comes readily to mind, as does space exploration. Perhaps the development and use of the internet is another major progressive step, though I am somewhat skeptical. At any rate, I feel comfortable saying that there exist, simply put, new things that we can do now that we could not, and did not, do before, and that these things bring about real change in the way the human life is lived or the way that we think about ourselves and our place in the world; medicine and space exploration are some of those things. Moreover, these are things we
understand now that we did not
understand before, too. Voila! Progress.
The worldview I am presenting, then, is not one in which I descend into a chaotic postmodern narrative of human development in which we never learn and in which quality of life never improves, and during which we can never hope (as a species, or a nation, or a family, or any other group) to achieve any great goal or to approach any knew sort of objective knowledge; I emphatically find such a worldview to be false. At the same time, though, I do tend to approach narratives of progress with a major grain of salt. We
can move forward, but it is hardly the inexorable march to modernism imagined by Marx or anybody else. (I'm not saying that such an idea is particularly Marxist, just that he is the proponent of it who comes most immediately to mind.)
Tangentially, I note here that I have just rhetorically placed myself somewhere between modernism and postmodernism, which is sort of amusing. Perhaps I can coin a new "ism" halfway between the two: "stmodernism," or "osmodernism," or something else with only half of the "post" included.
The thing is, it seems to me that most of our tangible improvements (both "hard" improvements like the development of pacemakers and heat-efficient buildings and fiberoptic cables as well as the more theoretical "soft" improvements in understanding, like our knowledge of how synapses work and why heat rises) are scientific. To be sure, the random legislator has at least as much and, generally speaking, probably a lot more, power over an individual's life and happiness than does a random scientist. But the legislator is doing exactly what legislators before him did, trying to balance the same forces, encouraged by the same kinds of promises and ambitions, and plagued by the same kind of difficulties. There may be different sorts of political leaders today (a king here, a Congressman there), but both seem to me to be practicing old methods of governance, necessarily rehashing again and again what has already gone before.
This is not a bad thing. I use the word "necessarily" with care; we
need governance, social work, an economy, and literature and story as much now as ever anybody did then. (The "then" being some unspecified time in the past, I know, I know.) But these things are at once ephemeral and repeating; we will play them out now, and people will replay them over and over again into the future; and they played out in various permutations in the past as well, wherever and whenever there have been people out there (I imagine).
The work of science--at least some of the work of science--is different. It is not ephemeral, but timeless: we can forget a discovery, but it cannot be less true in the future (whereas the best way to run a society may very well change as the people change). This is complicated, of course, by the way that philosophical arguments turn into scientific investigations--but I think that that is not so difficult for us to understand intuitively. We know that Aristotle's physics and our own are different sorts of beasts; we know that Descartes talking about the mind is not the same as Harvard Med School studying the brain while looking at the output of a PET scan.
But that is, again, tangential. In the end, where I mean to be going is here: I think that all of this presents to me a sense of
who one is helping when one prefers a political, social, religious, or literary calling over a scientific or mathematical one (or vice versa). In their noblest form, the former kinds of work engage in the eternal struggle to make life better for
today's people (though, in more ignoble form, they can of course be used to make life worse, or to make the power-hungry happy, or for other nefarious but short-lived purposes). By contrast, scientific work is forward-looking, more about the good it can bring to people and the world in the future than about solving present and pressing problems (or doing harm--this, too, can be seen from a more nefarious flip-side). Even the person looking for an AIDS vaccine, very much with a mind to helping her world today, is learning something which will be useful and lifesaving even more in the future than it will be during her own time. Politics is not primarily about making the world better for all time, but shepherding one's compatriots pleasantly through the present. No politician is under the illusion that she will broker a lasting and permanent peace for all people. A scientist, however, is precisely under the impression that, if successful, she will discover (or create) something forever relevant to everybody.
This does not make the social sciences more parochial than the hard sciences, nor does it make the hard sciences more divorced from today's reality than the social sciences. But it does clarify a continuing tension in my own mind. I studied history and government in school (because I loved the former, at least, and was good at both); I believe in the public service of politics; I think history and story are deeply important, underappreciated, and excitingly able to give people a sense of themselves in the world, of cultural affinities, of analytical yet abstract thought, and even of right, good, and decency, all while being straightforwardly
fun. I have occasional crises of conscience, however, in which I consider that I should devote my life to science--especially privileging medicine, physics, certain kinds of engineering, and math (don't ask). I would not be as good a physicist as I am an historian, but I wouldn't be too shabby--and it seems, on occasion, that that would be the best way to do good in the world. The question of how to make my world a better place is idealistic and perhaps even silly, but it does deeply matter to me nonetheless; it is helpful to think of these two kinds of pursuits as so explicitly complimentary, then, and so equally necessary. (I mean, we
say that all the time, but we hardly ever act that way...)
$11
I was buying ice cream at Cold Stone a couple days ago when presented with a conundrum that has bothered me ever since. I lay it out here for your consideration (and my own).
While standing in line, I found $11 on the floor. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I first started looking at the ice creams, which means that somebody in the line probably dropped it--and whoever it was probably still was in that line, or at least in the store, when I found the cash. Brilliantly, I announced that I had just found $11 on the floor. Whose was it?
Predictably, I suppose, no fewer than six people claimed the cash as their own. Well now, what to do? Nobody gave up their claim, and in the end there was just no way to decide between them. I kept the $11 (and subsequently put 10 of it into the United Homeless Organization's collection bin, feeling something of a guilty conscience).
Nobody in the crowded shop complained at this except those who said it was their money in the first place, so I take that as a tacit statement that this was fair. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that
somebody got screwed out of their money. I was in a store--they easily could have given me change for a ten and a one, and I could have divided the money up between all the claimants. But that doesn't really seem fair, either; five of them were lying, after all. At least I was telling the truth when I walked out with the cash.
But that seems suspiciously
ex post facto, as an attempt to justify the fact that I left the shop $11 richer for no apparent reason. What's more, I'm pretty sure that one of them was telling the truth, too, since I really do think that whoever dropped the money was probably in the store at that moment. Obviously, the cash was more rightfully that person's money than my own.
The problem here is not what I did, so much as the fact that I don't really know what I
should have done. If presented with the same situation, would I handle it any better? I don't really think so.
I might not announce the amount, of course, and that seems like a sound starting point. But I also know that I never know
exactly how much cash I'm carrying. If I lost $11, I might be able to see that I'm a bit short, and I might even know that I had a 10-dollar bill in there which appears now to be missing. But I'd never manage to get the exact amount with any certainty.
I imagine that others are like me in this way. I may be wrong, and, in a similar situation, there may indeed be somebody who can claim his exact loss. But if not, how does one handle this? I mean, I walked out of the store with somebody else's money, and that person was probably right there telling me that it was hers. And if so, she got totally screwed.
Something I Didn't Consider in College
I find, as I become more firmly ensconced in the working world, that I become more boring as well. This seems to me a shame, but also not entirely a bad thing: being boring is not the same as being bored, after all, and I suspect that boringness and dependability go hand-in-hand in this world of ours. A student--of the humanities or liberal arts, at least--is expected to spend her time reading interesting things and commenting upon them all day long. She has the summers off to travel, or to work in one of many short-term jobs (each short enough to remain perpetually new and interesting), or to spend time with friends who are, one hopes, prolifically interesting when at their leisure. She can stay up late at night to talk about the meaning of life, and if she is tired in the morning, she can go to class groggy or skip class altogether.
Others get paid to lead interesting lives: the travel writer, I suspect, must work very hard to make her life uninteresting.
But the tradeoff is very real. The travel writer doesn't precisely have a home (even if she has a house), doesn't have a dependable income, doesn't have a family (or else doesn't see them very often, or else has to figure out how to move frequently with spouse and children in tow). In being predictable, one is also predictably available; I may go to work every day from 9 til whenever, and I may go to class once a week for my own perpetual sanity, and I may see the same people at each place day in and day out (and this may indeed be relatively boring)--but at least my work friends and my classmates and my bosses all know how to find me. My buddies know I'm in the city, and I will be next month, and they can plan on that. My landlord knows where my rent will come from. I know, roughly, whether or not I'll have time to go see a show on a Monday night in three weeks.
It's a boring, plodding kind of life, but it is still a good life. One needn't dislike what one boringly does.
Here, however, is an insight: professordom is an anomaly. Convincing somebody to pay you a regular, dependable salary for work that is discrete (a paper here, a new discovery there, a 9 month pedagogical period) seems to me reasonably unusual. It is made more remarkable by an expectation that one will read and investigate precisely that which is thought-provoking; indeed, this is often considered the most important part of the job. And this all seems truly fantastic when one considers that the professor does all of this in a context in which it is considered necessary to take extended periods time off (summers, sabbaticals) in order to do or discover or create explicitly interesting things. Indeed, the university professor is largely being paid to be perpetually exciting or noteworthy; if her ideas, lectures, and papers present nothing new and pique no one's interest, she has not done her job well.
There may be myriad other jobs that successfully combine stability and excitement (whether that excitement be merely intellectual or physical and bodily as well); Anderson Cooper undoubtedly has one of them, as does Derek Jeter. The insight is not therefore that professors have the best jobs in the world, but merely that such professions do exist, and are popularly attainable. Though certainly it has never before occurred to me that my fascinating history prof was as much a product of his lifestyle as a driving force behind it...
