Reviews of Crash and the Accidental Theorist
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Last night's film was Crash, a series of connected vignettes about interracial clashes in the mean streets of
I have been working over my book-in-progress of proposals to save the world from the climate crisis. Over the past few days my time was spent picking over the early essays where it all began, in and around 2003. It is interesting to notice how migraines gave birth in me to a desire for health, and a desire for health pushed older utopian dreams into something that might be doable. It started when I noticed on vacation what a large percentage of my fellow tourists in
"At whatever time highly-skilled physicians shall have developed the healing of illnesses by means of foods, and shall make provision for simple foods, and shall prohibit humankind from living as slaves to their lustful appetites, it is certain that the incidence of chronic and diversified illnesses will abate, and the general health of all mankind will be much improved. This is destined to come about. In the same way, in the character, the conduct and the manners of men, universal modifications will be made." (Selections, 156)
The vexing question of what these "universal modifications" of the machineries of conduct and manners might look like has preoccupied me all these years. I look at the world through the lens of movies like Crash and wonder what the specific modifications need to be, and how to start it all going. A universal modification would start with the physical design, and proceed to the metaphysical later. One thing is sure, it cannot start in one place, be it
A universal modification, therefore, would have to begin its planning stage at the universal gathering of humanity that Baha'u'llah called for but its implementation stage would take place everywhere on the planet, especially in extreme environments, even in space. If it has any semblance to my suggestion of cooperative mound housing, experimental projects would be carried on in natural jungles like the rain forest and human jungles like
As these cooperative lifestyle experts gain in experience, their standards would be constantly readjusted to maximize health benefits in mound developments. The following admittedly difficult passage of Aristotle describes the general goal of this environmental re-design:
"... the art of gymnastic considers not only the suitableness of different modes of training to different bodies (2), but what sort is absolutely the best (1); (for the absolutely best must suit that which is by nature best and best furnished with the means of life), and also what common form of training is adapted to the great majority of men (4). And if a man does not desire the best habit of body, or the greatest skill in gymnastics, which might be attained by him, still the trainer or the teacher of gymnastic should be able to impart any lower degree of either (3). The same principle equally holds in medicine and shipbuilding, and the making of clothes, and in the arts generally." (Politics, Book IV, Part I)
In antiquity Aristotle was known as one of the best stylists ever, his Greek prose being described as a "river of gold" but unfortunately his finished books were lost and we have only his lecture notes, which is why the above is phrased in such obscure language. But it is very important, so I will go into this in detail.
As I understand him, Aristotle is anticipating what are now called life coaches, personal trainers who put adults onto a different path of self improvement. He assumes like all Greeks that the basis of education is gymnastics (health of the body) and music (health of the soul). An expert in gymnastics can train an athlete to extreme performance in a particular sport, but also can bring an ordinary person with average abilities to a higher level of proficiency than he would otherwise attain. (Note that gymnastics is not part of medicine, he mentions the two as separate arts. Health maintenance and the cure of sickness are different areas of expertise.) Music and gymnastics were the twin pillars of the Greek education, and this system has influenced educators to this day. Unfortunately, we have endemic obesity and ubiquitous emotional strain, as depicted in the film Crash, because we have restricted the lessons of gymnastics and music to the school years and have not made them standards of living from cradle to grave.
What Aristotle is getting at, it seems to me, is that every trade and area of scientific investigation has a specific and a general application. A trainer or expert in gymnastics can benefit athletes specifically but also has a duty generally to see to it that everyone attains their own peak of physical health. Similarly an expert in music, which includes all the arts as well as religion, teaches both a specific skill in a particular instrument or discipline, and also has a more general duty to the cure and maintenance of souls.
The same is true of every other trade and profession, each has both a specific and a general service. But these two, gymnastics and music, stand above. Why? Because everybody has a body and a soul, and everybody has a duty to maintain them at every stage of life, from infancy to old age, according to the latest evidence-based, scientifically-derived standard. These two are the sciences of all other sciences. By putting them first science and the professions will go beyond their particular specialties and have a primary say in the general good and in the design of mound housing projects. This will, I hope, effect a "universal modification in conduct and manners."
As if to demonstrate the need of every discipline to get involved in the crusade to eliminate quasi-science and uphold an evidence-based consensus on the design of things, I have been drawn to a set of essays first published in Slate Magazine by Paul Krugman called,
The Accidental Theorist; And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science, W.W. Norton and Company,
The dust jacket declares that Krugman is the best popularizer of economics since John Kenneth Galbraith. His explanation of economics and what it involves is certainly among the best I have ever seen. To back this up, although his book has tough competition from the many other volumes in my towering pile of books being read, I have gone through this one at a steady clip. I feel this poor academic's frustration with popular superstitions pretending to be sound knowledge. I feel it at a gut level, for example, when he says,
"Muddled thinking about the subject of jobs flourishes, in some cases at the highest levels of government. Particularly depressing for anyone who would like to believe in intellectual progress is the reappearance of decades -- and sometimes centuries-old fallacies stated as if they were profound and novel insights -- as if those who propound them have transcended conventional views, when in fact they have merely failed to understand them." (Accidental Tourist, 16)
I suppose I should pity doctors more than economists, for physicians go to school for over a decade only to see ignorant charlatans and pretenders spouting bromides and filling the airwaves and bookshelves with shoddy advice that kills rather than cures. But now that I think of it, a depressed or inflated economy run by muddled quacks may have a worse effect, in the broad picture, than pseudo-scientific medical cures.
In any case, Krugman notes that a common error among pretenders to economic knowledge is to commit the fallacy of composition, to imagine that what is true of a part is true of the whole. The entire economy, macro-economics, does not operate according to the same market rules that a single industry does. I will not go into the details, suffice to say that entire books on economics have been written by clowns ignorant of this not-so-complicated mistake. I was reminded of a similar fallacy of composition common in popular thinking about God. We too often imagine that what is true for worldlings is true of the Manifestation, and that what applies to the Manifestation applies to God. If it were so, God would be the murderer of us all, which makes no sense since He is the Creator of us all too. Such are fallacies of composition.
One of the worst fallacies that continue to return no matter how often they are refuted is supply-side economics. Krugman says that in his early years he thought it would help if he ridiculed it, but he has since learned better. It comes back like a zombie from the grave in spite of having no validity simply because it is in the narrow interests of the rich to support it. Since the rich have almost unlimited power and influence such pandering follies will keep coming back until the end of time.
"Biologist Richard Dawkins has argued famously that ideas spread from mind to mind much as viruses spread from host to host. Its an exhilaratingly cynical view, because it suggests that to succeed an idea need not be true or even useful, as long as it has what it takes to propagate itself. (A religious faith that disposes its believers to become martyrs may be quite false, and lethal to its adherents, yet persist if each martyr inspires others.) Supply-side economics, then, is like one of those African viruses that, however often it may be eradicated from the settled areas, is always out there in the bush, waiting for new victims." (Accidental Tourist, 46)
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