I am becoming more comfortable with the notion that there is no meaning as we have traditionally thought about it—nothing out there in the universe that explains everything, no Platonic forms waiting to be discovered or emulated or admired. Rather, I’m beginning to think that what we call meaning is an artifact of human activity, more like a toaster or a wristwatch than anything a priori.
Meaning is something we create in our minds when we order and delineate relationships between things. This is why meaning is so seemingly all-encompassing, why a coyote can simultaneously manifest as a pest and a species, a vital member of an ecosystem and a trickster god.
This doesn’t make meaning any less real, of course; a car or a candle are no less real than a rock or a tree for having been made by people. Meaning is simply, like a painting or a ceiling tile, plastic. It must be approached with its own set of values, and the meaning that we ascribe to natural objects must be understood for what it is, an artifact of the human mind working on those objects and not some kind of discovered ultimate judgment. If anything, this requires us to be more respectful of what we encounter in the world, as the trees and the stars and the coyotes defy meaning since they occupy themselves; they exist beyond our limited attempts at creation and categorization.
This is maybe also why we get frustrated when we try to depict nature in art, and why for so many years memesis was so important to art, and in the same way that categorization and description are important to science. But science (mostly) comes to terms with its limitations: it can describe in a somewhat limited way, but it cannot answer the questions of human values and certainly cannot sum up the meaning of an otter or a perch. That, perhaps, is why scientists and artists are more likely to be advocates for conservation: they confront the thing itself. Business interests and industries see the meaning of a forest entirely summed up in its board feet of lumber and a fishery equated only with the market value of its catch. If we level with ourselves about the limits of meaning-creation, we can no longer think this way. We must accept that the sovereignty of the thing does not belong to us but to the thing itself (interpolating Walker Percy).
Maybe this is why Kant’s categories seem overly complex to me, a Ptolemaic attempt to keep the human soul at the center of a universe as a conduit of that universe’s inherent meaning. When we go beyond meaning, we approach what the Buddhists call interbeing, as the hardest part of all this is the idea that the human herself is also not the subject of meaning—not an artifact of human mental activity—but an object of being, a sovereign thing whose existence, like a mossy boulder or an errant daisy, extends beyond meaning alone.
I realize I am putting values upside-down here, but then, that’s the point. Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values fails, ultimately, because it still clings to the idea of values, which are themselves derived from human meaning. We don’t need a transvaluation of values but a transition from values to existence; values flow from, are artifacts of, sovereign existence.
I suppose this makes me an existentialist of a sort, but I do not think essence proceeds from existence because I do not believe in essence as such. “Essence,” too, is a form of meaning, a Platonic notion that attempts to sidestep the particularities of the thing. It is just another name for categorization: “the essence of a human” is simply a delineation of what we say categorizes a human as a result of whatever methods we apply: unique, soul-bearing life; homo sapiens sapiens; uppity ape.
–Lael Ewy
My beloved NPR has done it again, this time failing to call petroleum-industry spokespeople and analysts on so-called “rig migration.” The first I heard of this mysterious behavior was on last week’s Morning Edition when a petro-analyst claimed that the danger in the current moratorium on offshore drilling is that oil rigs will “migrate” from the Gulf to South America and the North Sea.
Immediately, images popped into my head of massive rigs with comically googly eyes and squiggly mouths sticking out their unctuous tongues and hauling ass out the Gulf.
The only things that don’t seem to be migrating in the Gulf these days are oil-coated seabirds. The inability to follow your instincts in this case implies that you have them, that you’re a sentient creature with some measure of volition. Last I checked that category does not include oil rigs.
I hate to break it to the dewy-eyed public radio reporters who want so deeply to believe ala Peter Pan; I really do hate to smash their fiercely imaginative view of the world. But I must. OIL RIGS DON’T MIGRATE. Oil rigs, you see, are owned by very, very rich corporations like BP and TransOcean. They move around when the inordinately compensated leaders of these companies command their underlings to move them. When industry-friendly voices say things like “migrate” they are trying to make the cynical, nature-killing, job-destroying decisions big companies make sound like some kind of natural phenomenon. It is sort of like calling the job losses from massive outsourcing “deciduous.”
This is just another way in which industries erode language–like despotic governments before them–in order to hide responsibility for what they do. It’s not surprising that they do; it is disappointing that our media choose not to confront them.
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In other news, the Washington Post reports that census takers are getting a hostile and sometimes violent response from many Americans who want nothing to do with the federal government, and some of whom simply think census workers are agents of Obama.
To this I say: splendid! Not for the census workers, of course. But the civic ignorance of the people who refuse to be counted will hurt them when it comes to apportionment of representation in Congress and distribution of some public funds since those are based on census data. The anti-gubmint extremists get what they want, namely left alone, and the rest of us don’t have to pay for them or feel their wrath on the floor of the House. They have chosen to be disenfranchised, and since they are against participation in public life by doctrine, they have no reason, now, to complain when things don’t go their way.
I get the feeling, though, that they will complain nonetheless . . .
–T.S. deHaviland
The impetus for this analysis is a seemingly sloppy piece of reporting by NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt that appeared on the June 17 2010 episode of All Things Considered. The story, titled “Avoiding Government Oversight” (which reads like a how-to, and which it could, in fact, be), was apparently trying to explain how government regulators get “captured” by the businesses they’re supposed to regulate.
In the piece, Joffe-Walt interviews Vincent Reinhart, identifying him only as “an economist with the American Enterprise Institute” without mentioning that the AEI is not some scholarly research organization but an industry-funded free market advocacy group. He is her only “expert,” though she previously interviews a regulator with direct experience of “capture.” This is like not identifying People for the American Way as left-leaning and accepting everything they say without also presenting a right-wing pundit or politician, which NPR would not normally do with straightforward analysis like this. If the AEI were upfront about its position, like the Sierra Club with its environmental advocacy, and not trying to hide behind the facade of intellectual think-tankery, perhaps identifying its leanings may not have been necessary, but sadly, this is not the case. I would hate to believe that Joffe-Walt is so unsophisticated that she is not aware of what the AEI is up to.
Reinhart’s argument in the piece—one roughly outlined by Adam Smith 230 years ago—is that industry will always try to “capture” regulators through, as Joffe-Walt puts it, “money, time, gifts”; “help” writing legislation; and “help” filling out difficult forms. Over time, Reinhart contends, this will influence regulators to favor industry. He goes on to note that this forces those creating regulations to make rules more complicated in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening. His suggestion is that this is inevitable, as regulators are people and “regulations have to be enforced by people and that the more judgment you give these people, the more possibilities of things going wrong.”
The implication to which Reinhart wants to lead us—and to which he successfully leads Joffe-Walt—is that regulation is doomed to fail because it is enforced by people and people make mistakes. But, of course, “regulations” are really laws, and industry regulators therefore enforce the laws that pertain to their given industries. They do this in the same way that the highway patrol enforces the rules of the road; if you are caught violating them, you are subject to a fine or, in egregious cases, criminal charges. When we frame things properly, we can see that “capture” is really corruption and that Reinhart is purposefully glossing over the moral bankruptcy of his argument. If we substitute the term “identity thieves” for “industry” we can see this in action. If identity thieves gave “money, time, gifts” and “help” to the police officers that enforce anti-identity theft “regulations,” we would throw them in jail for bribery along with the cops who took the bribes. And even though it is also true that identity theft gets increasingly sophisticated and the laws that govern it increasingly complex, we show no signs of just giving up and letting these people go. The initial moral failure is with those who try to get around the law, and industries attempting to “capture” regulators are just as unethical as more petty criminals trying to bribe law enforcement officers.
We tolerate this sort of crap from the business community for the same reason that we put up with the abuse of tyrants when we were serfs: they own the castle and with it our means of living. That doesn’t make their corruption right, of course. Dismissing it or justifying it is simply allowing certain people and the companies they control to live by different standards than the rest of us do. More people follow the law out of good faith than fear of arrest; that is why our society is actually fairly well-ordered. If regulated industries acted in good faith, if they lived up to the citizen portion of the complete personhood they recently acquired, regulatory “capture” would be relatively rare, not the inevitability that Vincent Reinhart and other corporate apologists want us to think it is.
I do not know if the one-sided reporting of Joffe-Walt really was bad reporting or if it was an attempt by NPR to curry-favor with their corporate sponsors (in the case of the “Planet Money” series of which Joffe-Walt is a contributor, Ally Bank) and industry-friendly Congresspeople who help determine CPB funding. But if the latter, it’s a pretty good example of media “capture” by industry, which is not so much an irony as a sad comment on the decline of independent voices even at supposedly “public” organizations like NPR.
–EW Wilder
The Seven Steps to Building a Foundation of Suits
1.Use a high-quality epoxy. Cheap glue won’t hold the weight.
2.Attract Squares with generous stock options; seal the deal with massive tax breaks.
3.Confine in a bank vault with a lingering stink of greed. Provide a bit of diversity to prevent genetic clots: navy and black, pinstripe, perhaps a touch of tweed. Wait.
4.Interest, from a distance, is indistinguishable from breeding. Brooding is another matter—messy and without distinction to appearances, coated in a layer of gray vomit, drool-glistened.
5.Modern techniques have made suits nearly impervious to the universal solvent. Yet tiny gaps in even the tightest weaves give passage to blistering envy.
6.A mismatched button on a cuff might indicate recession; a minor breakdown of the moral order ensues.
7.Here gold, there bone.
–E.W. Wilder
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