December 30, 2005
The Use of Forest Fires
This just in from INAdaily.com (via Political Theory ), on the political use of catastrophes. Daniel Innerarity gets right to it when he notes that, although catastrophes may exact unfathomable pain and horror upon a populations, they also present unique opportunities. He notes that some people are so positioned that they can...
...exploit the state of emergency by reacting well to it. If we look at the things that excite the hottest political debate, we find catastrophic events such as forest fires, air accidents, floods and terrorist attacks, all of which cause the opposition to raise a howl. Whoever performs the thankless task of opposition knows that he or she has no better weapon at their disposal than a badly-managed catastrophe. This is his step up, the foot in the door. Governments understand this too, and prepare detailed plans for disasters so as not to give a chance to the opposition. Emergencies are now the stuff of political debate; routine business producing little political mileage, and left to the bureaucrats.
What does this mean? It means that, for those of advantageous position, enormous and catastropic difficulties can become powerful avenues of influence, that it is not only small and personal difficulties that can contain such meaning but difficulties of all size, scope, scale, and severity actually contain hidden forms of use. This utility, while, from a conventional perspective, of highly questionable moral fiber, is undeniable. Bruce Lee wrote: "Pain can be good. It is like the forest fire that, after burning, new growth springs.
The question then remains: What type of person, or character would or could capitalize on such a situation? Strong? Or weak? But then almost as an afterthought Innerarity adds:
Governing is something within the abilities of anyone; the hard thing is to be a good opposition. It is as leader of the opposition where you become believable as a leader of government. In the end, we voters think that the easier job can be done by one who has done the harder one. In other words, we are inclined to award the government to one who has performed the task of opposition. [Emphasis mine.]
Even upon the enormous playing field of global politics of these difficult times, difficulties are not always burdens.
Posted by Rob at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2005
Tempering Character
These days it seems as though we have lost focus on an important pillar in the makeup of society: strength of character. With all the corruption going on in the world of business and in the world of politics, it seems that we have lost our grip upon strength of character as a psychologically- and ethically-orienting principle.
By the term "strength of character," I mean moral and ethical character, and it seems that today there are many incentives not to be bad (public shame, fines, prison, capital punishment etc.), but there are few incentives to be good. In other words, being of strong character is not rewarded in any tangible way, that we are not “incentivized” to be moral creatures, that the men and women in power today are rewarded more often for their ability to disregard "common morality" than their strength of character, and that our society is now cast adrift because of it.
THE WEAK IN CHARACTER
When we identify a person who is weak in character, our initial reaction is very visceral, one of disgust, and we use the following expressions to describe them: no backbone, no balls, no guts, no courage, no sense of justice. Such people lack strength of heart and are emotionally crippled. We say they are immoral and corrupt. Corrupt? The idea of corruption contains the idea of cleanliness and purity, which we'll get to in a moment.
But when we suffer the presence of many such "corrupted" and "dirty" people, we watch on a societal level the weakening and collapse of justice, due to a general atrophy of honor. Today, instead of enjoying the vision, leadership, and morality of strong and principled men and women, we are surrounded by weak characters.
The enormous and seductive influence gained through following the easy paths to power causes an important cascade-effect upon our society: it creates a culture that breeds people of weak character. The very system we live in today reinforces our becoming weak and does not, in any tangible way (i.e. financially), create people strong in character or reinforce altruistic or ethical behavior.
But who, and what, are the strong in character?
THE STRONG IN CHARACTER
When you meet or hear about a person of strong character, it stops you in your tracks, doesn't it? Wow, we think, that woman! What a fighter! We note the moral fortitude of such people. We note their strength of character, their sense of indignation, their sense of honor, their moral imperative to do the right thing, and to strive to find out what is right. We note these people in our minds and respect them, but they aren't always rich people; they aren't always powerful; and they certainly aren't always physically beautiful — no, they are regular men and women who you know and affiliate with, the ones who stand up for what they believe in and make sacrifices for their principles.
There are several metaphors we use for those with strength of character. There is the general metaphor of being hard, or solid, some explicit, some obtuse:
“He’s a solid guy.”
“He’s a rock.”
“Get tough, get lean!”
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
“Ya gotta be a Teflon® pan. The stuff’s gotta slide right off.”
But people are not born strong. They are not born possessing a non-stick surface, as Teflon® pans are equipped. No, strong characters become strong because they are seasoned.
We often use the expression "incorruptible" for people of strong character. They cannot be corrupted or made dirty or tainted: they are always clean, pure, unadulterated, like unalloyed metal. Those of weak character, on the other hand, are often corrupted and made dirty. They are no longer pure or unalloyed, and it is this dirtiness and weakness about their behavior that disgusts the rest of us.
INCREASING STRENGTH OF CHARACTER
But what can we do to increase our strength of character? Are we doomed to always be weak in character? Can the weak ever become strong? The great sword-smiths of Japan use many techniques to strengthen and temper the steel they use for their blades. What can we do to temper our own character? What hammer blows can we apply to our own minds to strengthen our own character?
TEMPERING CHARACTER, SEASONING SKILLETS — A METAPHOR
One thing is absolutely for sure: there is no pill you can take that will temper your character for you. This work must be done by you, by hand: There are no shortcuts. In fact, it is because there are no shortcuts, it is because you must always do this the hard way, that we place such a premium upon strong character the way we do (or rather, the way we ought to anyway).
I would like to introduce a metaphor for strengthening character or tempering character: People Are Skillets. The metaphor implies that people are useful creatures that can withstand heat and abuse yet amazingly retain their original form and function. It implies that, like good skillets, people can be seasoned, which means to intentionally subject the object to adverse conditions to inure it.
Allow me to quote from someone who knows about skillets — chef and cookbook writer, Christopher Kimball. He discusses the best method to season skillets. Cast what he says in the context of tempering character:
"SEASONING CAST IRON COOKWARE. To season a cast iron skillet, most cookbooks instruct you to oil it and then bake at 350°F for 1 hour. This does not develop the type of deep nonstick finish you really need. The following technique is adapted from the one used by Barbara Tropp, who is an expert on wok cooking and author of The China Moon Cookbook. Place the skillet on top of the stove and turn heat to high. Tear off three wads of paper towels (two or three sheets each) and place near the stove with a bottle of vegetable oil. After about 5 minutes, when the skillet is very hot (the inside rim of the pan should also be really hot), drizzle about 2 tablespoons of oil on one of the wads and rub the inside of the skillet, including the sides. The oil will smoke. Use the second and third wads of paper towel to immediately wipe off any excess oil, pressing down hard to burnish the surface. Be careful — the pan will be very hot. It would be best to wear an oven mitt to do this. Remove pan from heat and let cool for 30 minutes. Repeat this three times. (It does not have to be done all in one day.)
After each use, immediately wipe the skillet clean with a soap-free sponge. Place back on the burner (which has been turned off) to dry while you eat. Repeat the initial process (giving the pan only one coating) after each use until the pan is thoroughly seasoned and has a deep, lustrous finish, usually a half-dozen or so times." — [Emphasis added.] Christopher Kimball, The Cook’s Bible (Little, Brown And Company, New York; 1996.) p. 9. Buy this handy cookbook here.
THE USE OF THE SKILLET METAPHOR
What is the use of this metaphor? Its utility lies here: it means you can season yourself, that you can temper your own character and acquire that "deep, lustrous, non-stick finish" possessed by all well-used and heavy-duty skillets.
What kind of workouts can we exact upon our character? How would such a workout be done? Tune in soon...
Posted by Rob at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2005
The Concept of Hard
"Do you know that the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? 'Easy' doesn't enter into grown-up life: to get anything of value, you have to sacrifice."
— Robert Spritz in “The Weather Man”
(Steve Conrad. Paramount Pictures. © 2005.)
What is so interesting to me about this movie quote is that it reveals a commonly-used and extremely powerful metaphor: difficulties are solid. (For more on the ubiquity and power of metaphor please see George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide To Poetic Metaphor (University of Chicago Press. Chicago: 1989.) here.)
This association is everywhere. You’ll find it in aphorisms: “Life is hard,” “If it don’t come hard, it don’t come right.” And you’ll find in regular street conversation: “It was a hard decision,” “Boy, dealing with children is hard to do,” “Oh man! My holiday season sucked. I had a tough time shopping.”
A tough time? What is a tough time? How can time be tough? How is it that we view abstractions as being solid? Why does this association exist? Furthermore, if you look carefully at this metaphor, you can seen that the difficulty mentioned in every case is thought of as a solid object, a hard object. Why this connection between difficulty and solidity?
And conversely, why does there appear to be a corresponding and opposite association between ease and fluidity? (i.e. “It was smooth sailing,” “Yo! It’s like buttah!” “I’m living on easy street.” Notice all the connotations of fluid motion, sailing, melting butter, streets. You get it.)
There is a big reason for these associations: we use them because we have nothing better to use. They are all we have. I find the English language in specific to be tragically deficient in this area. (Other languages I believe are also deficient, but I don’t speak Japanese or Swahili — I’m looking into this.) And it is in need of major addition. We are ill-equipped with a robust language about difficulties, adversities, and trials. In other words, we lack strong terminology for difficulty.
We depend upon these metaphors (difficulties are hard solids; eases are soft fluids) because our sense of language sprouts forth from our bodies. Our bodies become the framework for language. So, can we use a metaphor that is beyond our bodies to get beyond this and extend our language for difficulty?
This we will have to wait and see.
Posted by Rob at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2005
Why do we fall?
"And why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."
— Thomas Wayne, in "Batman Begins" (David S. Goyer. Copyright © 2005 Warner Bros. Studios.)
Posted by Rob at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)
December 25, 2005
What I Got For Christmas
I got a pulled muscle in my back! I was exercising in my father-in-law’s home gym, only with too much weight and — boop! — there goes my lower back again. It tightened up like bowstring. I knew I was in trouble, but maybe I could continue, I thought to myself, lying.
So, did I stop? Nope. I kept going, only with no weights, thinking that I could at least get a few more exercises. After about twenty minutes of pushups, curls, and the various stretches I like to do, my back felt okay, so I decided to go for a short and easy jog around the neighborhood. It wasn’t until I was a mile away that my back fully started locking up, and I experienced what surely must be the hell and torture of old age.
Now, I ask you to keep in mind that I’m a relatively young man who enjoys relatively good health, so when I was one moment jogging along, a little damaged but generally fit as a fiddle, and then the next moment I was hunched over and shuffling along like an old-timer, well, that was just a little more illumination about the realities of aging than I was expecting. It was torture. I felt a boa constrictor bind the interior of my lower abdomen and hips to the point where I could barely walk. I returned back to the house, (oh, by the way, it started raining on me too) and stretched my back some more and took a very hot shower and thought it was all over, until I bent over to put my shoes on. Oh my god the pain. I couldn’t do it. I could not even put on my socks. I had to stand at the base of the stairs and lift my foot up on the fourth step and with gingerly care slip my sock and shoe on, waiting for a shockwave of pain.
Well, I’ll be alright, I hope, but if this is the way old people live their lives, with this kind of pain, I understand why they’re sometimes cranky, why they sometimes complain, and why they sometimes seem to have it so rough. Meaningless difficulties like this are the toughest to make sense of — although my painful experience was rife with meaning: don’t do such a stupid thing, and increase the weights I lift in small increments — but old people have already learned those lessons, and their pain is meaningless. Or is it?
Posted by Rob at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2005
The Importance Of The Christmas Obstacles
What good would life be without obstacles? Now, I’m not talking about monstrous and unbeatable obstacles but about manageable ones, the kind that when we overcome them, they bring us a tangible, if not a little mild, amount of satisfaction. Celebrating these difficulties is part of what this website is all about.
So when you’re at your family’s house and you are inundated with the overwhelming and often irritating minutia that compose our Christmas experiences, remember this: if it was easy — if dealing with your siblings, your parents, your nieces and nephews, and extended families, the fights, the old wounds, and the great many skeletons-in-the-closet — what would you need to leave for? If living with all of those people was simple and pleasant, you’d probably still be living with them, and what would your life be like then?
So, you owe to those irritants a special nod, a little acknowledgement, for the role they play in the arc of your life. We all do. They’re the tiny roadblocks, repellents, and pinpricks that help us live the lives we do. They’re the reason we move out, the reason we pick where we live, and we expect them when we come back home. So when your pa-tience gets thin, just think to yourself: I won’t be here forever!
Here’s hoping you overcome all the tiny difficulties that assault us this time of year. Merry Christmas!
Posted by Rob at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)
December 23, 2005
The Lessons of Difficulty
What did New York learn from the TWU strike? What did I learn from it? And the TWU itself, what did it learn from its own strike?
New York, as a whole, learned a lot about annoyance; it learned that collectively the public is one gigantic irritant to itself and is very quickly brought to the brink of total breakdown. It learned about weakness, about dependence, and about the pain and discomfort of adaptation.
What did the TWU learn? It learned that its hands were tied from the beginning by the Taylor law and, even as it sought to cripple the city and bring it to its knees in order to prove its worth, it, the TWU itself, was legally crippled and not fully able to flex its muscle and apply the incredible leverage it has at its disposal.
What did I learn? I learned these past three days that my habit of regularly biking to work came in handy and that the winter-cycling apparel that I have was a very, very good thing to own. I learned that cycling to work in the winter (during normal transit conditions, during times with no transit strike) is largely one of nearly total isolation: no one is on the bike paths, no one is crossing the bridges, no one is bicycling down the bike lanes, and that it is blissfully boring and pleasant. I learned that anything disturbing mass transit ends up causing me, as I ride on my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge, a lot of irritation, a lot of anxiety, and literally, because of all the exhaust fumes I inhaled, a lot of headaches. Yep, I had a whopper last night the entire ride home, from the exhaust.
I wonder: what else can I, the TWU, and New York as a whole, learn from this experience? What kind of lessons can come from such a enormous and encompassing difficulty?
Posted by Rob at 04:22 AM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2005
The Great Metropolitan Crutch
Although the MTA Transit strike has disrupted the lives of millions of people in an intimate and very real manner, the strike is also revealing from an abstract point of view.
It shows, in incredible clarity, how dependent our society has become on heavy machinery, the heavy machinery like that used by the MTA subway system. These devices have become for us one gigantic CRUTCH. This machinery moves us, carries us to work and back home again; it allows us to run businesses, allows people who live far away to travel long distances to work; it does our heavy lifting, and in general we depend upon it to do our work for us. And without this crutch, what happens?
People, in general, have become annoyed. They ask: Where is our crutch? Where is the tool that we used to have? Are we not being deprived of this crutch? Is not this crutch our right? Upon the third day of the strike, I notice that people are settling in and adapting to new ways of getting to work, but that patience is waining, and the sense of irritation is heating up like a piece of coal.
I find it profitable to skew the issues surrounding the transit strike using this crutch metaphor: the Transit Union operates and controls the crutch, and the rest of us depend upon it and have taken it for granted; and when the Transit Union takes this crutch away, we suffer and have to limp along, metaphorically speaking, without it.
There are times when the injured or handicapped must not use crutches: they must move on their own. And so must we, without complaints, without anger, without irritation.
The crutch is gone, the training wheels are taken away, the starling falls from its nest and beats its wings. Difficulties like this make us stronger, do they not?
Posted by Rob at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2005
Welcome to These Difficult Times! Welcome to the Transit Strike!
Welcome to These Difficult Times! Welcome to the Transit Strike!
On this blog I will write about and discuss what I will refer to as the Law Of Difficulty.
What is The Law Of Difficulty, you ask? It is a philosophical system of satisfaction and way of life that seeks to empower you, the reader of this webpage, with a simple (yet counterintuitive) path toward tangible satisfaction and pleasure. As you read these pages, I will continue to lay the groundwork and fundaments of this law.
But, to inaugurate this website first entry, I will begin with a short post about a central tenet of this philosophy, one that is exemplified by the disruptive effects of the New York City MTA Transit strike, which is currently choking the economy of New York to a grinding halt, in perfect synchronicity with the holiday shopping season.
THE TRANSIT STRIKE
Let me now state that I support the transit strike. As an agent of refreshing contrast to convenience, ease, and technology, the strike has forced millions of people to either stay home from work or to find another way, either by commuting by car with other people, or by bicycling, rollerblading, skateboarding, scootering, running, and, most of all, by walking.
What has the strike done to New Yorkers? It has deeply disrupted the lives of nearly every New Yorker. But has it ruined their lives? No. Has it forced them to appreciate the myriad of methods of transportation available to them, including their own legs and feet? Yes, it has. From the perspective of taking technology like this for granted, has the strike been a step backwards in technological progress? Yes, it has. But is this step backward refreshing? Yes, but only if you are a New Yorker who is prepared to forgo the conveniences of highway and railway transportation.
As a difficulty of obvious weight and importance to the New York metropolitan area, the transit strike is one that hits different people in different ways, but please remember this: Difficulties are not always burdens. Sometimes they present avenues to satisfaction.
After walking seven miles to work, did you not feel satisfied? After walking past people trapped in their cars, honking and impatient within the incredible gridlock that froze the island of Manhattan, did you not feel glad you at least could walk? When was the last time you appreciated the simple act of walking? If you are like me, sometimes you go a long time without thinking of little things like this.
The idea that difficulties are not always burdens is one of the central ideas within the Law of Difficulty.
Posted by Rob at 01:53 AM | Comments (0)