Candide by Voltaire

I wish I had gotten more out of this volume than I did. I picked it up thinking it was a philosophical novel, and was disappointed to find that it is little more than a philosophical fable. 

The philosophy is revealed by the title -- both of the book and of its central character -- Candide, meaning, if I understand it correctly, a kind of naïve optimism in Voltaire’s native French. And it is an attack on the philosophic fashion of its time, that one should approach all calamities in one’s life with an understanding that it could not have been any other way, that one is living in the best of all possible worlds.

From the book’s introduction:

The reasons for Candide’s immediate and enduring success with readers are many. It is a supremely wrought tragicomedy that slyly and irresistibly induces us to laugh at and simultaneously reflect upon the most dreadful events that befall humankind. It appeals to us today because, nearly 250 years after its publication, it has lost none of its relevance or satirical sting. It is particularly modern and pertinent because its dark comic vision is essentially in keeping with our own awareness of what separates our need for order, clarity, and rationality from the brutal reality of a chaotic world.

The fiercely relentless attack Candide unleashes against the evils of religious fanaticism, war, colonialism, slavery, and mass atrocities is more relevant that ever. The naive, young hero of the tale obstinately seeks personal happiness in a world beleaguered by all kinds of catastrophes wrought by the blind, unleashed forces of nature -- such as earthquakes and epidemic diseases -- as well as by violent, destructive human passions.

This is indeed the book I read, but it is, I think, the most optimistic of interpretations. Somewhere else in the introduction, it supposes that Voltaire himself would “probably have been both pleasantly surprised as well as bemused by the exceptional and enduring popularity of Candide, which he viewed as one of his minor works, unworthy to vie with his tragedies, historical essays, and epic and philosophical poems, on which he staked his posthumous reputation.”

Bemused is a good word for my reaction as well. I found this work to be little more than a sketch, a kind of rough first draft that should have been fleshed out into a full narrative if its author wanted it to have its full effect. Don’t get me wrong, stuff happens in this short novel, almost too much stuff, but who are these people that this stuff is happening to? I don’t really know, and characters come on and off the stage too rapidly for me to develop any kind of rooting interest in any of them.

But that’s okay, I guess, because it’s a fable, not a novel. The characters in it are not supposed to be people, they’re supposed to simply represent ideas or archetypes. The story isn’t the stuff that happens. The story is the clash of these archetypal ideas. In that regard it reminds me a little of Don Quixote, but Cervantes pulls off something transcendent that I’m not sure Voltaire had the time or interest to develop.

Here’s the closing paragraph, in which at least the moral of the tale is well represented. After years of wandering and trouble, Candide and his small band of companions have found a kind of peace on a tiny plot of land that they all share.

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable scheme, and each began to exercise his talents. The little piece of ground yielded a plentiful crop. Cunegonde indeed was very ugly, but she became excellent at pastry-work. Pacquette embroidered, the old woman took care of the linen. Everyone, down to Brother Giroflee, did some service. He was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss sometimes would say to Candide: “All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for your love of Miss Cunegonde, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not travelled across America on foot, had you not stabbed the Baron with your sword, and had you not lost all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, then you wouldn’t be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” “Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but we must cultivate our garden.”

We must cultivate our garden. In other words, rather than blindly suffer the slings and arrows of our outrageous fortune, we must act and try to improve our situation. Yes, calamity will befall us all, but those who seek will always find more than those who cower in place.

That’s fine, but the deepest wisdom I found didn’t come from Candide but from the “old woman” he picks up along the way. She is one of the many beaten and tortured creatures that Candide meets in his beaten and tortured journeys. And after describing the specific toils and abuses that have comprised her life, she says this to Candide and his love Cunegonde on a sea voyage they take together:

In the different countries in which it has been my fate to wander, and the many inns where I have been a servant, I have observed a prodigious number of people who held their existence in abhorrence, and yet I never knew more than twelve who voluntarily put an end to the misery: namely, three negroes, four Englishmen, four Genoese, and a German professor named Robek. My last place was with the Jew, Don Issachar, who attached me to your service, my fair lady; to whose destinies I have attached myself, and have been more concerned with your misfortunes than with my own. I would never have even mentioned the matter to you, if you had not irked me a little bit; and it was not customary to tell stories on board a ship in order to pass away the time. In short, my dear miss, I have a great deal of knowledge and experience in the world; therefore, take my advice -- divert yourself, and ask each passenger to tell his story, and of these is one of them all who has not curses his existence many times, said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.

“This ridiculous weakness,” the old woman reminds us, “is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he had gnawed into our hearts?”

Yes, cultivate your garden. But while you’re cultivating, remember that life is and always will be a serpent gnawing into your heart. There is no other remedy. Carry the burden, since the burden is your existence.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 71 (DRAFT)

In order to meet with Gerald, I had to cancel my lunch date with Bethany.

“Hey,” I said into the phone after calling her extension. “Can we take a raincheck on lunch today?”

“Sure, I guess,” she said. “Is something up?”

“Not sure, yet.”

Gerald and I didn’t go to the basement. There was a little bistro down the street that Gerald thought would be much more appropriate to our needs. It was part of a strange urban bed and breakfast and had only six or seven tables, none of them large enough for even the two people that were expected to sit at each. It had a French theme and was completely overgrown with houseplants, any one of which clearly received more water than any of the paying guests.

Getting settled, reviewing the menu, hearing the specials, placing our orders, waiting for the food to arrive -- through it all Gerald kept the conversation light and friendly. Had Jenny and I ever spent a night at this bed and breakfast? He had once, with his wife, before his divorce, and it was nice, a kind of get away. They felt like tourists in their home city, going to the art museum, having dinner at one of those ritzy places overlooking the lake, taking breakfast in bed the following morning. It was almost like a second honeymoon, but God knows it wasn’t enough to save the marriage. He and Kate probably shouldn’t have tied the knot in the first place, but at least there were no children to worry about. They still saw each other from time to time, that was the funny part, usually for a play or a concert or something they could both agree on. But never a movie. God no, he and Kate had completely opposite tastes when it came to movies.

It was more information than I wanted to know, but I smiled and nodded politely, wondering only when he was going to shift to what we had come here to discuss. Eventually, the waitress returned with two oversized plates, one in each hand, and placed them down in front of each of us -- mine a few pillowy ravioli looking abandoned in their cream sauce; Gerald’s a towering pile of salad with more Bibb lettuce than anything else. 

“Can I get you gentlemen anything else?” the waitress asked us. She was older than my mother, with her hair dyed blue and enormous discs in her earlobes.

“No, thank you,” Gerald said for both of us.

She disappeared and Gerald and I sat staring at each other.

“Dig in,” Gerald told me, picking up his fork and knife and beginning to shred his lettuce into a thousand smaller pieces.

I had the first ravioli in my mouth, cradling it on my tongue, while sucking in some air in an attempt to cool it down, when Gerald shifted gears.

“I have a message for you.”

I grabbed my water and poured some into my mouth. “You do?” I said, when enough had been cleared to allow me to speak.

“Yes. From Paul Webster. I called him this morning, and told him we were having lunch today.”

Having lunch today. Three innocent words. People had lunch all the time, didn’t they? Every day, as a matter of fact.

“And?” I said around an ice cube.

“He wants you to give him a call this afternoon.”

“He does?”

“He does. I’m going to give you all the particulars, and hopefully that'll be enough for you, but he wants to encourage you directly. Wants you to know that he is fully on board with this, and that he’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

“Taken care of?” I asked, suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

So Gerald began to tell me. He told me we would each resign in the coming weeks, him first, and then me a few weeks later. Not so close together that it would raise any suspicion. He had already filed the incorporation papers and he already had his business ID, so for all legal intents and purposes, his new firm, Kreiger and Associates, was already alive and kicking, albeit it wouldn’t have any clients or cash flow until Paul severed Mary’s contract and pivoted to us. It might take a month or two before either one of us would start getting paid, but when it started, Gerald had already negotiated a package that represented a big bump for the both of us. Mine would be thirty percent more than I was currently making. What did I think of that?

What did I think of that? I wanted to know how he knew what I was currently making, that’s what I thought of that.

“Paul told me,” Gerald said simply, as if the subject of my salary was a common topic of discussion between the two of them.

That rubbed me the wrong way. Paul was a Board member, so he had access to the organization’s finances, but he wasn’t supposed to know what individual staff people were being paid. From the client’s point of view, they paid a flat fee to Mary’s company for all the services we provided, and how Mary decided to carve that up among the rest of us was her business. But Board members were notoriously nosy about those kinds of things, especially with what they often erroneously thought to be highly compensated staff, and it wasn’t unusual for such numbers to get passed around on the backs of envelopes.

“What’s your bump going to be?” I asked.

Gerald smiled. “Bigger than yours,” he said unapologetically. “But it’s my company. You’ll be working for me.”

He said those words like they were the most attractive part of the offer he was making, but that’s not how I heard them. In fact, the thought of reporting to Gerald Kreiger almost made me choke on my pasta. I tried to hide my reaction by coughing into my fist.

Gerald went on. He talked about how the company would be structured, and who we would lure out of Mary’s company in order to fill many of the positions. He talked about how he would be the lead on the client and how I would serve as his deputy, but how different that would be compared to the box Mary had painted me in. He would initially focus on the transition and the turnaround -- he was good at that kind of thing -- but once the client organization was up and running on all cylinders, he would turn its operation over to me so that he could focus on new client acquisition. That’s the only way to grow in this business, he assured me, gobbling up as many clients as you can and staffing them as thinly as possible. Once he pivoted in that direction, the day-to-day would be all mine, and I could start doing all the things Mary would never let me do now.

I’ll be honest. The more he talked the less appealing the offer became to me. I’ve told you about Gerald. He was a pompous ass, and that side of him was on full display as he laid out all of his half-baked plans. There were a thousand holes in what he was planning, some of them big enough to drive a monster truck through, and every time I pointed one of them out to him he dismissed it with a wave of class-ringed hand. 

“Oh, we’ll figure that out,” he would say, his confidence in his use of the word “we” indicative of his delusion that he was effectively selling me. “We can’t write everything in advance. But we’ll tackle that, better than Mary would ever dream of.”

His animosity against Mary was also on full display. He hated her -- even more than I did, it seemed. She was small-minded and in-over-her-head and an idiot. Sure, I could go along with those ideas, but with Gerald the anger seemed to go deeper than that. It wasn’t just that she was a clown, somehow she was a clown that was making her audience laugh at Gerald’s expense. As if her incompetence was somehow a direct threat to Gerald’s competence, that by working under her he was admitting that he was as much of a fraud as she was.

“She won’t know what hit her,” he said more than once during that lunch conversation, a devilish twinkle always coming into his eye. “When I take her client away from her, she just won’t know what hit her.”

And that seemed to be the only thing Gerald was really clear about. Everything else was fuzzy, something to be worked out later, after we had both quit our jobs and sat waiting for Paul Webster to make his move. By the time we were done with our meals I had more or less decided that I wasn’t going to follow Gerald on his mad quest, even regardless of what Paul Webster had to say, should I ever even call him. Calling him, I knew, would make me complicit in this conspiracy, and that wasn’t something I was willing to do. If I was going to turn State’s witness on Gerald, I would need to keep my nose clean.

“So, what do you think?” Gerald asked me near the end, most of the tiny bits of lettuce cleaned off his plate and only one stuck in his teeth. 

“I’ll need to think about it,” I said casually. “Talk to my wife.”

“Of course,” Gerald said easily. “Take a day. Or even two. And give Paul Webster a call. If you’ve got any doubts, he’ll remove them. The future is going to be so much brighter. For both of us.”

“You gentleman need anything else?” It was our blue-haired waitress.

“We’re good,” Gerald said confidently. “Just the check, please.”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is a novel with a lot of layers to it. And I’m not sure I can really do justice to it. Frankly, there were times when I had some difficulty understanding who was who and what was going on. All I think I can do now is share my reactions to the words that are there, and try to pull them together into something universal, something we can all understand.

And, that, I think I can do.

Sethe had given little thought to the white dress until Paul D came, and then she remembered Denver’s interpretation: plans. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled just thinking about what the word could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years and only that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made -- getting away from Sweet Home -- went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.

Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago did cross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought also of the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove in her arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

Beloved, it turns out, is a novelized version of real events, and it centers on a slave woman, called Sethe in the novel, living in northern Kentucky in the 1850s. Sethe wants to flee to the freedom of the Ohio River and the Underground Railroad, but is held in place by her relationships with her children and the men who have and have not fathered them.

In this early passage we get a glimpse of what her life -- and the lives of the sixty million and more to whom Morrison dedicated her novel -- was really like. It was an aborted life, absent the luxury of planning, the ability to hope for the future, to even count on the permanence of the present.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.

But despite this oppressive reality, Sethe does love, does love her children more than she probably should, knowing that they, like everything around her and everything given to her, were owned not by her nor by her heart, but by someone and something else; her master, yes, but also the whole of the society in which she helplessly swam.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

In this world, white and black are inexorably linked, linked not just by ownership, but by blood as well, because, of course there is miscegenation, and some of Sethe’s children are the products of these recognized and unrecognized acts.

And when the truth is against the wall, when Sethe has fled to Ohio with her children, and when she has been cornered in a dark place waiting for those with kind hearts to save her while those with dark hearts closed in, she does what might seem unthinkable, but was in fact the only thing she could do, the only path that existed in the dark, tangled jungle of the white people’s creation. She begins to murder her children, taking from them a lifetime of pain and taking from her owner the value that they represent, openly in the market, and, guardedly, within his heart.

These are the facts of the case on which the novel is based, but the novel uses them primarily as its launching pad -- in fact, obscuring this truth until deep within the narrative. The bulk of the novel focuses not as much on these facts, but on Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child that reappears and competes for Sethe’s love and attention with Denver, Sethe’s living child. 

Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning -- that Beloved might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant -- what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life -- Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that -- far worse -- was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.

And in this respect, Morrison, I think, is helping us understand that this pain and this love is eternal -- this pain of not having what one loves, and this love that surpasses even that limitation -- that not even the passage of time can erase it from Sethe’s being, just as not even the eventual passage of emancipation and reform can erase it from our consciousness and our understanding of who and what we are.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 70 (DRAFT)

Gerald left my office door standing open. He hadn’t been gone more than ten seconds before I went over and closed it. First I looked out into the larger office. It was still early, but more than half of the pods were already occupied, people blowing on their coffee cups as they waited for their computers to boot up.

I looked right, down where Don’s Enormous Pod was situated. Given the angles and the heights of the intervening pod walls I couldn’t tell if Don was there or not. I looked left and saw Ruthie’s empty desk guarding Mary’s open door. It looked very much like the lights in her office were still off.

I shut my door and sat down again at my desk. I looked at my computer screen for a few moments, the characters of the email message I had been working on as meaningless to me as Sanskrit.

I picked up my phone and dialed my home number.

“Hello?” Jenny said guardedly.

“Hi,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “What are you doing?”

“I’m feeding Jacob his breakfast, what do you think I’m doing?”

Ouch. “I thought you might be sticking pins in that voodoo doll of me you keep under our bed.”

“I’ll do that later,” she said.

“Look, I know you’re still mad at me, but I need that incredible brain of yours right now. Can we call a truce for the next 10 minutes or so?”

“Hold on,” she said. “Let me get this plate of fruit out to Jacob, first.”

I waited patiently, hearing the knife hit the cutting board a few times and then her footsteps moving away. Here you go, honey, I heard faintly, and then footsteps coming back.

“What’s up?”

Her tone had shifted, and I was glad to hear it. Prior to her pregnancies, Jenny had been a public relations professional, and had been in and out of more companies that I had. In times like this I looked to her as a kind of business coach, and she knew it.

I told her everything that had happened so far that morning, skipping over my encounter with Bethany and going right to the discussion with Gerald. I told her that he was planning to quit, planning to take the client and start his own business, that he wanted me to go with him, and that Paul Webster had said there would be no deal without me.

“Whoa,” she said.

“I know, right? What do you think?”

There was a pause on the line. I imagined Jenny standing in our kitchen in her bathrobe and disheveled hair, one hand on her pregnant belly and the other holding the phone against her ear. In the background I heard Jacob call out for more blueberries.

“Just a minute, honey,” Jenny said to him, and then aimed her voice back into the phone. “I think you should call Paul Webster.”

That came out of left field. “What? Why would I do that?”

“Mommy! I want more blueberries!”

“How do you know Gerald is telling you the truth?”

“Why would he lie about that?”

“Because he’s a shifty asshole. You know that.”

“MOMMY!”

“Oh, Jesus. Wait a minute, Alan.”

While she was gone I turned things over in my mind. Jenny, of course, was right. Gerald was a shifty asshole, but even so, I didn’t see how a lie about Paul Webster wanting me to be part of the deal made any sense. If that wasn’t true, why would Gerald even bring me into the loop? Despite his protestations, he didn’t think highly of me. If Paul wasn’t compelling my inclusion, what other reason would Gerald have for approaching me? I mean, with this kind of information, I had him over a barrel. One word to Mary and Gerald and his secret deal would both be dead. 

I told Jenny as much when she returned to the phone.

“Yes, I guess that might be true,” she admitted. “But I don’t trust Gerald and you probably shouldn’t either. He’s asking you to quit your job, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He says we have to both be clear of the company before Paul orchestrates the vote to cancel Mary’s contract at the Board meeting.”

“That’s a pretty big risk, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“You guess? Quit your job and our only source of income on nothing more than the word of Gerald Kreiger?”

Okay, I acknowledged, it was a pretty big risk. No guessing about it. I told Jenny about the lunch appointment Gerald had made with me, about how he promised to fill me in on more of the details and make the formal offer of employment that I deserved.

“Uh huh,” Jenny said, less than impressed. “I would still call Paul Webster. If not before lunch then definitely after. You absolutely shouldn’t make any commitment to Gerald without talking to Paul and verifying the story.”

I told her not to worry, that under no circumstances was I accepting or quitting any jobs today. I would gather what information I could and then we could talk about it over dinner tonight.

“Okay, Alan. Sounds good.”

“Thanks, Jenny. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Bye.”

And then she was gone, back to whatever obstacles Jacob planned to put in her path today. Our parting words of affection had felt perfunctory but genuine, and I took that to be a good sign.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Brain Cuttings by Carl Zimmer

I must’ve heard about this book and its author on Radiolab. 

Say that reminds me, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with Radiolab, which I listen to as a podcast, and which I will therefore treat as a podcast moving forward. Every time I think I’m done, every time I’ve had it “up to here” with their gap-mouthed Millennial wonder about things that happened before 1980, every time they transparently let Jad’s sound design muffle what would otherwise be a clear-eyed approach to scientific inquiry, they wind up posting an episode that captures both my heart and my attention -- and those episodes usually have something to do with the human brain.

It was probably one of those brain episodes that either mentioned or featured Carl Zimmer, a “popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity.” His Brain Cuttings is a collection of fifteen fairly short essays, each on some subject related to neuroscience. They, like most collections of essays I’ve read, left me fairly flat. The most interesting thing about the collection, I think, is how Radiolab-ish they are -- in the sense that none of them dive very deeply into their subject, each skipping along across the surface with some genuine wonder, but with a disappointing lack of precision.

Here are the handful of things that caught enough of my attention to make note of them in the margin.

Blushing Is Shame

In the first essay, “Does Shame Excite a Blush?”, Zimmer explores the neuroscience behind facial expressions and the emotions that give them rise. Or is it the other way around, the facial expressions that give rise to the emotions? Turns out it’s not always so easy to tell, because the two things, your emotions and your facial expressions, are inexplicably connected. 

In other words, you don’t just make a sad face when you’re feeling sad. Making a sad face is an essential part of feeling sad. Take away the ability to make a sad face and you take away the ability to feel sad.

It’s another blow to our belief that we are thinking agents with premeditated volition. If one were to paralyze one’s face -- like through the use of Botox, a new craze at the time Zimmer was writing -- one would seriously limit one’s ability to feel emotions of any kind.

The Extended Mind

In “The Googled Mind,” Zimmer explores the concept of the extended mind, first posited by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. In a short essay they published in 1998, they…

...asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network.

Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

Clark and Chalmers argued that Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook. The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too. Clark and Chalmbers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

It’s a provocative idea to many, but needlessly so, in my mind (extended or not). Because, like a lot of pop-science, the provocation rests on the choice of words, not on the actual concept. People freak out because Clark and Chalmers called it the “extended mind,” and then went on to claim all kinds of logical interpolations based solely on that phraseology.

They argue that Inga’s brain and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same thing. But are they? They both allow a person to record and access information, so they are similar in that regard, but does that make them “fundamentally the same thing?” What if Otto is only visiting New York and he left his notebook at home in San Francisco? Or if he gets mugged and his notebook is stolen and he no longer even knows where it is? Is the notebook still part of his extended mind?

The vernacular trick is that phrase itself. The extended mind. Nobody would view it as controversial if Clark and Chalmers called Otto’s notebook an “information storage device,” even though that wouldn’t change any of their argument’s conclusions. But which essay are you going to publish? “The Extended Mind”? Or “Information Storage Devices”?

The Sloppiness of Time

In “The Music of Time,” Zimmer explores the everyday phenomenon of time seeming to pass at different rates based on our emotional condition. There’s some real neuroscience going on when we have this perception (obviously), but here Zimmer seems more focused on dispelling myths that don’t exist.

We don’t need drugs for our feeling of time to change, however. When we experience a moment of terror -- falling from a tree, for example, or watching a car veer out of control and come towards us -- time seems to slow down. In 2007, David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, and his colleagues set out to probe how this feeling arises. They found some hardy volunteers who were willing to climb a 46-meter tower and fall backwards down into a net. After the fall, Eagleman asked the volunteers how long it took to fall. Their guesses were 36% longer on average than the actual 2.5 seconds it took for them to hit the net. Time did indeed slow down.

Wait. What? Time did indeed slow down? It did? Is time what the mind perceives it to be? Or an external construct of the universe? Why is the language here so sloppy?

But let’s get back to my essential point. In the essay’s conclusion, Zimmer makes this comment.

The old notion that our brains are governed by a single, simple clock is gone for good.

Yeah, okay. But does anyone think otherwise? No, sorry, my brain contains a unalterable time piece, with the precision of an atomic clock, and everything I perceive is meted out by its regular and constant progression of clicks. Why is Zimmer arguing against something that no one believes is true? Next he’ll be telling us that our memory isn’t exactly like a movie camera recording everything we see and hear.

The Spectrum

Let’s end with this one. In “They Imprint Your Genes, Your Mum and Dad,” Zimmer makes this interesting comment.

One of the most striking contrasts between autism and schizophrenia is how they affect the ability to understand others. Autistic people have a difficult time figuring out what other people are feeling. Schizophrenic people, on the other hand, sometimes do too good a job. They may come to believe that a refrigerator is talking to them, for example, or that people are conspiring against them.

Is schizophrenia on the autism spectrum? I don’t think so. Zimmer is simply making a connection here. And in that regard, it’s probably important to point out that seeing such connections puts Zimmer decidedly on the schizophrenic side of that non-existent spectrum.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 69 (DRAFT)

For the first time in years I was happy to go to work on Monday morning. I was up early after snatching only an hour or two of sleep in the wee hours of the morning, and I showered, dressed, and left as quietly as I could so as not to disturb anyone else in the house. I didn’t even peek in on Jacob before leaving, deciding that I couldn’t afford the sentimental luxury with what was likely facing me in the office that day.

Somewhere in the middle of the night I had become convinced that Bethany was going to quit on me. She was going to turn in her resignation, and might even make some kind of public scene, angry and dejected, both at the secrets we had shared and those that I had kept from her. I was at my desk in my tiny office long before anyone else arrived that morning, and I cringed each time I heard the elevator ding and a new gaggle of voices make their way onto our office floor.

I was hunched over my keyboard, pecking absently away at it when I finally heard Bethany’s voice -- not distantly as if just stepping off the elevator, but loud and present and in the very doorway of my office.

“All right, Alan,” she said, swiftly shutting my office door and perching herself on the edge of one of my plastic visitor chairs. “Now tell me. Tell me everything.”

I looked at her blankly, fear the only and overpowering emotion rushing through my veins. She was wearing a navy blazer over a white blouse, a big and beady necklace hanging tightly around her throat. But it was her eyes I noticed most, her bright and glaring eyes, filled with an incessant need.

“Everything?” I said, looking both ways to avoid whatever ambush lay waiting for me. “Everything about what?”

“About the interview!” she cried, as if I was the densest man she had ever met. “Where is it? What’s it for? When are they going to make you an offer?”

Oh. That.

I didn’t really want to tell Bethany about it. As I had already promised myself, I didn’t really want anything else to do with Bethany. But as I began to politely drip some innocent details of my adventure in Boston out to her, she responded with such eagerness, such willingness, and such desperation -- desperation, I realized, to imagine and vicariously experience something, anything better than the company we worked for -- that she pushed me completely off my guard. I had lost sleep thinking she was going to resign in anger, but I now began to realize that she might be thinking that I would be able to take her with me.

“So that’s it?” she said, after I had shared Steve’s parting words to me in the airport lounge. “They’re going to set-up another call with you? Have you heard from them yet?”

“Uh, no. It’s only Monday morning. Steve said his assistant would be reaching out to me sometime this week.”

“Steve,” Bethany said, somewhat dreamily. “It’s a good sign that you’re already on a first name basis with him. It sounds like he really respects you.”

Was I? On a first name basis? I was pretty sure that the next time I spoke to Steve I was going to call him Mister Anderson, but I decided not to share that with Bethany.

“Uh huh.”

There was a knock and I looked up and saw Gerald standing on the other side of my closed door. When he had my gaze he pointed at me and then held up five fingers, evidently wanting that many minutes of my time. I looked back at Bethany but she was turned around, also looking back at Gerald. Before I could say anything she was up and out of her chair. 

She patted me on the hand. “Let’s get lunch together today,” she said sotto voce, standing over me, her hips and shoulders intentionally blocking Gerald’s view. “I want to hear a lot more than this.” And then she leaned in even closer, so close I thought she meant to kiss me. “I’m so excited for you,” she whispered instead.

And then she spun on her sensible heel. She opened the door and stepped aside to let Gerald into my small office.

“What are you two conspiring about?” Gerald asked, his voice unpleasant, but no more than normal.

“Secret stuff,” Bethany said playfully and left the office, closing my door behind her.

Gerald did not look amused. Nor did he take a seat, simply standing there and scowling at me through his eyeglasses. He seemed stiff, much stiffer than normal. Gerald typically had an uncaring nonchalance about him, as if he floated above the petty concerns of us mere mortals. Something was definitely up.

“What can I do for you, Gerald.”

“I wanted you to know that I’m planning to leave.”

I heard the words, but I had a hard time processing them.

“What?”

“The company. I’m planning to leave the company. Next week if we can make the proper arrangements.”

His words were clear, but I still wasn’t connecting the dots.

“Wait. What? You’re quitting?”

“Not exactly, but something like that. A lot depends on you.”

My heart sank, the import of what Gerald was saying suddenly made manifest there if not yet in my brain. I was already covering for Susan and Michael. How was I supposed to cover for Gerald, too? I’d never fucking sleep. And what would Mary say? She and Don already blamed me for driving Michael out of the organization. How well would they take another resignation on my senior team?

Gerald appeared to be waiting for me to say something, but I was too occupied with my own panicked reactions.

“Do you want to hear more?” he said eventually.

“More?” I said, pushing myself back from my desk, my chair making another gouging scrape on the wall behind me. 

“Yes. When I go, I’m taking your client with me.”

That finally got my attention. I’m not sure how, but that particular combination of words just plucked me out of the sea of fear and worry I was drowning in and dropped me dry and clear-eyed on the deck on my own ship.

“What do you mean, you’re taking my client with you?”

“Just that,” Gerald said, still standing, and crossing his arms across his chest. “I’m hanging out my own shingle. I can run a business that runs circles around Mary Walton, and I’m going to prove it. I’m taking the biggest jewel out of her crown and building my own business with it.”

My thoughts were racing again, but this time the engine was my head instead of my heart. There were a lot of companies like the one we worked for out there, providing management services to non-profit and other organizations too small to manage themselves. It was not uncommon for smaller ones to splinter out of the larger ones, as the needs of the individual client organizations found themselves increasingly at odds with the needs of the growing management company that served them. Even what Gerald was suggesting was not unheard of; a client organization, dissatisfied with the minimal service it was receiving from an increasingly thin management structure, signing a deal with the person or the people it knows in the company for more dedicated and individualized service. But for something like that to happen, the client organization had to be dissatisfied, and as far as I knew the client both Gerald and I worked with was anything but. Mary’s entire focus was seeing to that. She was so much in bed with Eleanor, that I couldn’t imagine anything like what Gerald was talking about happening.

“Have you been talking to Eleanor?”

“No,” Gerald said, smiling devilishly. “Not Eleanor. Paul Webster.”

Paul Webster. The immediate past chair of the client organization’s board. The man with the gray hair and the blue suit that had questioned Mary and me about the circumstances of Susan’s and Michael’s resignations, and if we were responding appropriately to the staffing holes they left behind.

“He’s working on getting a majority of the board aligned with him. He wants to vote to cancel Mary’s contract at their next board meeting, and we need to be free and clear for the switch to be made.”

This was big. This was perhaps the biggest thing that had ever walked into my office, even if it had so far refused to take a seat. If more than half the board was in on such an action, then things had been in play for a very long time. Looking as shrewdly as I could at Gerald, I tried to remember all the times I had seen him in close and quiet conversation with members of the board. I always thought he was doing his job -- getting the leaders engaged in his department’s agenda. But now I re-imagined all those interactions with a different purpose in mind: selling them all on the idea that he could do the job better than Mary.

Wait a minute.

“Gerald, why are you telling me this?”

A look of pained exasperation passed over Gerald’s face. I could see him try unsuccessfully to stifle it, but it was there nonetheless.

“Because,” he said. “I want to take you with me.”

“You what?”

“I want to take you with me. I want you to quit your job here, too, and come work for me.”

No he didn’t. That much was obvious to me. He was saying the words, but he didn’t mean them, not in their entirety, at least. The pained look was still on his face, and for the first time he looked uncomfortable standing there in my tiny office in his pressed slacks and freshly ironed shirt.

“Gerald,” I said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

He looked at my plastic visitor chair, put a hand on its back, and then slowly lowered himself onto it. He did it without taking his eyes off of me, as if he was afraid that I might make some sudden move. 

“Gerald,” I said again. “What’s really going on here? You don’t want me to go work with you. You hate me.”

Gerald looked honestly offended. “Alan! I don’t hate you. Why would you say such a thing?”

I thought back on all the times that Gerald had been dismissive of me and my authority -- throughout the length of our doomed staff qualities effort, for example, or, still very fresh in my mind, the time he had questioned my ability to lead in front of others in our staff office in Miami Beach. I was under no illusion. Gerald thought I was an inexperienced hack. Why would he want me to come work with him?

“All right,” I said. “Maybe you don’t hate me, but you’ve never thought too highly of my leadership abilities. You’ve made that clear. Why would you want me to come work for you?”

Gerald pursed his lips tightly. “Look, Alan, there’s no simple way to say this, and it’s probably not worth beating around the bush, so I’m just going to lay all my cards down on the table.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“Paul said there would be no deal unless I brought you along.”

It felt like I was back to not hearing him clearly.

“He said what?”

“Paul said there would be no deal -- that they would not break Mary’s contact and sign on with me unless you were part of my team. Once the separation is made, I plan to recruit a lot of Mary’s team away from her. We’re going to need them if we’re going to preserve the kind of continuity Paul is demanding. But there’s one person he won’t allow me to leave to chance. You. You need to be on board with this or there will be no deal.”

I looked at Gerald blankly, hearing, and understanding what he had said, but not entirely believing it. Me? Why would they want me?

Gerald quickly rose to his feet.

“Look, Alan. I realize now that I’ve approached this whole thing wrong with you. I want you on my team -- not just because Paul is demanding it, but because I think you will have a crucial role to play in the future of both organizations -- both mine and Paul’s. I should have led with that, and I regret that I didn’t. Why don’t we get together for lunch today -- somewhere away from the office -- and I can lay out my plans and make you the formal offer that you deserve. How does that sound?”

“Ummm. Okay.”

“Grand. Meet me at the elevators at noon. And please, keep all of this under your hat, at least until we’ve had a chance to discuss this over lunch. Will you promise me that?”

“Sure.”

Then Gerald smiled at me, a weak and flaccid thing that spread across his face like a stain of raspberry jam. He nodded, turned, and left my office without another word.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt

“On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about sun-rising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven. There were five persons taken in one house, the father, and the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive … another there was who running along was shot and wounded, and fell down; he begged of them his life, promising them money … but they would not hearken to him but knocked him in the head, and stripped him naked, and split open his bowels. … There were three others belonging to the same garrison who were killed; the Indians getting up upon the roof of the barn, had advantage to shoot down upon them over their fortification. Thus these murderous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them. … One of my elder sister’s children, named William, had then his leg broken, which the Indians perceiving, they knocked him on the head. Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels. … It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves. All of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out. …”

That’s an excerpt from a seventeenth-century captivity narrative by Mary Rowlandson, describing events that occurred when European settlers of North America entered a cultural “Indian country.” Engelhardt cites it to make the central claim of his book, especially when he purposely contrasts it with the following similar excerpt.

“At 6:30 A.M. on March 16, 1968, all the enemy batteries installed around Son My started pounding the village for more than half an hour. The eleven choppers came in, strafing the locality and landing American troops whose sanguinary intention was visible on their faces. They shot at all that came in sight: men, women, children, elderly people, plants and animals, and destroyed everything: crops, fruit-trees, houses. … Vo Thi Phu, mother of a 12-month-old baby, was shot dead. … The baby, which tried to suck at its mother’s breast, cried when it found only blood instead of milk. The Yankees got angry and shouted “Viet Cong, Viet Cong,” and heaped straw on mother and baby and set fire to it. … After raping to death Mrs. Sam, a sexagenarian, the aggressors made a deep slash in her body with a bayonet. … Mui, 14, was raped and shut in her hut. The GIs set fire to it, guarded the door and pushed back the poor little girl who tried to run from the fire. … Worse still, the aggressors threw over one hundred women and children and many dozen old people into a canal dug in front of Mr. Nhieu’s house and murdered them with machine-gun fire and hand grenades. The victims’ corpses were disfigured beyond identification. … In one day only, 502 people including over 170 children were massacred, 300 houses destroyed and over 870 head of cattle killed. Our coastal village so green with coconut palms, bamboos and willows is now but heaps of ashes.”

This is a Vietnamese account of what would become known as the My Lai massacre. As Engelhardt points out, much like Massachusetts in Mary Rowlandson’s time, the peninsula on which My Lai sat was thought of as “Indian country” by the American soldiers.

And this transition, I think, is the overall point of Engelhardt’s book. It is the story of how “America” went from victim to victimizer, from righteous fighter against sneak attacks to sneak attacker and devilish marauder. This, and the cultural cognitive dissonance that resulted when an older generation continued to cling to their narratives of victory culture while a younger generation exposed them for the myths that they had become. 

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.