Category Archives: Culture

Jun 22 2013

Nepali Festivals

The Dashain festival starts today (October 2011) so Hindus are planting barley.  Others will begin the ritual practices later.  What everyone looks forward to is the feasting.  Huge numbers of animals will be sacrificed.  It’s projected that only 15-20% of the goats will be of Nepali origin this year.  The remaining 80%+ will come from India.  Ideally, one should sacrifice a buffalo but most people cannot afford that.  A goat is next best but a chicken is OK.  Chicken trucks have been coming to Kathmandu for many days and chicken men walk the streets with birds casually suspended from where their wings are attached to their backs.  Most chickens look alert and oddly calm.

The latest version I’ve read of why buffaloes should be sacrificed is:  Once upon a time all the Gods and Goddesses were bothered by demons.  None had enough power to defeat them.  At last the deities began to dance.  They danced with such vigor that great clouds of dust arose.  Goddess Kali manifested from a lock of Lord Shiva’s hair (Shiva is the member of the Hindu trinity responsible for destruction and creation, Kali handles just destruction).  Kali was immediately covered with dust energized by the deities’ dancing that gave her enough power to kill the demons’ vehicles, which were buffaloes.  The unseated demons fell to the ground where they were easier to kill.  We kill buffaloes on this day to commemorate Kali’s triumph.

I learned more during the next big festival, Tihar (later in October 2011).  This is when girls offer tikka to their brothers.  Tikka means prayers, gifts and a colored powder emblem applied to their forehead.  I was puzzled because the girls of the family I was with offered it to more males than those I think of as their brothers.  I’m still not entirely clear about it but I am clearer about who can marry who.

The first-born adult sister in this family is A. Next are B, C and D.  A, C and D are married, B is not.  C could (after divorce or death) marry A’s husband but not D’s.  She must treat him as her brother and would offer him tikka.  A’s husband could marry B, C or D.  C’s husband could marry D but not A or B.

As well as rules about brother marriage there are rules about cousin marriage that are not the same for all Nepali tribes.   Many members of this family’s tribe have the family name Y or Z.  The adult sisters’ father’s family name was Y so they could not marry a man with that family name.  They also could not marry a man whose family name is Z because Y and Z are “the same”.  They could marry anyone with the same last name as their mother unless it was barred by the first set of rules.  The existence or not of a blood relationship makes no difference for marriage but they would not offer tikka to an unrelated Y or Z “brother”.

There are only five family names in the village of about 800 people where these sisters were born, two of which are “the same”.  So, if the population was equally distributed across family names, 40% of the males would be their “brothers” and off-limit for marriage.  Is this because most marriages were between people in the same village so all Ys and Zs would have been blood relatives of these Y sisters?  But why not also prohibit those with the mother’s family name?  The Y sisters’ mother was an X so 60% of the males (X, Y and Z) would have been off-limits for them.   Maybe too restrictive?  But if you only prohibit “too-close” marriage to one parent’s family, it should be the mother’s because you cannot be certain about the father in a pre-DNA-typing society.  I need to ask more questions…

The old rules are breaking down but you still must not sit close to and certainly not touch anyone of the opposite sex who the rules would allow you to marry.  You can’t be very free either with those you could not marry but it would be OK, for example, for B to sleep in one room of a house and husband-of-C to sleep in another room even if they were the only ones in the house.  It would not be OK, however, for husband-of-A to sleep in another room of the same house as B unless his wife, several children or B’s mom was also there.  “Everyone” would assume that if B and husband-of-A were alone at night in the same house they would have sex but if B and husband-of-C were in that situation “nobody” would suspect them of incestuous relations.

This is a very repressed society by our standards.  A small girl can put her arms round her father’s waist on a motorbike but not when she is older.  Only a wife can put her arms round her husband’s waist in that situation, or another man.  Society pretended homosexual love could not exist but assumed that sex between any man and woman except if it would be incestuous is inevitable any time there is an opportunity.  The norms are changing, though.  When I first started coming here in 2003 you never saw a boy and girl holding hands. but now it’s commonplace.

One more thing about marriage in Nepal:  Fathers pay for sons’ weddings.  That’s because son’s marriage brings a woman who will care for you when you are old.  It’s best to marry off daughters so you don’t have to support them (unless you have no son).  That’s why very young girls get arranged marriages.  If a son finds a prospective bride, he brings her for his parents’  approval.   Depending on her age, they will evaluate if she has a “good heart”, but mainly they want to know if her family is raising her to be a “good girl”, a good housekeeper and a dependable source of home care in the future.  It’s worth paying whatever you can for that security.  The expensive wedding honors the girl’s family for raising a girl who is worthy of such extravagance.

Jun 13 2013

Village and Urban Culture in Nepal

I recently (September 2011) learned what happens if there’s a fatal accident on your property in Kathmandu.  It’s what would happen in a rural village.

A boy hired to apply concrete facing on a house fell from the second floor and was killed.  The boy’s father knew the homeowner did nothing that contributed to the accident, but in Nepali culture he must provide compensation because the boy would have supported his parents in their old age.  Because the father has a good heart and knows the homeowner does not have much money, he requested only about two years’ wages compensation, which the homeowner had to borrow and is now working to repay.

After I wrote about Truck Drivers’ Insurance in Nepal I was asked how big is the fine for killing someone and how much for injuring them.  The fatality fine is too large relative to what a driver can earn.  That’s why they join the insurance club.  There isn’t a fixed fine for causing injury.  The problem for the driver is he becomes responsible for paying the victim’s medical costs and compensation for loss of earnings, etc., which gets complicated and unpredictable.   If nobody observes the injury he simply drives off.  If he may be caught it’s better for him to get the definite outcome, the fine for a fatality.  Vehicular homicide is always considered an accident.

Another comment was: “The drivers must feel somehow insulated from reality up in the cab or how could they back up and run over someone on purpose.  Perhaps to the Ranas other people are just animals.”   The Ranas ran Nepal for more than a century before the king regained control in 1951.  They set the example for how to drive because they were the only ones who could have motorized vehicles. They established that killing someone in this way deserves only a fine.

The Ranas used tax-gatherers to collect half or more of the peasant farmers’ annual production.  They rarely saw anyone other than their entourage and they did act as if the rest of the population were animals.  You do not treat an animal standing on the road with any courtesy, not in a hierarchical society, anyway.  The Ranas’ vehicles were driven by their resentful and/or prideful servants who would have treated the “animals” not with indifference but contempt.

Nepal still has a highly status-conscious culture.  The Ranas established a caste system that encompassed not just them and other Hindus, not even just tribal folks who were not Hindu, but also foreigners.  There was a hierarchy of tribes as well as the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy.  This aspect of Nepali culture has changed less than I imagined.  I did not at first realize there is a hierarchy because we relatively very wealthy Westerners are treated as high caste.

I also misunderstood Kathmandu Valley culture because the village culture I saw first on mountain treks is more egalitarian.  The Ranas had little influence there because there was little for them in that harsh environment.   The majority of people in the Valley now are fairly recent arrivals.  If they can get a motorbike, they are suddenly more powerful.  They’ve acquired what the Ranas had, the ability to intimidate.   Add these dark cultural legacies to the very low level of common sense among Nepalis, G says, and you have the explanation of Kathmandu traffic.

G went to a driving school when he got a motorbike.  The owner said he need not take lessons, for Nrs 3,000 (a little over $40, an average monthly wage) he would get G a license.  G said he wanted to take lessons and pass the test.  The owner said he might fail and would have to wait six months before he could take it again.  G persisted and passed.

Another question prompted by “Truck Driver’s Insurance” was about the overall legal system, which used to be controlled by the king, then by parliament.  I’ve seen no discussion of an independent judiciary under the new Constitution.  The politicians want to remain safe from prosecution for corruption unlike in India, which is also famously corrupt, where a very strong independent judiciary was inherited from the Brits.  India’s Telecom Minister is in jail for corruption right now, his boss the Minister of the Interior is under indictment, and the Prime Minister may also be indicted.

A villager we talked with yesterday said:  “We don’t need democracy, what we need is for criminals to be punished.”  That’s a common theme.  We keep hearing complaints about the breakdown of law and order.  Westerners are safe so long as they remain in the tourist areas during daylight because there will be severe retribution for messing with them.  Nepalis, however, are not safe from each other anywhere after dark and business people are not safe period.  Three men were arrested yesterday for demanding protection money from more than 50 business owners in Kathmandu.

Village style social pressure for good behavior has not yet been replaced in Kathmandu by an urban rule of law.  The distressing results illustrate why urban societies need an effective central government.

Feb 2 2013

Chaos Theory and What we Do

We’re raised to believe chaos is a bad thing, a state of disorder.  “Your room is a mess, it’s in chaos, clothes everywhere, everything filthy!”   But recent scientific discoveries shed new light on chaos.  We now know how deterministic systems like the weather can produce unpredictable behavior, a situation we think of as chaotic.

This discovery re-frames causality, the old debate about free will or determinism.  A deterministic system is one where the result of every cause is inevitable.  That seems to imply the system can only develop in one way so we could forecast its state perfectly at any future time.  Why, then, can we not predict the weather two weeks, two months or two years out?  Because very small changes can have very big results.

Chaos theory is known as the butterfly effect after a 1972 paper by Edward Lorenz: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?”  What Lorenz showed is that a flapping wing, a tiny change in a big system, can trigger a chain of events that lead to large-scale phenomena.  If the butterfly had not flapped its wings in Brazil, the system could have developed in a vastly different way.

Chaos theory does not say if we can or can not choose what we do, it does show that a tiny good act could nudge the system of behaviors and results in which we live toward an immensely happier state.  Or the reverse.  Our tiniest actions, a little bit bad, uncaring, or a little bit good could lead to results of unimaginable scope and power.  We don’t have to know whether humankind has free will, we do now know it matters very much what we do.

What should we do then?  I’m beginning to realize I completely misunderstood Eastern thinking about what to do.  They teach acceptance.  What do they mean by that?  Raised in the West, I  understood acceptance to imply an uncaring, uninvolved, inactive stance.  After quite a bit of study and reflection I realize Buddhists understand acceptance very differently; seeing things as they really are and taking action that really is helpful.

What does it mean to “see things as they really are”?  What we “see” is our interpretation of phenomena via concepts we trust.  That’s essential in many situations.  When we’re driving and we see a red traffic light, that small red signal triggers the appropriate response.  The triggered response can also be useful even when a signal is falsely interpreted.   If the tree stump that quick-matched my concept really had been a robber, my response would have been appropriate.

But there can be great harm when we “see” people behave in ways that we interpret via concepts.  Nothing like the tree stump will appear to reveal our mistake.  The wealthy-looking man will continue to look industrious and trustworthy, the raggedy one unambitious and maybe a free-loader or dangerous.  We will act toward them based on our concept and the harm will increase because we will keep “seeing” what we expect to see and reinforcing it by acting as we always do when that’s what we “see”.

I’m also realizing the definition I grew up with is fundamentally different from the Buddhist understanding of “perfect” and how Buddhist “perfect” relates to “acceptance”.   To a Buddhist, “perfect” is not a value judgment just acknowledgment that the situation at any instant is complete.  “Acceptance” means we don’t waste time and energy wishing it was some other way.  It can at this instant be no other way, it has been “perfected”.

“Seeing” is also related to “Acceptance”.  It requires training (or sudden insight) so, with undistorted awareness and acceptance of the situation, we know what really is most beneficial to do.    As chaos theory explains, we might at any moment take some small action that would nudge our fellow beings toward enormously greater happiness.

“Identity” is also related to “chaos”, “causality” and “seeing”.  What we “see” as a tornado is phenomena solidified into a concept.  It has no fixed identity.  It’s more a force than what we see and hear of dust, broken fragments of houses, and maybe Dorothy and her dog.  They’re just bits and pieces, not the essence of a thing.  What we seem to hear and feel are not an object but the manifestation of a collection of forces.  The collection would be better named by a verb, not a noun.  It’s an ever-changing aggregate of forces picking up an ever-changing collection of objects composed, if we look closely, of tinier and tinier particles.

A tornado is a different thing in the next moment, and a tiny change in what led it to appear here and now could have led to something utterly different.  It’s the same with beings.  If any one of so many small things had gone a different way, I would not exist, and any tiny change later could have led me to do entirely things with very different effects.

It is more accurate to consider tornadoes and people as processes than things, ever-changing aggregates that manifest in ways only chaos theory illuminates.

Jan 30 2013

Not Ribbit, ‘Scuse Me and a 2 by 4

Half of your EVERY income tax dollar gets spent on death and destruction!

Maybe as a semi-wrathful frog I should start by flailing a 2 by 4?  Would a grabber like “Half your EVERY Dollar!”  be better than the eyelid-closing title of my previous post, which everyone should read and think about, “Military-Industrial Complex”?

In any case, I must do a better job with Categories so it’s easier to find posts.  Inciting y’all to read the posts in the first place is not the same as helping you find potentially interesting ones from the past.  Already, I’m having trouble finding posts about specific topics from the fairly recent past.  I’ve forgotten what content went with some titles.

What the title of this post tries to suggest is first, especially when I’m in semi-wrathful frog mode, I always try to write something more worth reading than “ribbit”.  There’s so much non-fact-based, not-thought-through ribbiting around.  I try hard not to add more.  The third part of the title, “2 by 4”, I already explained.  “Scuse me” refers to the culture in which I was raised where 2 by 4s were frowned upon.  If you had something worth saying, the expectation was that in most circumstances you would have the grace to keep it to yourself.  If it really had to be said, you should do so with minimal fuss.  So, as an example, here’s a true story from a Brit friend.

Early one morning when my friend was playing in a nearby gravel pit, he found a metal canister.  It looked quite old.  What could it be?  He broke off some of the corrosion with a rock and exposed a plate with strange writing.  Maybe his dad would know what it was?  He took it home.  “I don’t know,” said his dad.  “I have to go to work in a minute but give it here, I’ll take it in the shed and buff it up a bit.”  Dad went out and had a go with his grindstone.  After he got home from work that afternoon and had his tea, he put the canister in a cardboard box, strapped it on the back of his bicycle and peddled off then waited patiently in line with the box under his arm until it was his turn.  When it was, he said: “Erm… ‘Scuse me…” to the policeman on the other side of the counter, “My boy found this.  Looks like German writing.  Thought it might be an old bomb, like.  Thought I’d best bring it here.”

Jan 25 2013

“If You Really Want to End Suffering,

it’s very simple,” Shugen Sensei told us at the start of our week of Zen Buddhist meditation: “Stop creating it.”  I’ll come back to that in a moment.  Just notice he did not say it’s easy.

Thinking why I blog reminded me of what Steve Jobs said is the secret to product development “Start somewhere”.  Just starting has always been my path.  Only later, sometimes much later, if what I started still feels worth doing, do I try to understand why.  The urge to figure out the why of Himalayan exploration, Buddhist practice, economic and governance research and blogging has now arrived.   To my surprise, it centers on ending suffering.

It all started ten years ago in the Himalayan mountains.  It wasn’t my idea to go there and I had no specific objective.  What happened was I found myself among people who appeared to be living with dignity, not aggressively, not hurriedly, and happily without the nice things we take for granted.  Could it be true?  Did they have a recipe my society might learn from?  So I kept going back.

I began to wonder if Buddhism was part of the recipe.   When we visited Buddhist temples our crew always lit lamps and prostrated.  But later, when we visited Hindu temples and the dwelling places of animist spirits, they showed reverence there, too.  I’d done some Buddhist reading by that time and was trying to meditate.  That’s why I went to the Zen monastery.

By the end of the first day I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake.  It was so hard to do nothing, sit completely still, just notice my thoughts, make no judgments, not reject or follow them.   By the end of the day I was exhausted although I’d “done” nothing.  I fell instantly asleep.  In the morning I thought, “I’ll see how it goes until breakfast”.   After breakfast I thought, “I’ll see if I can hang on ’til lunch”.  At day’s end I thought, “Maybe day three will be better“.   It was worse.  Day four was a little better, though, and so it went.  I’d suffered a lot by the end of the week but I’d also had glimpses of the truth of what Shugen Sensei told us at the start.  I was bringing my suffering onto myself.  That felt worth knowing.

Before I could go to the Himalayas I’d forced myself to retire.  It was hard because from then on, investments would have to support us.  With more time to worry, I realized my ignorance of how the economy works meant I had little confidence we’d made good investments.  So, when I wasn’t in the Himalayas I studied investment and economic theory.  The Great Recession arrived just as I was starting to feel I had the theories sufficiently clear.

Now I had to understand why our economy collapsed.  I studied governance and saw some parallels with the paralysis of government in Nepal.  That’s when I started blogging.  The US economy is embedded in the global economy.  There are so many moving parts in the system.  I had to start recording facts and analyses to get a holistic picture.  Charts and writing are my best tools for thinking and I hoped for critical feedback.

It’s only recently that I began to sense all these activities are related and they all start where Shugen Sensei was pointing.  They’re all aimed at happiness and stopping the creation of suffering.

The historical Buddha taught that we will only become truly happy when we work to end the suffering of others.  It must be so because we are not separate from others.  If they are unhappy we will also be made unhappy.  Communities were small two and a half thousand years ago.  People made each other happier or not with face to face interactions.   Today we also interact via nation-state and global systems that impact both us and future generations.  That’s why I care about governance.

Jan 23 2013

Rejection or Ignorance of Science?

In summary, Gallup writes:  “almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.”  What are they talking about?  “The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago”.

Gallup poll Origin of Humans.jpb

The existence or not of the creative entity we call God is unprovable.  Many folks are encouraged by their belief in God to do good.  Some throughout history have felt justified to torture others who do not share their belief.  Fervent belief is the problem.  That can lead to believing others should be forced to the same belief.

It is not necessarily a problem that: “78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way“.  It is a serious problem that so many Americans reject “the preponderance of the scientific literature”.  This is not the only science being rejected.

How can it be that almost half of all Americans reject tools for understanding the world?

Our educational system is failing disastrously and I do not at all understand why.   I’ve joked about its pretensions but there was after all some merit in my alma mater, “Richard Hale’s Free Grammar School for the Deserving Sons of Impecunious Gentlefolk, Founded in 1608” and there must be something different about the schooling of my fellow citizens who do accept facts and believe in reasoning.

I’ll try to say what was good about my school experience.  The British school system drove students at an early age to study either science, popularly considered to depend on reasoning, or arts, defined as nonscientific knowledge.   I was fortunate because I resisted being driven in that way; I studied both physics and literature.  I was also fortunate not to resist my English teacher’s insistence that I understand both what I read and how the language worked.

And, although physics did not yet cover quantum theory (matter and energy have properties of both particles and waves and physical systems can only have properties like energy in discrete amounts or quanta) I did get enough of an overview to see how science progresses.  Imaginative leaps verified by experiment enable theories that don’t explain all the facts to be replaced by ones that explain more.

I was taught how to use all humankind’s thinking tools.  I learned to value reason, inference and intuition.  I learned not to imagine any theory to be a final explanation.  I was encouraged to question all theories and evidence.  I was taught, in other words, how to investigate, how to learn.

Also, my parents taught me to work hard, practice and be persistent.  No question, it would have been better to try harder but that’s a different issue.

Jan 18 2013

Why Nepal?

A happy-making and thought-provoking side-effect of this blog is it’s re-establishing friendships from long ago.  One such friend recently wrote: “I’ve been reading your blogs trying to understand your fascination with Nepal”.  I’ve tried many times to understand that, too.

First it was the mountains.  But why was I susceptible to their allure?  My mom once worked as nanny for an Italian noble family and vacationed in Switzerland.  By the time I knew her, her life was utterly different.  She never spoke about the past and kept almost nothing.  One thing she did keep was a Swiss mountain scene that she put on my bedroom wall.  Maybe it fascinated me because it was so mysteriously different.  I never asked about it but it had a lasting impact.  I still have that picture.

Fall 2010 867

So, when an opportunity presented itself, I went to the mountains in Nepal.  They were even more beautiful than I’d imagined.  The light is strong and always changing, so the mountains’ appearance is different from moment to moment.  The effort required to climb and descend triggers bliss-producing endorphins.  And it’s peaceful in a way we rarely experience, no TV, radio, cellphones, internet or chatter, just the undistracted opportunity to notice.   One thing I noticed was how differently the mountain people behaved.  I saw no aggression.  They were respectful both of place and people, often playful, and seemed happy though they had barely enough to survive.  And like the mountains, the people, too, tended to be beautiful.

Fall 2010 818

Back home in the USA I studied the history of Nepal, trying to understand what shaped its culture, and found it has many different cultures.  It’s similar in the mountains to the culture of neighboring Tibet.  In the southern lowlands where there is no geographical boundary with neighboring India, the culture is Indian.  In the middle hills and Kathmandu Valley are diverse blends of the two.  Why are those cultures different?  I studied the history of India and Tibet, which led me to the history of Tibet’s neighbor, China, and I began to see the underlying force of geography on history and therefore culture.

Back in Nepal again, and its neighbors Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan, I began to realize these people who fascinated me were not so very different from me.  Can you tell the difference?

Fall 2010 955

And that led me to Buddhism.  The great majority of people in Nepal’s mountains are animist, respectful of place because there must be spirits everywhere.  How else to account for what happens?  Those with questioning minds and some education retain that foundational belief while practicing Buddhism.  It offers an established discipline for respectful practice.  It is also, as the most intelligent, thoughtful and educated Buddhist scholars say, a logical and practical guide to happiness in a universe we don’t control.  It’s much more apparent up in the mountains that while we can learn to control our mind, we cannot control the universe in which we exist.

Fall 2010 972

I never imagined we could control the universe.  I did hope to learn how to increase happiness and kindness for me and everyone I meet.  It seems not quite so difficult to work on that learning among beautiful mountains and beautiful people even though, or maybe even in part because, they are so much at risk of natural disaster and so bedeviled by centuries of corrupt administration and selfish government.

Jan 16 2013

The Canary and the Colly Bird

Colly birds are unexpectedly thought-provoking.  Learning that colly comes from the Old English col led me to the history of coal and other energy sources, how power shifts when it’s abused or new technology arrives, and differences between resource-extracting and self-sustaining economies.

Colliery work was very dangerous.  Workers who were not killed by mine shaft collapse, flooding, or explosive gas accidents died later from black-lung disease.  Mine owners in 19th century British held all the power and invested little in safety.   The workers could get no other jobs but they organized as the 20th century approached.  They balanced the owners’ power by striking and they got safer conditions.  In 1947 all mines were bought by the government.  The miners’ and other unions continued to gain power and make more demands via work stoppages that peaked in 1979 when over 29 million working days were lost.  In 1984, the miners stopped work for a year.  That cost the economy well over $2 billion but the government refused to negotiate and broke the unions’ power.  Stoppages were below 2 million working days by 1990.   The number of mine workers fell even more precipitously from over 700,000 in the 1940s to around 12,000 in 2002.

So, excessive power was abused first by the mine owners, then  the workers’ unions, then government gained the upper hand before re-privatizing the mines.  Union leaders got power when the workers were roused to desperate protest, then lost it when coal began to grow scarce and new technology eliminated the miners’ jobs.

UK Coal Production

While UK coal production fell from 112 million tonnes in 1980 to 9 in 2006, coal consumption fell only from 123 million tonnes to a low of 59 million in 2000 after which it grew to 67 million in 2006.  The growth in demand for coal came from power stations that accounted for 86% of all UK coal consumption by 2006.  The drop in UK coal production was balanced by increased imports.

UK Coal Consumption

Overall UK energy use grew from 205 to 232 million tonnes of oil equivalent since 1980.  Oil use was roughly constant, coal dropped and use of natural gas doubled.

UK Energy Use

In the USA, where I found longer term data, there is much higher dependence on oil, coal still is as important as natural gas and, as in the UK, although production from renewable sources is increasing, it is still only a small fraction of the total.  I’ll return in a future post to energy use and its implications for economies and societies but first, why did I mention the canary?

US_historical_energy_consumption

Canaries were used in British coal mines from 1911 to 1987 as an early warning system.  Carbon monoxide, methane and other toxic gases in the mine shaft would kill a canary before affecting the miners.  Its signs of distress alerted the miners to escape.  It occurred to me that our house was heated by coal when I was a kid and I liked that but I knew nothing about conditions in the mines.  Could there be  mine-shafts in our economy now where great wealth is being extracted and toxicity is building up?  I felt I should take a canary to investigate.

And why colly birds again?  Because they and other birds in the song were rich folks’ food.  The audience for and singers of the song were being promised those things.  We tend to overlook toxic by-products of rich folks’ things because we like to imagine that we, too, could be rich.  That makes us vulnerable to contemporary equivalents of the Monty Python pet store salesman who insisted the deceased Norwegian Blue parrot he sold was not dead but resting, pining for the fjords or momentarily stunned, or the 4th century Greek man complaining to a slave-merchant that his new slave died who was told: “When he was with me, he never did any such thing!”  Those jokes work because we really are vulnerable to such nonsense.

We should always, but rarely do, consider incentives.  To understand a business’ sales results, understand its sales folks’ comp plan.  To understand a society, understand the basis of its economy.  Resource-extracting endeavors like coal mining encourage owners to make their one-time harvest as fast and profitably as possible.  Self-sustaining enterprises like Nepali hill farms that require terraces to be maintained for food this year also enable them to raise crops next year, and their descendants in future years.  The different bases of the two economies drive short-term-only or short-and-long-term-optimizing behaviors.

Coal mining and subsistence farming are illustrations.  I’m no romantic about village life.  My sheep needed care every day; care in bad weather, intensive care in lambing season, care when I was sick, care that must be expert or they would die.  It’s hard and stressful work that never ends and sheep die in disasters no matter what.  There are much easier ways to support oneself.  All I’m saying is we should notice negative side-effects of the way we live and consider if there are better ways.

So, in future posts I will take a canary down some jointly-owned, private-public mine-shafts that are disproportionately rewarding for their owners and harmful to others.  Four that seem especially problematic are the:

  • Miilitary-industrial mine-shaft that keeps us in a ruinously costly perpetual state of war
  • Washington-Big Oil mine-shaft that keeps us in a military trap in the Middle East and keeps climate change off our agenda
  • Washington-healthcare industry mineshaft, our largest at 17% of GDP, which costs us twice as much as in any other rich country and makes us the only one without universal healthcare
  • Washington-Wall Street one that supplies almost every US Treasury secretary and paved the way for financial crisis, mega-bailouts and not a single prosecution of criminals.

I will also explore the economic and social impact of technology.   The UK coal miners who improved their lives by increasing their relative power later lost their livelihood to new machines.  New technologies like that can greatly increase capital returns by replacing human labor, which increases unemployment and pushes down wages.  That cuts society’s ability to pay for the newly automated products and services, and everything else.

I will try to shed light on how governments can respond to:

  • A great imbalance of power in part of the economy
  • New technologies that will have disruptive economic and social impact.
Jan 15 2013

A Semi-Wrathful Frog

Frogs are not cuddly but each could be a prince.  Today, the transformation is triggered by a princess’s kiss.  In Grimm’s version it’s when the princess disgustedly throws the frog against a wall.  In other cases the frog had only to spend a night on the princess’s pillow.

Setting fable aside, a sad fact about frogs is that one sitting in a pan of water will not notice the gradual change if the water is heated.  It will remain unaware until it dies.

A frog that touches hot water, however, will immediately jump away from the danger.  I say this because although no form of attention from a princess will transform me into a prince, I do try to notice and point out water that’s getting hotter.

A couple of days ago, someone I greatly respect asked: “Your posts seem a bit angry; do you feel that way?”  I was surprised.   “I don’t think so…  I hope not…  Hmmm, I do see what you mean.  Maybe they do sound that way.  It’s true that I very much want some things to change.”

My posts are on disparate topics but most are sparked when I notice something and feel like a frog sensing hot water.  Wanting to alert my neighbors to the danger, I probably would be semi-wrathful.

What does semi-wrathful mean?  Tibetan Buddhists use images of deities with peaceful, wrathful and semi-wrathful appearance.  Meditating on them helps practitioners see the origin of their emotional habits and misguided concepts as they work to slowly gain control of their mind.

These deities do not experience emotion as we do.  They do not feel attracted, repelled or indifferent.  They simply recognize what is good and not good behavior, speech and thoughts.

Peaceful deities help calm the crazy spinning of the mind.  Wrathful deities help destroy its passions, anger, desire and indifference.  Semi-wrathful deities help those of us who sometimes need gentle calming and sometimes more urgency to do better.

Aspiring to be a semi-wrathful frog is better than the goal many of us are given, to be lion king of the jungle.  That has three defects — lions do not live in the jungle, it is not possible to control the jungle, and above all, it’s selfish.

Selfishness makes everyone unhappy.

Jan 11 2013

Who am I With?

As we enjoy our fine breakfasts of potato curry, my Korean-American friend tells me Korean is better for people because the usage changes depending on their relationship.  It’s not just the greeting, the suffix of many words also changes.  Interactions are not effective if the wrong form of language is used.

What this means is when Korean people meet, they must immediately work out how they are related.  “I must pay close attention to you.  I can’t just start blah, blah, blah as I would to an American.  The language forces me to be more sensitive to other people.”  I knew Japanese was like this and associated it with a stilted, hierarchical culture.  Koreans, my friend says, are very different.  “We are fiery people, always yelling at each other.  But because of our language we do it respectfully.” 

Westerners also assess relative relationships.  Think of a business gathering, think of a social gathering, think of any gathering.  We treat people differently depending on what role we imagine for them, and we can imagine simultaneous different roles for the same person.   Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, the head of a big Tibetan monastery here in Boudha, who travels extensively to give teachings, said with a big smile one day last year: “It’s very strange.  Sometimes people treat me like a great teacher.  They say, “oh, you are such a great lama’ and they bow to me.  Other times they treat me like a baby who cannot do anything for himself.”

How does communication actually work?   Do we need concepts about others to interact effectively?  Does facial expression, for example, tell us more?  Recent research provides a surprising answer.

A researcher with photographs of faces of people who had won or lost a tennis match asked folks to say who had won and who lost.  Then he showed photographs of the whole body of the winners and losers.  Lastly, he showed  losers’ faces photo-shopped onto winners’ bodies  and vice versa.  Shown faces only, people were wrong as often as they were right.  With entire bodies they usually guessed correctly.  We imagine faces reveal what’s in our mind but in fact, it’s body posture.

Surely eye contact is important?  Sherry Turkle has been studying social technology for thirty years at MIT.  When I met her in the mid-90’s she was cautiously optimistic about virtual communities where adolescents (and others) can try out different personalities and learn better ways to interact.  No eye contact there.  She recently published a new book about not only social technology but the impact of always-on smartphones and also caring robots.  She is troubled by how these technologies amplify self-absorption.  Robots that make eye contact are especially seductive.

If a robot follows us with its eyes and responds to our words or gestures, we imagine it cares about us.  It fits our concept of interaction.  We are in fact happy to imagine the emotion that does not exist, maybe happier because that’s safer; we’re in control.  One of Sherry’s research volunteers was playing with her grand-daughter when her robotic “seal” was delivered.  Captivated by its responsiveness, happily imagining its need for food and sleep and responding to that, she soon ignored the real child.

Are concepts of interaction ever helpful?  My sheep didn’t seem to have concepts about each other.  Mothers and their lambs baa’d if they got separated.  Pairs of adult ewes sometimes interacted by standing nose to nose breathing lightly.  In both cases information was exchanged.  Was it correctly understood?

Maybe that’s not the right question.  Sheep and other creatures are programmed not to evaluate but respond instantly to input that might signify a threat.  There’s little or no cost when the threat is not real and great benefit when it is.  They, too, are imagining more than is being sent but in their case, it’s a survival mechanism.  Chickens run from an aircraft shadow because it could have come from a hawk

There is a form of communication that provides perfect information exchange.  Computer-computer communication includes extra data with each message so the receiver can know if the message was corrupted, and extra messages so the sender knows if the message reached its destination correctly.  Getting that to work is harder than it sounds – the network whose development I managed starting in 1971 took a couple of years to debug – but this is a case where message sent and received are identical and there’s no imagining of additional content.

The goal of humans communicating seems less clear.  We are happy to communicate with robots even though we fabricate the emotional content of message received.  We are often unhappy communicating with each other because what’s said is ambiguous and/or what’s heard is misinterpreted.  Why does this happen?  Because our interactions are formed by concepts about others and what kinds we like, don’t like or don’t care about.

Suddenly, I see the big thing.  Korean helps us notice we are speaking with a real person not an imaginary playmate.  Grandma’s robotic seal has the opposite effect, seducing her into an imaginary relationship in which she ignores her real grand-daughter.

We so easily imagine we’re communicating when all we’re really doing is entertaining ourselves.