Friday, February 25, 2011

What I'm Reading

1. Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. Slingerland analyzes the conceptual metaphors used by early Chinese philosophers to characterize the ideal of wu-wei or "not doing". He argues that these metaphors result in irresolveable paradoxes, suggesting that the concept of wu-wei may be self-contradictory.

2. Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. An analytic philosopher looks at the issue of the purpose of life, in the light of contemporary science and eastern and western wisdom traditions.

3. Clark Ashton Smith, A Vintage from Atlantis. This is volume 3 of the collected fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. Smith was a writer for the pulps in the 1930s, whose poetic prose and lush imagery had a big influence on other writers of horror, fantasy, and science fiction (including H. P. Lovecraft and Jack Vance).

4. Robert E. Howard, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Along with Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard is one of the three most influential writers from the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s. Howard's writing is vivid and visceral, and his brooding hero is more than just the muscle-bound oaf in sandles of later pastiche, film, and television.

5. Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000. Wickham shows the continuity and contrasts between the late Roman empire and the early Dark Ages. He helps clarify the nature of the transformation of Western Europe after the gradual collapse of Roman rule there, working extensively with both the archaeological and textual sources, and even-handedly evaluating the theories of other historians.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

The Costs of Higher Ed

I teach philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and I like what I do, but I have to admit I don't think higher ed provides a very good bargain for students. According to a recent study, college students aren't learning much, and meanwhile the cost of getting a degree continues to rise. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution recently blogged about what might be keeping higher ed costs so high, and he linked to a couple of recent posts by Matthew Yglesias on the same topic. I'm glad that more people are thinking about this issue, because it has perplexed me for a long time.

The general problem is a lack of incentive among higher ed administrators to reduce prices and improve quality. One solution might be to replace not-for-profit private universities and state-run universities with for-profit private universities, but I imagine that this would be too controversial to ever actually happen, regardless of how effective it might be. (David D. Friedman has a chapter in his anarchist manifesto Machinery of Freedom dedicated to this idea, which he titled "Adam Smith U.".)

Even in cases where universities offer a quality education (as measured in terms of actual learning outcomes), costs are often higher than they should be. Part of the problem is supposedly due to the "Baumol cost disease," which in the case of higher ed is due to the fact that salaries of professors have continued to rise despite the fact that their productivity has not. I suspect this is part of the problem, and that new technologies might be able to reduce the teacher to student ratio at higher ed institutions (and thus reduce the amount spent on faculty labor), but there are probably other factors as well, such as the amount spent on the administration, on facilities such as rec centers (et multa alia) that aren't directly connected to learning outcomes, and on building and maintaining a physical campus (as opposed to having the school operate over the internet or in un-glamorous but cheaper physical spaces). One institution dedicated to finding ways to lower the costs of higher ed while at the same time improving outcomes is The National Center for Academic Transformation. Unless the incentives facing administrators, faculty, and other people involved in higher ed change, though, I wouldn't anticipate much improvement.

How to Start a Revolution

A recent article in Foreign Policy profiles Otpor, a Serbian group which overthrew Slobodon Milosevic, and which now organizes workshops on the tactics of nonviolent revolution. Otpor has taken a page from the work on the tactics of nonviolent revolution by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

It's encouraging that today's revolutions seem to be led by liberal and social democrats and not by the communists and socialist anarchists of old; today's revolutions seem less likely to just give rise to new authoritarian regimes of a differing ideological pedigree from the old. There are probably many reasons for this shift, but Gene Sharp has argued that the use of violent tactics makes it more likely that a revolution will result in an authoritarian regime instead of a genuinely liberal and democratic one.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Claims Regarding Democracy in the Middle East

From "This Is Not an Islamic Revolution," an article in the New Statesman by Olivier Roy:
But the "democracy" that is being called for is not foreign, and therein
lies the difference from the Bush administration's attempt to promote democracy
in Iraq in 2003. That did not work, because it lacked political legitimacy and
was associated with a military intervention. Today, paradoxically, it is the
waning of US influence in the Middle East, together with the pragmatism of the
Obama administration, that has allowed a native and fully legitimate demand for
democracy to be expressed.
Would democracy have come sooner to Egypt and Tunisia if the United States had never supported military dictatorships there? Has the U.S. foreign policy produced more or less stability and security on the Middle East on balance?

Mixed Messages from the Obama Administration

Blowback from appointing Hilary Clinton as secretary of state?

How-To Manual for Revolutionaries

The New York Times had an article the other day on Gene Sharp, an American political scientist who wrote several works on the tactics of nonviolent revolution. Evidently his ideas have been used by actual revolutionaries in Serbia, Ukraine, and now in the Middle East to help overthrow dictators. Evidently, activists in Burma and elsewhere are interested in his ideas as well. His foundation's website includes copies of many of his works, including the classic From Dictatorship to Democracy, which is available in over 24 languages.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Effectual Reasoning vs. Causal Reasoning

Inc. magazine has an article about a recent study which looks at the style of thinking used by entrepreneurs. The study also looked at the style of thinking used by corporate executives as a way of understanding what sets entrepreneurs apart:
Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don't start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively
reacting to contingencies. By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it.

This contrast in thinking styles seems of great interest. I'm guessing that most of us, whether in business or not, gravitate to one of these two cognitive styles. Effectual reasoning seems more flexible, causal reasoning more systematic. Do you tend toward effectual reasoning or causal reasoning? Is each thinking style better adapted to certain kinds of problems or situations? How easy is it to effectively mix both styles, either synchronically or diachronically?

Read the whole article. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Monday, February 07, 2011

Joko

Last summer I read Charlotte "Joko" Beck's classic works Everyday Zen and Nothing Special. Joko is a Zen master with a unique gift for communicating the essence of Zen meditation in a straightforward, commonsense manner. Joko focuses on the intersection between Zen practice and everyday life. Phil Dickinson, a professor of English at Bowling Green State University and a member of the Toledo Zen Center, calls Joko's approach "no bullshit Zen," and I think that sums up her life and work quite well. Joko is clear about the difficulties of practice--the phrase "no pain, no gain" comes to mind here--and also about the true nature of the benefits of practice--e.g. getting angry a little less often, or a little less severely, or simply being more aware of when one is angry, for example.

Joki strikes me as a true Zen master, in that her considerable attainments and insights are equally matched by humility and by a sometimes painful honesty--which seems unfortunately rare in discussions of Zen meditation (at least, in my limited experience). Wheareas earlier works on Zen (such as Philip Kapleau's classic The Three Pillars of Zen) often focused on pushing hard to attain special enlightenment experiences (or satori, in the lexicon of Japanese Zen), Joko places the focus squarely on the impact of Zen practice on such everyday matters as one's relationship with one's boss, child, parent, or spouse. While seeing bright lights and attaining the brahma worlds is nice, what's the benefit if one still seethes with rage when criticized by one's employer, or belittles one's child for her lack of accomplishments, or take's one's parent's love for granted?

Joko is also refreshing in her willingness to dispense with the traditional trappings of Japanese Zen, favoring the unadorned substance of the teaching over textual exegesis and ceremonial ritual. (It is an irony, albeit par for the course in terms of the general history of religious movements, that Zen has become somewhat weighed down by its own layers of textual and ritual adornments, given that its origin lies precisely in a reaction against these attributes in the other schools of Buddhism in the China of the 7th century.) Joko even seems willing to contradict or at least question some of the traditional views of Zen Buddhism (and of Buddhism generally), such as when she raises the possibility that no person has ever been fully enlightened (that is, fully free from self-induced suffering caused by selfish craving and ignorance, and fully accepting of whatever hardships one may come across in life); strictly speaking, such a statement is heretical from the Buddhist point of view, because it calls into question the authenticity of the Buddha's enlightenment experience (and it's hard to think of a more basic view put forth by Buddhists other than the claim that the Buddha was in fact fully enlightened). Such openness and honesty, together with the sensible grounds which she gives for calling such traditional beliefs into question, makes me respect Joko a great deal; one wishes that more religious teachers would follow her example. In any event, her books are much recommended, and you can see an interview with Joko on YouTube(excerpted from a German documentary by Claudia Willke called Nothing Special) .

Protest Tactics in Egypt

For those of us who hope for a free, peaceful Egypt, it is interesting to ponder the significance of street level tactics in determining the political outcome. There are other factors, of course, but if the pro-Mubarak protestors had beaten back the anti-Mubarak protestors last week, this could well have caused the anti-Mubarak movement to lose momentum and go the way of Iran's aborted protests.

Via Delta's D&D Hotspot, I learned of a blog post by the War Nerd, who provides an analysis of street-level tactics in Egypt as seen through the lens of military history. I should warn you that the analysis of this "War Nerd" fellow is laced with slurs and foul language, which is unfortunate (and a mark against his maturity as a human being), but having said that his discussion is quite insightful, and definitely worth thinking about for those who support protest movements like those in Egypt, Burma, and elsewhere. When the military stands by, the tactics used on the street are basically a re-creation of the tactics used in the Middle Ages by cavalry and infantry (including the cavalry charge, skirmishers, the testudo or shield wall, and so on).