Learning from Las Vagueness

Have been reading and absorbing "The Evolving Self: Psychology for the Third Millennium"

Here's a couple of quotes-

Evolution has apparently provided us with an efficient mechanism to make us do what is good for us- the experience of pleasure. But to save effort (and evolution is always about saving effort, because entropy is so powerful and energy is so difficult to obtain), it did not provide a complementary mechanism for sensing a golden mean and avoiding excess. As Tiger (he Pursuit of Pleasure 1992) says, paraphrasing the historian Santayana, “Those who do not learn from prehistory are condemned to repeat its successes.” The brain wont' tell us when enough is enough.

This chimes with something someone put up on a powerpoint recently (who? where? when? it's all a blur. Possibly at the NWDA horrorshow), a George Bernard Shaw quote "The thing we learn from history is that noone learns from history"

So how do we get out of this mess?

The only way to avoid becoming dangerously dependent on pleasure is to use the mind. Only through conscious reflection can we determine how much of what seems good is actually good for us, and then adopt a discipline that makes it possible to stop at the threshold. This is precisely what religions have tried to do: provide cultural institutions for holding to the golden mean. For example, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, three of the oldest and most widespread faiths, all advocate very strongly the moderation of unchecked appetites. The seven deadly sins of Christianity warn against indulging in excessive pride, too many material possessions, inordinate sex, too much food and drink, anger, and laziness. Similarly, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism state that (1) suffering is an essential part of existence, (2) the cause of suffering is desire for sensory pleasure, (3) release from suffering involves the elimination of desire, and (4) elimination of desire is achieved by following the Noble Eightfold Path- which in turn is a system of self-discipline whereby one learns to control the boundless cravings of the body. Religions, however, may no longer be able to impose the necessary limitations, so until credible new cultural instructions are discovered, each of us is left to find the golden mean that will prevent pleasure from taking over our lives.

Page 44-5 of the Evolving Self

Go with the Flow

I often think of states not just as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but also as being obsessed with regulating/encouraging free flows (e.g mercantilism to neoliberalism) of capital.

Of course, they're less keen on the free flow of people. That- “border patrols”- will need a separate posting.

Traffic lights are a trivial example of this:

The modern electric traffic light is an American invention. As early as 1912 in Salt Lake City, Utah, policeman Lester Wire invented the first red-green electric traffic lights. On 5 August 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. It had two colors, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for color changes. The design by James Hoge allowed police and fire stations to control the signals in case of emergency. The first four-way, three-color traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920. In 1923, Garrett Morgan patented a traffic signal device. It was Morgan's experience while driving along the streets of Cleveland that led to his invention of a traffic signal device. Ashville, Ohio claims to be the location of the oldest working traffic light in the United States, used at an intersection of public roads until 1982 when it was moved to a local museum

And of course, we regulate our own flows (toilet training, emotional “repression” and the whole Norbert Elias thing. This, from the wikipedia page about him gives you a taste:

Elias' most important work is the two-volume The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Originally published in 1939, it was virtually ignored until its republication in 1969, when its first volume was also translated into English. The first volume traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego." The second volume of The Civilizing Process looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.

And on the subject of flows, we have the in a good groove flow-

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

And then of course there's the (often) bad “going with the flow” (of other people/the norms) phrase. The quote below is from page 276 of an amazing book called “The Other Side of Time: A combat surgeon in World War 2”

In the course of an argument in the command post somebody said, "Oh, shit, let's be practical," and I looked over to see Manfred staring at the floor, shaking his head, muttering in German. When I listened, he was saying, "Oh, shit, practical again, here comes practical marching. I'll never be free from practical." I asked him about his little chant, and he told me his definitions of "practical." The word praktisch had been a two-syllable club he'd been beaten by fellow students and teachers and businessmen and clergy all through the nightmare years. "Stop being such a god-damned idealist" Be practical!"

"You know what practical is?

"Practical means I know right from wrong but I'm too fucking scared to do what's right so I commit crimes or permit crimes and I say I'm only being practical. Practical means coward.

"Practical frequently means stupid. Someone is too goddamn dumb to realize the consequences of what he's doing and he hides under practical.

"It also means corrupt: I know what I ought to do but I'm being paid to do something different so I call it practical.
"Practical is an umbrella for the everything lousy people do."

I handed Manfred a bottle of brandy. "A toast, Manfred. Here's to the destruction of the practical!"

"The cowardly, greedy, vicious, plausible practical!"

The ultimate flow though- the one that will render all the others moot- is the flow of carbon dioxide from its long term sequestration as coal, oil or gas, into the atmosphere...

So it goes..