Writing teaches a person about language, in a very deep and sensory way, but language also teaches a person about existence in the human sense, existing as a human being, as an individual who is capable of not only perceiving and manifesting, but also articulating an identity. That, to some extent, is our most recurring, most insistent, most necessary and yet problematic, reason for engaging in serious explorations of language usage: how to articulate the untestable reality that is the human self.

It is an art of complex, but not always conscious, strategic engagement, to conjure up, locate and arrange the words necessary to any linguistic task. Assembling words is, to some extent, the fundamentally human undertaking that puts us both at odds with our surroundings and in touch with deeply useful means of reaching out to them, understanding them, bringing them into the folds of our awareness. To breathe a word is to make a claim on the nature of the universe, and our claims are contagious, so getting it right helps us to define the space of our agency, our selfhood.

In simpler terms, what the art of assembling words and their meanings teaches, as one learns what it is to forge new territory, to construct a landscape, to admire and to fear the rules that govern such activity, to honor and to evade those rules, what the whole process teaches is that experience happens in much the same way as language happens. There is a point of contact (a moment in time, a location in space, a ‘situation’ unique in itself) where experience happens, where it is gained, where we participate in its construction and it comes into being, and meaning accrues and something is stated, however quietly.

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such, the dignity of the human intellectual organism, as individual and of value in each case.

I could write a barrage of symphonic lunatic musings, trouble the world with my troubles, obsess, come apart at the seams, but instead, I will have breakfast and read a preferred selection with a soothing lilt, wake and exist and put myself to bed at night with an electrical hum, the din of an untroubled world, penetrating where I dwell and possess myself in solitude. From there, from that integral engagement, through choice and sublime expression and endeavor, I reach out, make contact, and we bridge the distance between us.

The choices we make in our experience have in many ways the consistency of the written word: they persist in their meaning insofar as we ask them to, and they fade away from the initial intent as we lose touch with that part of ourselves responsible for bringing them into our biography. Whether the mind engages its own work with a spirit of dissatisfaction or of pleasure, the experience of engaging the mind as such, of taking note of one’s internal existence, is akin to the expressive moment.

Contemplation becomes language as the individual seeks to emerge from the wells of the internal unknown, and to put a shape and a face on what was found. Everything, in the writerly/readerly moments when such tensions become apparent, is like medicine, for better or for worse. The medicine stays with us, changes our line of sight, molds our favorite haunting, guides us to water, dips us clean, refurbishes us in the tattered elegance of our everyday living.

The changing and refurbishing of one’s private world, even as it is the public face of that private self that is designed or reconfigured, is an intimate description of the process by which every intellect acquires knowledge. Accepting that experience and imagination come together on a plane between the two, and that there, in that landscape of intersection and semiotic contagion, of knowledge transfer and moral support, a vision of reality or of an individual’s experience thereof is formulated by the coming together of experience and imagination… that is recognition of what knowledge is, how it works, and why it must evolve if it is to be honest.

The honesty of knowledge, as opposed to its imagined truth, is a topic for another time, but it ties into the medicinal uses of writing and naming. Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be —we need every skill and angle of dreaming to make the world that encompasses and gives place to our pursuits, our claims on the universe, our attempts at selfhood, sovereignty and interconnection—, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters.

And that can benefit any human being. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. It is the inherently, unavoidably, persistently semi-distant nature of all individual experience —sensorial, intellectual, emotional, spiritual— which writing not only addresses but reiterates and re-presents, thus serving as a means for understanding more deeply, and reinterpreting the difficulties and the joys of, what occurs in the endless flux of daily… temporal… human… existence.

These thoughts are just a beginning of the example of writing as medicinal naming, so I will offer a few examples. I pick up a newspaper, and side by side am able to witness Europe naming its first full-time president, and the president of the United States engaged in an important and never easy diplomatic dance in Asia. Asia, Europe, United States: each of these words gives us a world to mull over and to be filled with.

In Africa, we read of malaria, and ambitious efforts at prevention. The “bad air”, old prejudices, confusion, and the new world of possibility. We read that life finds a way, without saying that life finds a way. A windmill, no longer a quixotic phantasm, can help prevent the Maldives from being washed under by out-of-place glacial tides. To say “no, we cannot”, is a kind of obstruction, an effort at contributing to the chaos; the world is coming together, or it isn’t, we are responible, or we are not.

Each of these complex realities, indulged or anointed, or fostered or projected, through language, is a way of approaching the problem of selfhood, the problem of the in-here versus the out-there, of how can we know what lies beyond the all-too-near far edge of our perception? How can we understand the other, if the other is always on the other side of a divide? We fashion channels to relay meaning; we build civilizations of discourse; we cut back the rampant vegetation of incoherence and use language to say that one self might have something to do with another.

Medicine. There is “good medicine”, in the Native American sense, a healing spirit, in the work of language, if we understand that it can be that. We cannot really test our knowledge, or challenge it, or open it up and expand it, without language. Instruments of all kinds, from telescopes to laptops to mirrors to particle accelerators, cannot give us the metrics for judging our surroundings, if we don’t base what they are and what they do on an implied linguistic terra firma.

We name the universe, not so we can classify and forget it, but so we can move out into it with some confidence, so we can test our apprehensions and forge new terrain for experience, not only the conceptual terrain we need to understand ourselves and our role in the world, but the actual terrain which we will feel less comfortable venturing into if we have no way to talk about it, to make guesses about it, to advance our hopes and test our aspirations.

While science and literature are rarely considered parallel pursuits in the way of the same problem, science understands this problem of naming and its connection to knowledge. What, for instance, is a disease? It is a lack of ease, something contrary to discomfort… but what makes it different than discomfort? In Spanish, malestar has both a clinical and an emotional meaning: it can be a state of physical discomfort, severe illness or an emotional malaise.

A syndrome is widely considered to be different from a disease in that it is not a specific entity with a proven cause-effect dynamic: it is more an array of symptoms, or a recurring constellation of particulars, not always the same, which seem to fit a pattern. If we take apart the language, syndrome is a more clinical, more scientifically specific term than disease, but in practice, the reverse is true.

We could say the same of astronomy: asteroids are supposed to be “like stars”, and different from planets, but like planets, they orbit stars, and in fact, gaseous planets such as Jupiter, Saturn or Neptune, can be more like stars in a mechanical, structural sense, than are asteroids. But we use the word in the way that works, and we assign meaning based on experience.

The writer must grapple with these digressions and underminings of purpose in language; the writer must, whether knowing or not, engage in a constant hermeneutic struggle —interpretive interpretation, in relation to meaning intended or accrued— in order to make language what it aspires to be, what we need it to be. The writer is not so much a priest as a pioneer, not so much an entrepreneur as a watchdog.

To make life into something with life of its own —Life is hard… Life is opportunity… Life is too short… Life finds a way…— requires an approach to meaning that is both rigorous and adventurous, and the good writer, whether an amateur writing a memo to a friend or colleague, a single ephemeral composition, or a professional who spends many hours a day wrestling with the merciless bulk of the whole language and its attendant (unspoken) implications, the good writer must manifest that intertwining of rigor and adventure in a way that is credible, sublime and impressive.

Because we all understand the demand, even where it is unconscious, that writing be an advanced example of the process of naming our experience, in the interests of securing and conveying knowledge, in a way that is medicinal, a help to the human being generally and specifically. Every word is an expression of the case-by-case process by which writing makes language —the stuff of our attempts to turn the world into decipherable sounds— into something new, a new terrain, a new chance at seeing, a healing experiment.

That experiment is universally demanded, implicitly or explicitly, by human interaction, because we all need to map out the spaces and parameters of the self, the sometimes complex distinctions between aspiration and action, known and unknown, viable and perilously fragile. We write in order to play out the shape and spirit of the language, to give it human specificity, to make it relevant to not just our past but our future experience.

Writing and naming are intertwined; every use of every word is a new naming of a new iteration of something either very much like or very much unlike what came before. It is by this process that we can speak about what is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, and that we can find a way to make the amorphous, ever-evolving life of the universe of experience, into something our own, something malleable, something that reinforces our dignity as human beings. The medicine of language is the medicine of acquiring knowledge, a trick of consciousness, but a trick that points us to the truth, to ways of approximating, testing and relaying, the truth that gives us meaning and humanity.

These are just a few commonly held ideas, not all compatible with one another or with reality as we know it. Depending on point of view, we find ourselves favoring or opposing some aspect of something we call capitalism, with sometimes radical swings in the underlying reasoning of our political philosophy — we being Americans, generally. And across the world, the same questions come up time and again: one nation’s democratic marketplace, rising tide that lifts all boats, is seen from a poorer nation as an upgraded feudalism, a new age of empire.

What about pragmatism? Capitalism is the best way we know, the idea goes, to achieve the best results for the largest number of people, so it is a pragmatist ethic. Or… capitalism is an efficient, “organic” model of wealth distribution: the market distributes wealth “efficiently”, because individual players in a free market make all their own interested choices about where they should send their capital in order to extract the benefits, the goods and services, they seek or require.

This is perhaps the truest statement about the potential virtues of capitalism, or what are widely accepted to be virtues any capitalist system should aim to embody. But, in practice, a system that privileges capital over cause often does so by giving special privileges to those who hold the capital, not to those who seek it, or who are laboring intensely in the harshest conditions to earn a share of it.

Capitalism is the enemy of communism: this idea is almost universally held, but actually, it refers to one of the biggest grey areas in the history of social philosophy. As a matter of social ethics, communism cannot really emerge in its Marxist form, as a philosophical approach to economics, unless it emerges within a capitalist society. Marx specifically says so: communism is not suited to old-style agrarian societies, because only the industrial societies, where democracy and capitalism have taken root, have the kind of civil structures able to reward the actions of collective bargaining organizations.

Hence the violent tendencies of many Marxist factions around the world: even in the US, there was violence during the heyday of 19th-century unionizing, but in the US, a dynamic, open democracy allowed for collective bargaining to achieve nearly all of the major socialist innovations the world has seen (the weekend, the paid vacation, the 40-hour work-week, over-time pay, the end to child labor).

Does this make the US a socialist or a Marxist country? No. It means that in the capitalist system, underpinned by the most experienced modern democratic system, the United States found efficient ways to achieve major social-policy goals of Marxist philosophy, without undermining or uprooting the capitalist system. Several European nations have now followed that example and gone further (Sweden is a commonly used example), but they remain democratic, capitalist societies.

Michael Moore has argued that capitalism is “legalized greed”, a view held by both critics and proponents, rooted in the idea that the most pragmatic approach to economics is to let vice have its purpose, and let self-interest power the mill. This idea is partly about social darwinism, partly about a near cynical approach to human freedom, or if you’re Michael Moore, it’s about the reasons why capitalism needs to be curtailed by democratically determined regulations.

Moore argues that what we now call capitalism needs to be cast aside in exchange for a different kind of market system in which democratic processes allow the citizenry to guide the hand of economic influence. But whether one agrees that capitalism is legalized greed or an organic model of resource allocation, it remains true that it is only as virtuous as those who apply it to the circumstances of human experience.

Capitalism, the same as any -ism, is not a hard-and-fast, unchanging object or species; it is a conceptual realm whose qualities vary as applied. It is what we make of it and only as virtuous or democratic as we shape it to be. Because capitalism, as a tendency, as a philosophical urge, operates among and across the lived realities of a society, it is only as democratic as its interrelationship with those realities.

Capitalism that fosters and cooperates with, protects and serves democratic processes and principles can be democratic in both purpose and in practice, but capitalism that interferes with, obstructs, undermines and abuses democratic processes and principles tends to be undemocratic in both its purpose and its practice.

It is a false choice that would have us choose between capitalism and morality, or between the service of profit and allegiance to the liberties and worth of individual human beings as a socio-economic priority. It is a false choice that asks us to choose between naked laissez-faire capitalism, unfettered by any social conscience and the crushing political bind of a planned economy in which no one is allowed to seek personal gain.

Capitalism is about privileging the flow of capital through society. It works better when those who do not have access to capital are able to come in contact with it, acquire some of it, and capitalize on their own merits, expanding their economic reach. That cycle must, however, be both persistent and pervasive. The freedom to seek personal gain and to innovate must share space with the need to ensure that human dignity is not eroded and free people subject to strategies of indenture.

The pastoral letter on a Catholic approach to economics, Economic Justice for All, makes clear that it is not only unnecessary, but unreasonable, to hand over the navigation of our economic policy to purely profit-driven considerations that ignore ethical accountability, erode community bonds and disrupt the human quality of human existence within our society.

In the preface to the 2006 edition of the pastoral letter, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops writes that:

… the measure of our economy is not only what it produces, but also how it touches human life, whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person, and how it promotes the common good.

In order to support and expand on that idea, they then offered five principles that must inspire the direction of major economic policy choices:

• The economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around.
• Economic life should be shaped by moral principles and ethical norms.
• Economic choices should be measured by whether they enhance or threaten human life, human dignity and human rights.
• A fundamental concern must be support for the family and the well-being of children.
• The moral measure of any economy is how the weakest are faring.

How the weakest are faring… a great and successful market economy must find a way to protect against starvation, deprivation, homelessness, and lack of access to quality medical attention when needed. Indeed, an economy in which the human person is made subservient to the imperatives of an economic machinery of resource allocation is totalitarian and not democratic, though one can imagine plenty of examples where something called ‘capitalism’ has this effect.

To protect the human rights and the human dignity of the individual, a democratic society must establish meaningful checks on the unfettered application of raw power through accumulated wealth. A social conscience must be part of a democratic society’s application of capitalism as an economic paradigm, or the primal urges of the marketplace will allow for distortions of the economic landscape, the rise of monolithic power structures, the blocking of dynamic resource flows, and the erosion of democratic freedoms and quality of life.

For this very reason, the American system has been a brilliant example of a free, democratic society, in which capitalism has fought its fight, but major achievements in the history and advancement of social justice have come, through democratic processes and the free assembly —Constitutionally guaranteed— of free people, demanding that capital not sideline the citizen.

Capitalism is not democracy, though the two can be mutually nourishing. And capitalism is not unfettered economic aggression. It is not imperialism, though it can be used to effect a kind of imperial control of resources and social patterns. It is not an ethos, not a way of measuring whether we are good or bad, right or wrong.

Capitalism is an idea, a way of looking at the priorities of a society, and the diffusion of power throughout a political system. It is a conceptual realm, in which pirates and villains compete with saints and public servants, where control competes with creativity, where concentration of wealth competes with discovery and the opening of new terrain.

The capitalist imperative is not to amass the most wealth imaginable, but to effect the most practical outcome for the most dynamic society possible. This will always be to the benefit of those with the most access to capital, even if their actual wealth is not as high as it might be in a less democratic setting.

In order to achieve that most dynamic society possible, however, virtually nothing is as vital as ensuring that the human individual, at all levels and across the entire range of that society, be as empowered, as capable, as free and as worldly a being as possible. Any one human individual that lacks the skills, the agility, the rights or the freedom, to choose a better, more dynamic and broadly beneficial path, slows the entire process of adaptation and makes the whole system more sluggish, less dynamic, less able.

This is where capitalism and democracy have their most vibrant and nourishing interaction, in their potential to adequately shape the dynamics of markets —for resource distribution, pricing, quality of the human contribution and reach of human mobility— in such a way that the human individual becomes society’s greatest asset, both economically of high value and socio-politically of primary worth and reliability.

No amount of stripping away of individual rights or the terrains of individual liberty will make a capitalist system more vibrant. On the contrary, such measures help to foster the concentration of wealth, but those concentrations have a sclerotic effect on the economy broadly and tend to pressure democratic systems in such a way that they must over-react or give way.

Socio-economic barriers to such free flow of information are just another kind of information control that establishes dangerous demographic stratification into privileged and marginalized groups. Governments across the world are using web filtering technologies to censor the information available to their citizens and crack down on dissent.

In China, in Iran, in Cuba, aggressive web filtering measures and electronic spying technology have been used to prevent the spread of information unfavorable to the government leadership, to obscure corruption, and to hunt and persecute members of a would-be democratic opposition. In China, web filtering censorship has perhaps reached its zenith, with major multinationals collaborating in the “Great Firewall of China”.

Web searches routinely rule out links that contain information banned by the government, and the government has explored barring any website not entirely in Mandarin from being viewed inside China. Talk of the parallel Chinese internet has given way to concerns the government has opted for a technologically more realistic total filtering program.

“Cyber dissidents” are now an entirely new area of press targeted by government censors and security forces. In China and Iran, cyber dissidents are jailed simply for linking to materials that the government has sought to keep away from the public eye. Iran’s government has repeatedly shut down opposition websites in order to prevent democratic assembly, to cover up violence against civilians or to obscure challenges to official diktat.

China recently delayed plans to implement a draconian filtering system based on a new “green dam” software platform. The government is believed to have been taken aback by the broad-based and persistent expressions of anger over the plans, as the nation’s population continues to move into contact with the online medium and is demanding more transparency.

But Pres. Hu Jintao came to office promising a “smokeless war” against the press and cyber dissidents, and China has been criticized across the world for efforts to manipulate the information made available to its citizens, including distortions of the unrest a year ago in Tibet and Sichuan and now in Xinjiang, which many say could foment violence against people of Tibetan or Uighur ethnicity, depending on the case.

Efforts to use internet filtering to cover up the massacre of unarmed civilians at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 are part of that ongoing war against the free press. The Beijing government fears acknowledging what took place there could delegitimize the current regime and sow political unrest. Pro-democracy advocates say that like any government in a free democracy, China’s government could acknowledge its mistakes, promote electoral reform, and liberalize its political process, without destabilizing the country.

In remote regions like Darfur in western Sudan or North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, conditions of extreme danger for aid workers and violence against journalists means information filters very slowly through the population, worsening already catastrophic situations of persistent conflict and human suffering.

Violence against women in Darfur is persistent in part owing to the fact that Darfuri women have virtually no access to information distribution systems. They are almost never able to report crimes against them to any public authority or international group. And medical service workers are often unable to locate people in need of help, as the remote region is plagued by lack of communicative media.

There is also concern about the effects of internet usage on the development of human cognitive abilities. Social cognitive structures are thought to be directly affected by use of communicative media, and the internet as achieved fundamental alterations in the communicative structure of society; facing that reality, it must be a universal right of all people to participate in the direction and development of that medium in reference to their own daily lives.

In May, I reported on this for The Hot Spring Network:

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

The internet and attendant communications technologies have a visible decentralizing effectthat enhances the democratic influence average people can exert in the public sphere. In the US election of 2008, that was evident in online information sharing and organizing. In the Spanish election of 2004, it was evident in the popular outcry that was so ably communicated by sms, that helped uncover a government disinformation campaign.

Clay Sharky, of the TED initiative, explains in a video address how social networking services and a new generation of web applications and smart phones, are coming together to empower individuals across the world and bring about the end of “top-down” controls in the political sphere. This effect is operating even in authoritarian societies, where in some cases the best information available comes from individuals posting anecdotal reports online.

Perhaps the world’s most developed and advanced campaign for net neutrality, or legal constraints on internet service providers’ (ISP) ability to plan or carry out systematic filtering of content, has taken root in the US. Motivated by a fierce defense of First Amendment rights and an understanding of the democratizing effects of open flows of information, the net neutrality movement has won important victories both in Congress andamong federal regulators.

In March 2008, I reported for Cafe Sentido that “We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society.” But that moment is being met with stepped up efforts by governments and businesses to control the freedom of ordinary people to access and control information.

Such efforts are a direct assault on democratic freedoms, and measurably impede the ability of people to gather information related to risks to their health or safety or to orchestrate the dissemination of information that may favor their social, economic or ideological interests. As the US Bill of Rights‘ commitment to a first-order freedom of the press shows, all other democratic rights are built on the foundation of a free and independent media culture. So access to the web must begin to be treated as a basic measure of human rights everywhere.

Follow these links for more information on:

• Press Freedom & Persecution of Journalists
• Net Neutrality & Internet Freedoms
• Human Rights & Democratic Freedoms

The idea of the ‘automatic’ in human affairs is an extremely dangerous fallacy —l’automaticité as a functional problem in French ethical and/or political philosophy. It presumes to be able to rule out nearly all human elements of any relationship: free choice, and by extension human error, the interrelationship of people in a community, or across a market. It dehumanizes for the sake of intellectual convenience, or in the case of banks, for the convenience of using accounting methods that ignore risk.

Though the ‘marketplace’ is the most efficient way of turning a sum of money into more than it started out being, and the marketplace is made up of human beings with human relationships, subject to the whims of timing, collective direction, the emotional cascades that dominate trends in trading and the rules set forth by major institutions (like the banks), the banks have sought to siphon as much wealth as possible out of the marketplace, while totally disregarding the humanity of the millions of players whose lives become the source of their profits.

So what’s the solution? Isn’t the automaticity of repayment part of what motivates banks to lend freely, as they have over the last decade? And aren’t the banks reminding us, day after day, by way of indirect protests against legislative action, complaints about the stifling effects of regulation, and over the last year their relentless devotion to the rigors of the not-lending marketplace, that they need such added motivation to do what it is that most behooves banks, which is to lend and hold debt as future income? (Why deprive ourselves of future income by falsely claiming it as past income?)

What can be done to make an institution founded on lending break its apparent addiction to not lending? The answer just might be in treating people like people, building human relationships that are not authoritarian in their zeal or fictional in their assumptions. The legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by Pres. Obama, in May, known as the Credit Card-holders’ Bill of Rights or the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, sought to make those ‘adjustments’ that would require more human relations between banks and borrowers, but it is just a start.

It should be noted, the entire nation has colluded in the grand delusion, letting the banks pretend that by making a loan and selling the loan, somehow the same profits it acquired would also be acquired by the buyers of the loan, and the borrowers would also locate the needed additional wealth to compensate everyone, in the time allotted. That conceptualization of lending and wealth-generation allowed for the delusion that new money could be made almost out of thin air, just by willing it.

A loan became a “product”, and the product could then be sold, over the counter, and morph from wealth projected to product sold to new wealth generated, eventually becoming an “engine” of economic growth. But with such a high percentage of all loans falling into this category of renamed, rehashed, and re-imagined value bases, the “engine” effect was getting too much like an effect and less and less like a genuine engine producing substantive thrust.

The idea of wealth replaced actual wealth. There was a bubble. There was a correction. We are living in the aftermath of the correction. But it is necessary to understand how widespread this financial market bubble was and what philosophy about the creation of wealth allowed for it to get so far beyond sustainable, or substantiable, expansion. The idea that by way of repackaging debt, new wealth would automatically emerge, underpinned an entire philosophy about how banking could be something new, something different, a break from the past.

But it was not the past from which these innovative finances were breaking; it was reality, the measure of the concrete, the measurable, the comprehensible. Money is abstract enough as it is: paper or coin that represents value, formerly backed by silver or gold, now just a currency with value against other currencies. So to craft whole new terrains of complex abstraction, within which money appears to do amazing new things, perform new functions, is to stretch the bounds of lived reality.

Here’s another way to look at it. Banks are required, at least in the US, to keep a certain amount of capital in reserve, to guard against losses and cover obligations to pay out withdrawals to account-holders. In the process of assessing the fallout of the 2008 credit freeze, banks that were taking money from the federal government were found to have inadequate capital in reserve: they had been using investments, bundled assets and projected earnings as “capital in reserve”, which they were not.

This fictionalization of the banking business has many causes, over many years, and cannot be attributed to a single individual, a single idea, or any one point of departure. But at some point, innovative thinking and the generation of valuable financial derivatives morphed into a fictionalization of value, in which there simply was not and could not be enough value generated, in a short enough period of time, to sustain the claims of value being made by those institutions generating and selling off the bundled assets, derivatives and exotics.

So, we can say, the fiction of automatic wealth is bankrupting the US. Yes, even today, even as we are in recovery. Because fictionalized finances found their way into the long-term investment strategies of major institutions, including state governments. California is now broke. Banks have refused to continue accepting IOUs from the state, and the state government now has to shut down one day a week. California, the world’s 5th largest economy, lost billions when the markets seized up and hemorrhaged wealth last year.

It is the second time in a decade that California fell head over heels into a massive swindle. The Enron debacle nearly bankrupted the state, because the power-trading giant had allegedly colluded with other power companies in California to fix prices, forcing the governor to sign an agreement to buy power at many times market rates for up to ten years. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to power in the wake of that collapse, and now the end of his second term is seeing another collapse, brought on by huge losses caused by a financial system whose claims of real value were simply not real.

The entangling of state pensions plans and other long-term investments with the esoteric workings of the financial system is a natural consequence of a mindset in which every player has a right to earn, and to profit, via financial investment. The problem is, someone generally has to lose wealth in order for someone else to gain substantially, so the more players involved, the more risk —one might think— that more players will wind up losing. Creative strategies have to be adopted to prevent this, or at least to make it look like it will not occur.

The math might change altogether. A 30-year mortgage, which may or may not ever be repaid at its highest projected value, is counted as an asset. The lender claims to in fact hold that wealth now. $500,000 was just paid out, but in fact, the bank will claim to hold the $500,000, plus all the accumulated future interest. It does not, in fact, have the money, but it says it does. And it makes this questionable logic look viable by selling the debt.

With most commodities, this works, because the risk of lower value is taken on by the buyer, and such is the speculation that comes with buying and selling commodities. At some point, there will be a buyer who has to know the risk is mounting and he may never see a higher price than he paid. But with debt, the value of the loan is fixed: the borrower will not in fact pay more than the highest amount allowable under the loan agreement.

So once the bank sells the debt at the highest price it can, the buyer is very likely never to see a higher price or a return on investment. To get around this, debt holdings were “bundled”. Or rather, they were fragmented, then recombined. So the $500,000 plus interest becomes 5,000 $100 values, each with potential accumulated interest, and each with a speculative price that might actually go up. The money multiplies, and the buyer has some confidence that this speculative commodity will in fact yield a higher price than what he pays for it.

But the problem remains the same: the underlying loan will never be worth more than the monetary value assigned to it in the initial loan agreement. At some point, someone somewhere will be holding debt, which they “bought” at a very high price, which will either be repaid at the initial agreed (lower) value, or not be repaid at all, because in fact the wealth necessary for the borrower to successfully repay the loan never materialized at all.

Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times across the financial system, then millions, over several years. Imagine people with fixed-rate mortgages, able to repay, refinancing their homes in order to get access to more wealth, buying into new loans that work in this way, so that a majority of all loans were in fact of this kind. Banks were long past the critical mass on unsustainable debt when the house of cards started to wobble last summer.

What happened between the spring and the fall of 2008 was that a scenario some economists had predicted for years actually became apparent and apparently inevitable: there simply was not enough real wealth in the world to sustain the claims of value being made by the financial sector as a whole: too many outstanding mortgages were in fact unpayable as it was, let alone in a world where repayment depends on a financial system with exorbitant growth levels and where wages are expanding too slowly —actually declining by $2,000 per household from 2000 to 2008— and cost of living skyrocketing — namely food, fuel, healthcare and credit.

We are still working our way out of the labyrinth of that fictionalized financial world. But it’s important to recognize the underlying big picture conceptualizations of wealth that led to the mess we are in. The idea that wealth can automatically materialize from cunning manipulations, or even from what might be essentially nothing more than a shift in vocabulary, is dangerous and must be guarded against.

Automaticity is a tempting idea: it periodically takes hold of and distorts entire political systems. It is the logic behind building ever more destructive weapons —logic that the use of brute force will automatically compel our enemies to respond as we wish— and of prejudice of all kinds —if a stereotype can be applied to an entire group, then why not pin the blame for all our ills on that group—, and so the logic of automaticity is at the root of some of the most massive and widespread suffering in human history.

In banking, it has led to millions of bankruptcies and home foreclosures, millions of layoffs, a frozen credit industry. A lack of government response may have allowed the nation to slide into a long economic depression, by many economists’ forecasts. So the lesson has to be: wealth is not generated automatically by any flip of the wrist, by any sleight of hand, by any cunning financial innovation; it emerges, over time, from real evolutions within the economy as a whole, and has to correspond to measurable real-world value.

Banks are no more entitled to an automatic unending expansion of the wealth they hold or claim to hold than is any one individual. Banks are no more virtuous than any borrower, when they make claims about future wealth projections. The virtue is in the human element, which is expressed by the measurable wealth construct, the figures that are not purely figurative but actually correspond to lived reality.

We must remember that banks are made up of human beings, just as the market landscape of borrowers and investors is made up of human beings. Ideas are tools we use to serve our purposes, but they cannot be bought and sold independent of the human world in which they function; innovative financial instruments must operate on the human scale, so that investors know they are not handing over real wealth in exchange for unsustainable wealth claims.

Beyond Utopia, it was a lust to fashion a paradise built on millions of purgatories. It was the paradox of a violent Heaven, a wisdom of intolerance, a corrupt purity, an abstraction drowned in the blood of innocents. In order to establish absolute power, either for themselves or their ideology, a purge was undertaken that would attempt to eliminate nearly all people of learning, leaving by one count only 4 highly trained Cambodian legal minds remaining.

The totalitarian nature of the purge was, like all political purges and all totalitarianism, based on the lie, the false promise of finality: The Khmer Rouge bet the lives of millions and the fate of their nation on the idea that once they had killed enough people, the perfect society would emerge and the ills that threatened their plans would be cured, purged successfully, overcome without risk of return.

If the political logic of the deranged practitioners of the Cambodian genocide are to be believed, they believed they could make a just and ordered world by attacking with thunder and steel everything vulnerable in the human beings they judged as outside their reach, and erasing human virtues like compassion, justice, tolerance, from the communities they favored, by shaping their society through a system of torture and murder.

The evils of the Khmer Rouge terror were nothing less than the wholesale abdication of humanity, in service of a power structure that elevated thugs and psychopaths, testing their merit by urging them to exhibit incomprehensible degrees of cruelty.

This is so much the case that in the ongoing trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch (pronounced ‘Doik’) —a prison director accused of a vast array of war crimes, committed in furtherance of the Khmer Rouge purge—, the defendant has alternately broken down in hysterical demonstrations of guilt and regret and attempted to delegitimize testimony questioning the identity of witnesses by saying he had long ago had that person killed.

The metaphysical arrangement of such a regime of bloodlust could be classed as habitual psychotics —more than as physics or metaphysics—‚ behavior so far outside what even the perpetrator’s heart and mind can countenance, that it amounts to a deliberate casting off of any intellectual or moral coherence, a descent into something antithetical to the involvement of anything we might call human qualities.

By casting off the restraint that stems from having human qualities like conscience, moral compass, tolerance and civil social structures, in exchange for an experiment with habitual psychotics, the genocidal regime is able to spread the logic of its brutality, by disqualifying virtually anyone from the broad category of humanity, both the victims and its allies in perpetrating the killing.

This accounts for the mysterious inability of any moral considerations to explain or account for the logic of genocide. It is not logical; it is not intellectually or morally coherent; it is not actually in service of any reasonable or worthy political aim. It is the sowing of injury and contempt in a way that will take root, leaving a landscape of devastation and tragedy in its wake, the fundamental crippling of a nation for generations to come.

Now, long after the killing ended, Cambodia has finally been able to put together a legal process for prosecuting and punishing the crimes of that era (1975-1979), but only with the help of international jurists assisting in an ad-hoc “hybrid” tribunal system meant to enforce and expand the scope of Cambodia’s own evolving humanitarian law.

The trials are a criminal prosecution that stands in for what has been tried in other places, the “truth and reconciliation” process aimed at fixing crimes and grudges firmly in the past, in order to clear the terrain of the society’s future for something better and more humane. Each society that faces the horrors of such a history has unique circumstances, unique crimes to address, and unique demographic makeup that may favor one solution over another.

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, conceived a complex but broadly applicable process of community hearings, in which the perpetrators of the horrific Rwandan genocide openly confessed in front of their neighbors their involvement in the crimes of those 100 days in 1994 — when over 800,000 men, women and children were murdered by machete, dagger, fire and beating, by people who had always been part of their communities.

Kagame told Fareed Zakaria on Sunday’s edition of GPS —the “Global Public Square”— that “We had to bring the victims and perpetrators back together”, because those on either side of the genocide live in mixed communities everywhere across Rwanda. Zakaria praised Rwanda for finding a nuanced and well-thought solution to the problem of continued cohabitation of both communities, even as the nation seeks to recognize the genocide and prevent another round of the same, perhaps in retaliation or frustration for hard living conditions.

In fact, “spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide” is now sowing unrest in North Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Cattle rustling used to finance militia activity is fomenting inter-ethnic conflict among Hutus and Tutsis, some of whom are émigrés from Rwanda, having fled in the time of the genocide. As the Christian Science Monitor is reporting:

While the trade in blood cows finances rebel activity here, but it’s also a form of psychological warfare. Another major rebel group in the region, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), is a predominantly Tutsi movement which sees itself as protecting its people. It also defends their traditional livelihood; For centuries, the pastoral Tutsi have measured a man’s wealth by counting his cattle.

“Nothing riles the CNDP and the Tutsi more than having their cattle stolen,” says Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. When they turn to battle, she says, the CNDP can be brutal: In a bid to regain villages controlled by Hutu militias, in April the CNDP killed over 100 civilians, some of them the elderly and children.

However galling or economically traumatic, the theft of cattle is substantially less significant than the mass slaughter of innocents, but the Kivu experience demonstrates how the unresolved fallout from the 1994 genocide is again stoking the fires of ethnic hatred. Can Paul Kagame do enough in his second term as president of Rwanda to establish a reliable civil society to effect a lasting truth and reconciliation process in which the crimes and animus of the genocide are relegated to the past?

The effects of the slaughter will be part of Rwandan life, part of the immediate life experience and family structures across the nation, for generations to come, as is the case in Cambodia, as among Europeans both Jewish and non-Jewish who lived through the Holocaust, as is the case for residents of the former Yugoslavia or of today’s Darfur. The false promise of the final solution will, in every case, become ingrained in the evolution of a people, and may impede any real ascent to ideal structures favoring harmony among rival groups.

We need to establish international structures with reach and authority that can detect and prevent such campaigns of slaughter. The prime minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, decries China’s treatment of Uighur muslims in Xinjiang province as “genocide”, though many believe the programmatic “ethnic reordering” in which Beijing has engaged is not as dangerous as more aggressive “ethnic cleansing”. But some say such situations as those in Xinjiang, or the North Caucasus, need to be viewed as early warnings and halted without further loss of life.

Framing a social plan of any kind in the logic of ethnic cleansing or political re-engineering implies the desire to use force to command the restructuring of communities. Doing so in a way that takes lives or forces entire ethnicities or groups of political dissidents out verges on what could be called a purge campaign. Such ideas of a final solution are tempting to the subset of political actors who disqualify their rivals from humanity and seek to sweep them from existence, and are the root structure of a burgeoning genocide.

International structures that can provide for monitoring such policies that put a society at risk of ethnic cleansing need to be established, tested and strengthened. Observation of crimes like those ongoing in Darfur, and possibly ready to flare up again in North Kivu or the North Caucasus, is not enough: observation with vocal protest which amounts to no intervention empowers the perpetrators and condones their worst actions.

Building consensus among the “great powers”, namely the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of whom wields a veto power over any action taken by the Council, is the first step. Genuine issues of sovereignty can be addressed, but Moscow and Beijing could be persuaded to see that reducing inter-ethnic conflict wherever it exists, especially within their borders and in neighboring countries, is in the interests of their existing systems of government and influence abroad.

Cambodia is now facing its savage and inexplicable past, and doing the truly hard work of trying to adjudicate who pays the price for the crimes of a regime whose legal framework for ruling could not be justified as “legal” under any recognized notion of legitimate government. Evidence presented in court may show that some of those responsible for the crimes were following orders; the orders, and the legal authority behind them, must be shown to be beyond the scope of any allowable legal structure.

What faces Cambodia, however, is more than just judging the guilty; it’s accounting for all that was lost, all the cultural potential of the lives cut short, all the vision and humanity that will never be recovered. That ache is memorial and immemorial, tightly woven into the fabric of Cambodian politics, and transcendent; it must permeate what takes place in the future, but also be put aside so that the future can be free of it.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy means feeling what the other feels, experiencing grief at the other’s grief, loyalty in kind with the other’s loyalties, taking sides; empathy is the ability to comprehend the meaning of another’s experiences, and does not entail adopting or sharing the other’s views. Empathy for a judge means the ability to see how both parties arguing before a court could arrive there based on legitimate human experiences and assertions about the protections and provisions of the law.

For a judge to acknowledge that this is a necessary quality, that it is important to go beyond one’s own preferences and ideological leanings in order to hear the full breadth of the case of each party before the court, is to acknowledge that full faith in absolute impartiality is a sort of false pride in one’s own capacity which expands the possibility a ruling will in fact be biased and not impartial. Acknowledging one’s humanity and personal experience as a judge is part of the process of transcending bias and getting to the most impartial rulings possible.

On the first day of direct questioning, the second day of her hearings, Judge Sotomayor told senators, “We’re not robots who listen to evidence and don’t have feelings. We have to recognize those feelings, and put them aside.” This message is in fact in keeping with her complex arguments about the intellectual process of understanding and getting beyond bias and personal preference.

Conservatives are committing one after another ridiculous contortion in an effort to defame Judge Sonia Sotomayor as biased, racist and incompetent. Their efforts are contortions worthy of ridicule, because they are ignoring every element of fact and thought in order to extrapolate arguments they so deeply desire to be able to make, as if there were no room for humanity or for reflection in the process of thinking about law, and as if their own ideology were not a source of significant bias on their part.

On CNN, Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, repeatedly suggested the narrowest of intellectual fallacies, in line with the arguments of Sen. Jeff Sessions, claiming that Sotomayor repeatedly said that she in fact meant to say the opposite of what she actually said. The truth of the matter is that she is trying to explain complex thoughts to individuals who are either recklessly or deliberately misreading her statements for their own partisan political reasons.

Castellanos and Sessions alike assailed Sotomayor for claiming that her statements about experience influencing judgment, or impartiality being in real terms an aspiration and an ideal were in fact statements in support of impartiality and objectivity in judicial thinking. They assailed her comments, because they either fail to understand or deliberately ignore the entire thread of her argument.

By day three of the hearings, her second full day of questioning, Castellanos was charging that there was something “almost schizophrenic” about Sotomayor’s philosophical explanations of how awareness of the meaning of personal experience leads to enhanced impartiality. There is a coordinated effort ongoing among Republicans in the Senate to argue that “empathy” is contrary to judicial impartiality, because they assume the conversation is about sympathy.

They assume that by attacking Obama has promoting empathy, or judges aware of what is in their hearts, they can stain him with the charge of prejudice, bias, even make him seem suspiciously racist. The arguments are being made for one reason alone, to promote an ideological view of judging, which holds that any deviation from the conservative agenda favored by those making the argument is “activism” that threatens to undermine the American Constitution and strip people of their rights.

Of all the Republican statements and questions so far put to Judge Sotomayor, only Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has really gone to specific points of law and specific judgments outside the Ricci case. The Ricci case is eye-catching, but involves virtually no “innovation” on Sotomayor’s part and thus no real controversy, as a matter of law. It is being used in order to paint Sotomayor as a Hispanic woman with ethnic bias, who is trigger happy about affirmative action.

Even Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) spent most of his time questioning Sotomayor about her personal opinions on the philosophical question of “empathy” or of ethnicity as foundations for making rulings. He even went as far as to ask her if she believed that “physiology” played a role in judges’ manner of judging, referring indirectly to race and sex. She essentially spent most of her exchange with Sen. Cornyn explaining that she does not judge based on personal preferences, emotion or ethnicity.

What Sotomayor has time and again expressed is her view, informed by long years of experience as a lawyer and federal judge (she has more federal legal experience than any nominee in 100 years and more overt federal judicial experience than any nominee in 70 years), that most people struggle to even become aware of their own biases. Her concern with experience and awareness of discriminatory behavior is rooted in her experience that in fact most people do not make enough of an effort to transcend their biases, and this negatively impacts the kind of rulings made by many judges.

She has suggested that it is vital to understand one’s own experience and one’s own context, in order to look beyond one’s limits and develop genuine empathy for all litigants who come before her, to see that on some level there is meaning to their experience of the facts of the case. Her argument is not that empathy allows her to make biased rulings, but thatexperience of the need for broader empathy among people, in general, allows her to transcend her personal experience and give equal weight to the arguments of all before her.

It is not that complex an argument. But there is an ideology of “conservative” judging, which deviates from true conservatism and expects that conservatism (read: moderation) is a virtue that all judges should have, and that therefore any judge who is not determined to produce conservative rulings (read: in line with the “conservative” agenda) is somehow fundamentally flawed and can be opposed on those grounds. In order to support this view, a rigid standard of automatic ruling is applied, where certain types of arguments should win, not because of the merits of a case, but because they are aligned with a specific ideology.

Sessions and Castellanos appear to argue that law is “mechanical”, that judicial rulings are “predictable”, an essential negation of the logic of maintaining an independent judiciary. Sessions and Castellanos —and others making similar arguments against Sotomayor, or against Obama’s philosophy of the judiciary—, while they cast their criticisms in the mold of ideological conservatism, actually appear to be arguing that the only qualification for service on the Supreme Court is something akin to the ancient doctrine of papal “infallibility”.

This idea is reflexive; it works for segments of the political spectrum that desire relentless proof of the security of their ideas by way of the elimination of rival ideas. The mechanical judiciary argument is diametrically opposed to the idea that three separate branches of government check and balance each other’s power. The mechanical judiciary view holds that the judiciary must be either a rubber-stamp for the legislature or the executive.

The Sessions and Castellanos line, that all judges must be absolutely mechanical about the practice of law, use zero interpretive capacity and never disagree with ideological conservative positions, is 100% contrary to the US Constitutional system. Their line of attack is anti-democratic and is rooted in arguments that emerge from facile devotion to the logic of power rooted in old-world absolutist systems. (It should be noted that the Vatican threw out the doctrine of papal infallibility, because it had come to be seen as nothing more than an ill-conceived excuse for abuses and even heresy.)

It is important to note that increasing numbers of legal observers and Constitutional scholars are coming to view the Roberts Court as “activist”, in that Chief Justice Roberts has in fact been enforcing a devotion to a political philosophy that he had pledged would not influence his rulings. Jeffrey Toobin, renowned legal scholar and CNN judicial analyst, wrote in a May edition of the New Yorker magazine:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

Toobin was quoted during Monday’s opening statements, specifically in order to illustrate the concerns of some Democratic senators that the current Supreme Court has been stocked with ideological conservatives who do favor the idea of an activist conservative judiciary, despite their protestations in confirmation hearings that they would not.

The judiciary exists, and in the American system is independent of the control of the executive, precisely because no human being is infallible. This is why there are so many levels of judicial review, courts of appeal and opportunities to contest finalized legal rulings. This is why there are juries. And this is why on the final court of arbitration, the last appeal, the forum for final decisions on matters of law, there are nine justices, and not one.

Conservatives have reflexively sought to paint Barack Obama as a hardline socialist liberal who has no regard for conservative views, business interests, or limitations on government authority, when in fact, though a tested progressive in politics, Obama has consistently erred on the side of restraint and moderation. The prejudice that Obama favors biased government enforcement of a socialist ideology is influencing Republican arguments in the Sotomayor hearings, and has caused Republican senators to almost completely ignore her judicial record.

In fact, no serious challenge to her confirmation has been made by any Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, because so few points of law have actually been discussed. While attacking Obama’s interest in empathy as an emotional distraction that undermines impartiality, Republican senators have obsessively questioned Sotomayor on her sympathies, her views of personal experience in judging, her view of women in the judiciary, her “temperament” and her attitudes.

They have entirely glanced over her judicial record, which by most accounts is moderate and shows no overt signs of ideological leanings. What they have failed to see is that they are devoting their valuable questioning time to beating a dead horse: they want to establish that Obama’s mention of “empathy” means he favors judges who would be biased in favor of liberal ideology.

They ignore the fact that for both Obama and Sotomayor, based on their own extensive comments on the issue, empathy is a quality that allows a judge to rise above temperament, to rise above politics, and to judge the facts, in terms of law, for the good of the Constitutional system. The fact is, empathy as explained by both Obama and Sotomayor is a moderating virtue, a quality of intellect that allows for better understanding of the consequences of one’s actions as a judge.

• Constitution Center Stage as Sotomayor Introduced, Franken Debuts
• Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings Begin on Capitol Hill
• What Sonia Sotomayor Actually Said in 2001 Lecture
• Obama Remarks Announcing Sotomayor Nomination (transcript)
• Obama Names Judge Sonia Sotomayor for US Supreme Court

To think about achieving new cosmologies, to think outside the geometry of the known (or presumed) universe, we must first come to the understanding that rule-based thinking is designed to leave us with thoughts that re-affirm the underlying preconceptions, the rules…

The artist, the poet, learns to sketch free-hand, trusting that there is more life, more truth, more expressive capacity, in the traces left by a free hand than in the paint-by-numbers standard copy we might be tempted to produce (as if to show that we can or to demonstrate reverence for the conventions that elevate their proponents); the scope of the free hand is broader, so its ability to find its way is more evolved…

Dialogue works best this way as well: when two parties get beyond the vices of convention and expand outward into another sort of interpretive momentum, where the quality of the leap between one phrase and another is enhanced, and more of the previously unseen can be revealed…

A new utterance, or better, a new mode of utterance, is a de-structuring (or a deconstruction) of already standing structures through which utterance once has been known, and in that, it is a critique, an undermining and also a contribution…

In invention, there is a judgment about the frail and fluid nature of what is real, what is final, and as Joseph G. Kronick writes, in Derrida and the Future of Literature:

Such a judgment fails, however, to the extent that it obeys a law and does not reinstitute or reinvent the law in a new judgment. IT is a matter of doing justice to what is to come, the other, to singularity, to the singularity of the coming of the other, an impossible but necessary task, for the “other” is a name for what can bear no name, not even (and least of all) “Being.” It is to come precisely because is does not have the status of a present being, nor is it an object of knowledge. The other is what calls for a response.

To write is to engage the world in new terms. To create is to find shapes and voices new enough to seem a new world or a new standard, beyond the known. And to think toward the future is, of necessity, to engage something that we do not yet know: it requires invention, openness to shifting of sands, monuments, bodies of law and manners of parsing every x into its y and z, every memory into its offspring…

We find ourselves renovated by engaging an imagined future. Wisdom resides in the other as it resides deep within, not showing signs unless we embody the poise and patience to feel how it flows. Creating must be a work committed to being against the ravages of entropy, against disintegration, so we venture out into the de-structuring of the known, in order to write the next, and find synthesis, connection, coming together…

• Originally published 27 May 2009, at Elindulnék

We are “social beings” is a common way of saying it. The human being is the “grammatical ape”, a talkative species that uses codified sounds to create and transmit meaning and to build a community of individuals, ideas and voices, in which the individual can benefit from having connections as well. The “human” is an idea, not a fact, another way of looking at things, and so we should not even go as far as to say that the individual is apart from everything else, as we cannot define totally what it is that makes us a group in which that is true, aside from DNA and appearances.

These are all cultural refrains that repeat themselves in sometimes subtle, sometimes unsubtle ways. But the key to this examination is the problem of solitude, isolation, abandonment: what barriers are there to reaching a level of connection and reliability in one’s relationships, or at least in most important one(s), that allows one to feel that not everyone is alone, but there are bonds, safe spaces, enduring affections, and constructive complexity in human relationships?

The first barrier is the idea itself: everyone is alone… this seems true, and it is true that everyone, probably by the nature of human awareness and perception, must experience this, sometimes. But what does that really mean? The 9th century Chinese zen master, Huang Po has been translated as having said to a student of the zen way:

Once you stop arousing concepts and thinking in terms of existence and non-existence, long and short, other and self, active and passive, and suchlike, you will find that your Mind is intrinsically the Buddha, that the Buddha is intrinsically Mind, and that Mind resembles a void.

Huang Po’s words relate to the idea of “Buddha” as absolute enlightenment, and Mind as the realm in which one moves either closer to or further away from that enlightenment. “Void” is not a negation, it is not a vacuum, in zen thought, but means “beyond tangible perception”. It means that the truth as such can be conceptualized for the convenience of human thought, but that conceptualizations are not the truth, as such.

So, are we alone? How do we know? Does our perception, or our mind, hold this evidence? And if so, is it reliable? To each of these points, it is possible to respond by saying “possibly”. There are moments in which we are without substantive human contact, in a moment, or in a specific activity, and we must find a way to share our truth with others, if we desire to. We are alone. But this is not a permanent state of being, and it is not, ultimately, the truth of things.

Our perception notes in such cases that we are out of touch, we are without immediate open connections, we are alone, but this is not the only truth. We are also in touch, we are also, in most cases, close to part of our own story which is bound up with human connections, and which we cannot keep from view, not entirely. We are known, to some degree, and that knowledge, in the experience of those we have come in contact with, is part of who we are.

We cannot always access it, and the feeling of being unable to influence how that information is received, stored or called up, by the other, can be a kind of existential solitude that troubles the soul, deeply. But it is not necessarily that way, because the experience that in such a case manifests itself as frustration is shared with other people, though each person lives it in their own way, often away from the perception of others.

It is this distance between the perception in its moment and the perception as experienced, the one relating closely to a complex array of interpersonal circumstances, and the other held back from that closeness of contact by the vastness of what is not certain about that intermediate terrain between one and the other.

So, we must first ask ourselves what is the truth of an experience of absolute perception. Camus writes that:

La première démarche de l’esprit est de distinguer ce qui est vrai de ce qui est faux. Pourtant dès que la pensée réfléchit sur elle même, ce qu’elle découvre d’abord, c’est une contradiction. Inutile de s’efforcer ici d’être convaincant.

So perception of the self is by its own nature “unconvincing”. It is rooted in the inherently unconvincing nature of fact-perception itself: to perceive is to cross a distance, and so to become aware of separation, but to perceive humanity, whether in oneself or in another, is a kind of closing of that distance, a transmission of an implausible inner reality in which that distance is shared, and so is an experience of proximity. A contradiction.

As we seek to impose on our perception the task of proving its distance from the world it perceives —prove its ability to discern not only true from false, but also self from surroundings—, we fall into a trap of far-reaching consequences: any such judgment is inherently incomplete. Because the mind assembles all perceived reality always within reach of its own perceptive capacity, it can only truly perceive itself, not the real place of what lies beyond it.

So yes, in this way, we are always detached from what we seek to know, and it is always possible to perceive that perceptual distance as a void, unyielding and uncrossable, but in this, we are joined by all perceptual beings. The sensation of a deep existential aloneness is not so much a study of the facts as it is an awareness of the nature of human consciousness not meeting our most overwhelming desires.

It is important to get a sense of the limits of perception and immediate communication, so that we do not let the weight of untenable desires push our vision of the possibility of making contact with others over the line toward despair. That despair is another lie that emerges easily from adherence to desires with a distorted objective and from a misperception of perception itself.

In fact, there is room for a near total conversion of the traditional role assigned to perception: it is commonly professed that perception, via the senses and the mind, is intended to help us acquire knowledge of the world outside, but we could argue that percpetion is a mechanism for building the world of the self, within us. Not particularly ideal for mapping the full scope of the larger universe, our perception corresponds to our preferences about the inner world in which we make sense of the outer world.

The senses do give us the ability to assess our environment, to catch danger in our consciousness before it is too close, to navigate toward sustenance and away from mortal threats, but perception as a whole functions more as part of a project of making and maintaining a coherent, referential inner world, so the distance we perceive with concern in times of isolation is actually a vital element in the healthy functioning of an individual consciousness.

Everyone is alone, sometimes, when these difficult realities or our perceptual selfhood become all-too-evident, and it is possible to doubt what, if any, connection we have made with external entities —people, facts and resources—, each a stimulus, a reference and a ghost carrying meanings we can only suspect. But that aloneness is only a sometime interference in our more constant experience of being bound to those elements that provoke and inform our perception.

It is that complex intertwining of sameness and difference, of embrace and distance, of communication and isolation, that pushes us to defy the need for times of solitude, but which causes us to long for it when excess imposition from the exterior impedes our ability to discern what is true from what is not or what is our own from what is fed into our consciousness. Like dreaming, remembering or imagining, the experience of aloneness is a part of our lifelong project of crafting a personal consciousness of the world, a necessary element of the process, a gift as much as a burden.

• Originally published 4 August 2008, at CafeSentido.com
• Part of the collection of essays, Cave Painting

Soft power works, because one is able to use the social force of virtue —rooted in actual qualities and demonstrable value to those concerned— and because one shows proof of being closer to shared goals than the other party, leading the other party to follow one’s lead.

Obama has demonstrated an incredible ability for a victorious politician: forgiveness. His magnanimity is, whether he intends it to be or not, an exceedingly valuable asset to him, not just in terms of public image, but because he wields power through it, and that leverage is not missed by those he is negotiating with. Imagine the awe his show of mercy to Joe Lieberman must inspire in the vigilant eyes of the fallen leaders of the Republican party’s aspirational one-party government.

They were terrified of letting one inch slip to their opponents; this man is strong enough to be generous, politically. That means he can win favor with enemies, listen to a bewildering array of intelligent concepts and proposals, and rely on his judgment, not the maneuverings of party minions, to select, adopt and enact the best and most effective. This is the position leaders of all kinds most aspire to be in, and he is reminding them from day one that he is already there.

Is it “soft power” or “3d diplomacy” —diplomacy, development, defense—, is it “smart power”, or “principled pragmatism”? There is really no need to put a label on it, because for the sake of historical argument, we can call it the Obama way: push your friend and rivals alike to adopt bold new ideas that focus on solutions in stead of ideology; be courageous enough to tackle all of the toughest issues at once; use the levers of power to your advantage, but listen to dissent and allow for crafted solutions that broaden support for your strategy.

This is the kind of unrelenting soft power that has allowed Barack Obama to continue winning an historically broad base of support, even as he takes positions that other presidents would have seen as controversial, and battles Congress for leadership in the game of national policy rhetoric.

As in the campaign, Obama’s style of governing owes much to his prowess at framing the debate within a vocabulary rooted in his ideas. Everyone is speaking his language, so inevitably, the final verdict will be rooted in his principles, even if he has to give up some ground to get the most salient projects passed.

Much has been made of his “capitulating” on renewal of the assault weapons ban… the problem is, it wasn’t his ban, it wasn’t a priority to begin with, and Congress (unbelievably) is unwilling to pass it. Despite a severe rash of mass killings and spreading gun violence, despite evidenced that American gun-shop owners have been ferrying high-powered assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels, Congress is afraid of the gun lobby.

It is not for a president with major reforms ahead to pick a fight in which his allies are few and the public’s view of the issue is so severely skewed by relentless propaganda from a commercially-interested lobby. Every time the GOP leadership comes out in support of weapons that kill children, it gets harder for them to sustain any credibility, and the question of a “fight” on gun control seems to dim.

There may come a time, but using power wisely means letting people have their say, and for now, Congress says gun control will be a political bloodbath. Obama has been very adroit, throughout his rise, at letting hostile opponents sabotage themselves, letting John McCain make nitwit pronouncements on economic policy for instance, letting the Republicans propose a pointless tax-cut-for-the-wealthy budget even as they claim they are now suddenly populist.

With each round of renewed idiocy in the sort of attack levied against him, his pragmatist agenda and his personal standing are elevated. His political capital expands as his political enemies squander their own credibility in unfounded or illogical attacks. His “record budget” is adequately explained when the Republicans produce a faux budget with just as large a deficit, but no plans for recovery, and Obama announces a deliberative process to find record spending cuts, pointing out that Bush’s spending was even higher, he just excluded the wars from his budget.

It is hard for the Republican party to grasp how this kind of exercise of authority works: using moral authority to support solution-oriented policies, instead of the bully pulpit to ram ideological concessions down people’s throats; using carefully worded policy-speak to re-frame the entire scope of debate on a given issue, forcing even opponents into a debate within one’s vocabulary, i.e. winning the debate before it begins; listening to one’s opponents, even harvesting workable ideas from their agenda, but using those ideas to bolster one’s own position.

It is incomprehensible to seasoned Washington strategists that Obama is not using his high approval ratings and his bold agenda to bludgeon beleaguered Republicans to death in a campaign of character assassination and scorched-earth attacks. But Obama’s special quality of governing from balance and confidence is rooted in his belief that while the others may waste their energy on such games, actually governing effectively will always beat them. He intends to “lap” the Republicans over and over again, by getting things done, and so far, it has worked to an historic degree.

Know your enemy’s flaws, and avoid exhibiting them yourself. He is well aware of how toxic the Republican party’s vicious blood-and-guts politicking has been; he has seen Gingrich and DeLay go down in infamy; Rove’s name is synonymous with “liar” and Cheney is seen as a man so obsessed with strength that no principle and no ethics can contain his ambition.

You will notice that Obama exhibits none of these qualities, because he understands them to be a waste of time. If one wants to achieve important improvements to the quality of life of real people, the work is hard and the negotiations may be bitter, but open combat with one’s most bitter rivals is not an effective way to get there.

Obama’s way of relentlessly releasing new ideas and making much needed policy changes, always in line with his promises of reform oriented toward expanding transparency and ridding government of entrenched monied interests, has left the Republican party reeling. They keep waiting for something they can attack him for, on an all-day everyday basis, for weeks, and the struggle has left them looking like the party of “zero ideas” as one of their own recently confessed.

If we are to understand the “preternatural calm” or the legendary poise that was so often spoken of during the campaign, we have to take seriously Obama’s frequent admission that the campaign “was never about me”, that he was in it because the people needed someone to work for them. His focus is not on accumulating wealth and power, or is it on serving interests that have built him into an institution over several decades: it’s on doing the work he promised to do, and answering to the many millions who made his power base so genuinely grassroots.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people: Obama is qualified to use his own ideas and his own principles to effect this sort of government, because he was wide open about his policy proposals and his agenda from day one. He announced his bold reform initiatives over two years ago. His ideas were unpacked and deconstructed in the public eye, and he won sweeping support from voters to carry out his agenda. His soft-power strategy is far from weak; it is the manifestation of a deep reserve of political strength and commitment to effective reform.

The art of the rhyming couplet, the frenetic ebb and flow of iambic pentameter, sometimes seem in today’s language environment more a distraction than a vehicle for delivering meaning across time. Poetry now resides in subtler places in more intricate and interrelated forms. It seeps into political discourse, into rap, into the dialogue between two characters on a movie screen, often for brief moments, then pushed aside by a mass of prose and fact and circumstance. But this is not new and it is not hazardous to poetry’s survival as a concentrated art-form fashioning new molds and opening new horizons.

It has always been the case that the oracular function of poetry, looking deep within or to the far reaches of the known and knowable, happens at the edges of the prosaic, at the fringe of our collective normalcy, in a place where in direct proportion to the intensity of the vision we confront those basic truths of our existence we often prefer not to engage.

The impact of poetry on the dexterity and relevance of meaning, in all other areas of linguistic or even expressive activity, broadly, is not lessened by the frequency with which we now change topics, shuffle from style to style or distance the moment’s future from the once most-desired vision of it. On the contrary, poetry fits the moment, always, in some manner, precisely because far from having to evolve to suit the moment poetry’s function is to drive meaning deeper into the core of all that is swirling around us.

We must first remember that an art must be judged by its best practitioners, not by the common trend. From this vantage point, we can see that the ancient vanguard of the written word continues to infuse our core realities with meaning more efficiently and cogently than any other related art-form, filling its host environments with the casual essence they might not otherwise have noticed.

• First published at Helium.com, November 2008 (you can rate the article there now)
• Republished 17 November 2008, at CafeSentido.com