Scandal

The idea of scandal and how society responds to scandal has changed a great deal in the past few decades. Up until the sixties, people exerted a great deal of effort to prevent anything from becoming public. The worst thing imaginable in a 19th century novel, would be for people to find out and talk about whatever affair or liaison was driving the plot. No one must know, if they do know, they must be persuaded not to speak of the matter under any circumstances. What actually happened is almost beside the point, what really scares the characters is that others might find out and talk. This will cause scandal, and they will be ruined. I believe that, before the sixties, this would have been the prevailing view. It did not so much matter what happened, what mattered was whether people knew and spoke about the matter... If they did, one was ruined, if not, the problem did not actually exist.

Various large organizations, most notably the Catholic Church, did not make this transition gracefully. Also one finds a moment in most government cover-ups and scandals where people seem to believe that they are operating under the old rules. If only they can stop people from talking, then there will actually not be a problem - that is, it's not the illegal or scandalous activity that's the problem, the problem is that people are talking about it.

With the modern outlook being so clear, and apparently self-evident: that everything must be immediately made public, it's not the scandal that causes the damage, it's the cover-up... it is difficult to remember or even conceive that people ever thought differently. Why would they have been so determined to keep people from speaking about scandals and foibles publicly, but not so very concerned with stopping the activities themselves? I wondered for a few moments before an idea occurred to me - they are trying to keep conflict inside the society to an absolute minimum. One might think of society as a collection of individuals making their own individual choices, some of these choices perhaps not the best. This idea is not cohesive enough if the society believes itself under threat, however. Then it must enforce a social order, and act to stamp out conflict, and situations which threaten to cause conflict.

I lived in Seattle for several years and jogged through an older part of town. I noticed that the large, attractive older homes had no driveways, they did, however, have alleys in the back. Why would this be? I suddenly realized that respectable people would enter and be received in special rooms, kept presentable just for this purpose, while workmen, servants and others less respectable would enter through the alley. Garbage, and other things not to be mentioned, will be remove through the alley. If the master of the house has been indulging in a late night revelry at the brothels down in Pioneer square, perhaps he will enter through the back, so as not to disrupt the harmonious and respectable facade which fronts the street. There is no problem with him going to the brothels, as long as it does not disrupt the facade of the house, which the family has painstakingly constructed to present to the world. In this society, essentially everyone would know which door was the correct door for them to enter. They would keep themselves sorted according to respectability, and their less agreeable aspects would remain behind a screen in the alley.

The collision between the modern outlook and this older world would be undermining to both. The older world is a world in which people keep themselves sorted by social standing automatically, and in which all manner of actions can be tolerated so long as they stay behind a socially contrived screen. This older world puts great energy into indoctrinating social values so that people will automatically sort themselves by class, and so avoid confrontation. It places contrived social screens around all manner of behavior, at least for men, and so enables tolerating this behavior and avoids conflict. This society goes to great lengths to maintain a facade of harmony and order, whether this exists in reality or not. Was this older society under some sort of threat? Something which required it to repress internal conflicts in order to direct all its energies toward external difficulties? It does not seem to be this so much from what knowledge of history I possess. This older society seems to need to mobilize a great part of its resources and day to day social interactions in order to maintain its structure, its hierarchy of classes and genders, groups of higher and lower status, groups of outsiders and insiders. It seems archaic, blind and rigid, something to be thrown off at the soonest possible occasion. Yet the modern outlook has its strange blind spots as well, strange artifacts of vision like marketing and branding, the narrative, (a figure of modern speech which might uncharitably be called a lie), and many other strange artifacts obscuring clear sight. Just for an example, consider child care. Because people are willing to provide this service for free, at least for their own children, the market sees this as having a very low, or possibly no real value. People who try to sell this service are in competition with people providing it for free - it must not be very valuable... But if it is not done with at least some attention and care, you will end up with a population which is essentially unemployable. This is certainly of considerable economic value, but the market, by its very design, cannot price this service correctly. Modern society has perhaps dispensed with a considerable part of the social control and social enforcement, and replaced it with people who are trained to respond to market forces. When faced with difficulties, people are told that they need to consider their personal brand and make sure that they advertise and promote it in ways the market finds agreeable. A strange sort of social pressure this...

Nostalgia

It is strange to me how people believe that, in the time when they were children, everything was right with the world. Men were men, government worked, people only slept with socially approved partners, all was rosy in the land. At some point in the 50's, or in my case the 60's, paradise was evidently to be found on Earth, but ever since, an inexorable decay has afflicted the nation, and everything has made it's inexorable progress straight to hell.

I myself do not remember particularly enjoying childhood. I remember a fellow who was even more shut-off, rigid, and defensive in some ways than he is now. A fellow who was incredibly impatient to do and hear all those things that you can only do - when you are older. I remember moments that still seem almost perversely humiliating and embarrassing, such as loosing a fight, and hiding under a trailer crying in rage and humiliation, only to have the fellow who beat me, and everybody else in the neighborhood, come over to feel sorry for me and ask me whether I was all right. Things simply could not have been any worse as far as I was concerned. I remember another moment in second grade. I saw a group of boys from my class all fighting another kid, I had no idea who he was. I joined in of course. It was just being part of the crowd, the pack, exciting, something different, like when the fire alarm went off and you got to go outside. The unfortunate recipient of our mob attack acquitted himself quite well everyone agreed. It was only many years later, when that image of the moment appeared in my mind that I realized - the kid's Hispanic... and I was in an all white school... that's what we were fighting about. I had no idea at the time, none whatsoever. I don't remember seeing him again after that day. All these sorts moments return to me at odd times, afflict me with defensiveness, hostility, humiliation as though they were present at this moment. Where is the rosy glow to be found?

Usury

Usury is a sin because, in a zero growth economy, people with money to lend would end up owning everything in the space of two or three generations. Traditional cultures are all based on an idea of zero growth. Agriculture is the source of essentially all wealth, and this has a constant output in these societies. There might be good years and bad years, but overall harvests move up and down around the average, so wealth remains constant. Merchants, (the people with money that could be lent), are almost always regarded as the lowest people in the society, only one step above peasants. To a traditional society, they would be the most disruptive class of all, for they will always be trying to increase their wealth, and, in a zero growth society, this will always come at the expense of some other group. The idea that merchants could be the dominant group in society appeared as Europe expanded out into the rest of the world, and actual growth became possible, even if only at the expense of other societies. At this point earning money by lending money was no longer a certain way to ruin, and a threat to social order; it was a way to make expansion even faster.

CEO's vs. AI's

I read a bit online about the CEO of netflix Reed Hastings being seduced by the high share price of his firm into a number of ruinous mis-calculations, and I thought, that's right, I remember thinking that AI's would probably be better than human CEO's in most circumstances. An AI would most likely not be another Steve Jobs, creating a couple of new industries, and replacing the PC with a device you can put in your pocket and make phone calls on, but most companies aren't like Apple. The average company, by my thinking, exists in sort of a steady state. It can probably be described by a set of rules. When this gets too much, sell this and buy that... When expenses are too high, lay-off people, and focus on the most profitable products... And so on. These are the sort of tasks that AI's excel at. The sudden blooming or crash of the share price won't bamboozle an AI at all. It will simply be another factor that can be optimized according to the AI's rule set. In the true excellence of the modern world, it should be possible to lay-off most CEO's and simply return value to the share holders - something CEO's are always claiming to do when they undertake some activity that would lead to you or I being prosecuted for fraud.

Musical Robot

This morning I remembered something I had read a long time ago, in the 90's I was certain. Something about a computer that you could feed scores from Bach, for instance, and it would search for patterns and create works that were reasonably close to the same style. You could feed the program an Indonesian folk tune, and it would spit out a rendition of how Bach might have treated the melody. I remember downloading midi files that were produced by the program. The files were utterly mechanical, but a machine encoding of a real score would be too, I reasoned. This led me to wonder where the music as such actually appeared. I've made attempts at classical guitar from time to time, and it seems that you must make some sort of feeling, or heart sense of the score. Something that assumes a human sort of emotion on the part of the creator. So one senses, if the music turned like this it would have to feel this way. You put this sense of how human emotions would work into the score, so that maybe the music as such was actually from the performer rather than the composer. This morning, it occurred to me that this emotional structure is a pattern as well, and so it should be possible to analyze and reproduce in the same manner as Bach's style. I wondered if anyone had done anything more with this music composing program since. It seems that it is now possible to imitate the external surface of all human productions, (art, science, math, conversation, etc.), with increasing perfection. The inner experience of seeing, feeling, playing perhaps eludes, but how much substance does this have?

(I discovered the program through the miracle of Google in one not particularly good search. It was called Experiments in Musical Intelligence or EMI, and created by David Cope. A link to an article about it on the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm ).