jameswharris

Blogging, Aging and Maintaining Mental Abilities

By James Wallace Harris, Friday, October 31, 2014

It’s amazing how some old sayings reflect unfathomably deep wisdom. Two of which that come to mind are “Use it or lose it” and “You don’t know what you’ll miss until it’s gone.” Some of these old sayings don’t become relevant until you’re old, which is a shame, because such knowledge would give the young a savvy advantage. It’s always difficult to predict what to keep using until you need it in the future.

Take handwriting. Until a few weeks ago when I discovered it was gone and I missed it, I never gave it two thoughts. When I had a pinched nerve in my neck and couldn’t type for a few weeks, I truly missed the ability to write in cursive. Now that I can type again, I’ll probably forget that I really needed to write without a machine. I’m sure one day I’ll again regret the loss of that skill, so I should practice it now. But I won’t, will I?

The trick now is to recognize the skills we do wish to keep, and keep practicing them. Blogging has taught me the value of practicing verbal skills. Both for writing and speaking. If I stop blogging for any length of time I feel my ability to use words begin to fade. It’s subtle, but it’s there. If I go without writing long enough, it’s not even subtle.

When I was younger, and watching my father’s generation of men die off, my uncles and other older guys I knew, seemed to withdraw into themselves as the years passed by, and talked less and less. I know I’m making crude generalizations here, but men, and maybe women, seem to lose their conversational abilities as wrinkles become more numerous. When I was young I assumed aging involved a withdrawal from life, either from boredom, lack of interest, or a diminishing urge for self-expression. Now I wonder if it’s a fading ability to communicate. Either put words together into concise thoughts, or lose the ability.

When I don’t blog my mental muscles to shape paragraphs gets flabby. Since most of my friends are women, I tend to spend most of my time listening. I’ve lost the ability to argue, and my verbal skills of discussing ideas are beginning to fade too. When I do talk to men, our old ability to battle with words has been lost to a détente of friendship. My old buddies are guys that I agree with, and I’ve given up on confrontational acquaintances. Maybe I should be more aggressive in my blog writing and find some wordy foes to spar with.

If the only thing you do is watch television, then the only skills you’ll have when you get old is sitting and watching. Maybe that’s why all the old men I knew stopped talking?

Every time I write an essay I can feel my brain working out. It’s like being at the gym and pumping iron – I can feel I’m lifting heavier concepts with systematic practice. I doubt blogging is for everyone, but I expect everyone needs some kind of verbal exercise that includes both conversation and writing. And it may even help to learning handwriting again.

JWH – Happy Halloween

What is the State of Feminism in the 21st Century?

By James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, October 29, 2014

I’ve been watching season two of Makers on PBS, a documentary series about the changing roles of women in America during the last century, with the focus of the massive social changes made since the 1960s. Each episode is both inspiring and moving. We’ve all come a long way in the last fifty years, an amazing long way. For example, in the episode, “Women in War” they showed a history of women being kept out of the military, yet they were interviewing women generals, pilots, field commanders, spies, and grunts of today. We have all come a long way, but how far do we still have to go? Each episode of Makers, which are available online to watch, show how far women have made it in various fields, including film, business, politics, military and even standup comedy.

What I want to know is how far our society has to evolve before women are truly equal to men? These documentaries show a great progress, but also stark failures. One reason the public didn’t want women in combat was the fear that their daughters would be raped by the enemy. It turns our the real problem is their daughters in uniform are being frequently raped by their male comrade-in-arms. In another episode they showed how women pilots were kept out of the Mercury space program because they weren’t combat test pilots, even though many of the women pilots tested did better on the astronaut medical exams than the original 7 astronauts, and they also weighed less, so they would have required less fuel.

Our real problems are still another case of Pogo’s:

I know I’ve had to constantly change to keep up with the demands of my women friends, and I’m sure I’ve got a lot to learn still. I think we all need to be feminists. Our culture does a number on everyone along the spectrum of gender issues. We still have never passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Most young people won’t remember the long battle for the ERA, but many of the vocal opponents were women, and there’s even an antifeminism movement by women. Hatred of women is often expressed in our society, both overtly and subtly. Most of it comes from males, but not always.

Back in the 1970s the word feminism was routinely heard in conversations, but I seldom hear it today. The entry at Wikipedia for feminism is very good, and talks about third wave feminism in the 21st century, and post-feminism. For many people, equal rights means equal opportunity for jobs, and many women feel they now have that opportunity, so they don’t feel the need to campaign for feminist causes, or worry about passing the ERA. But it’s much more complicated than that.

There is no way I could sum up the current state of feminism in a short blog essay, even if I knew it. What I can say is if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see the struggle for gender equality everywhere. For example, there’s been a number of stories about leading atheists being misogynists. Or the vile, repugnant views of some computer gamers in GamerGate. Just watch Anita Sarkeesian video series on how women are portrayed in video games. Then search out articles and videos attacking her. The hate she received represents a psychological deep resentment of women by a younger generation of men that grew up with a more enlightened generation of women. Why did they miss out their generation’s gains? GamerGate is the tip of the iceberg because we don’t know how most males really feel inside their heads. GamerGate allowed anonymous males to vent, and it was tremendously ugly.

Another documentary I watched recently was Brave Miss World, about Miss Israel Linor Abargil, who was raped competing for the Miss World contest, and now travels the globe promoting rape awareness. One clip in the documentary had a Yale fraternity chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal.” If the modern well-educated young men at Yale don’t know any better, then I’m not sure how far we’ve actually come.

After I saw one of the Anita Sarkeesian videos, which everyone should watch, I saw an ad on CBS for Two Broke Girls. Is it freedom of expression for women to play up to male stereotypes, or is it still oppression? I highly recommend watching the two seasons of Makers. You can watch online, and season one is on Netflix streaming, and some episodes are on the Roku PBS Channel. Season one is on Amazon Prime, and season two available to rent an many sites.

I hope PBS Frontline, and other major news magazine shows like CBS 60 Minutes cover the GamerGate, because it deserves all the air time that Ebola has been getting. I also think it deserves as much attention as the NFL scandal, but so far I’ve never seen anything about it on TV. In fact, I have to wonder if video games do lead to violence, especially against women. Studies claim to show no relationship between game violence and real violence, but the GamerGate attacks on women seem to indicate otherwise.

And I’m only talking about events in the United States. When you think as a global citizen, understanding equality for women becomes exceedingly complicated. Like I said, you don’t have to read books or be a feminist scholar, just pay attention to your television or computer. Watch how women are portrayed in fictional stories, and how they appear in documentaries and in news stories. Apply the Bechdel test to everything you watch.

[I wish I could link to “Cassandra Among the Creeps” by Rebecca Solnit in the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, October, 2014. On the cover, the essay is called “Silencing Women,” and that’s a more precise description of the essay. GamerGate, and so many other current attacks on women show a distinct desire to silence women. There is something deeply disturbing about individuals who protect themselves by shutting up others.]

JWH

Why the Fad to Declutter and Simplify?

By James Wallace Harris, Monday, October 27, 2014

One of the most emailed stories at The New York Times this week was “Kissing Your Socks Goodbye” about a woman in Japan, Marie Kondo, who is famous for extreme tidying up. With shows like Hoarders reaching season 6, it’s obvious that throwing things out is in, and it’s chic to live with less. But why is less more? What’s the virtue of turning all your rooms, closets and drawers into Zen gardens of simplicity? Is it just a fashion, or does it reflect a mental desire for personal change?

You’d think simplifying one’s life would be as natural as drinking water to quench a thirst. Just give up everything you don’t use regularly, and then keep everything else orderly and tidy. Man, I’ve been trying to do that for most of my life and have always failed. Clutter and kipple are relentless! Is that because my personality is disordered, and my outside reflects my inside? The trouble is, my head is far more cluttered than my closets and drawers. I just got too many things to think about, and I don’t want to throw any of those ideas away. If I wasn’t too lazy to photograph the rooms in my house, I could show you I’m reasonably clean and orderly, and far from being a hoarder, but being moderate is bland. If I could photograph the inside of my brain, it would look like this:

By the way, I hope you didn’t find this essay looking for how-to instructions on organizing your life. I’ve got no tips for you. This is a philosophical analysis of why we want to simplify our lives for people who can’t – people like me. Have you ever wondered why an uncluttered life is so prized? Even Henry David Thoreau only lived at Walden Pond for two years, two months and two days, and didn’t spend all his time there even when he implied he was. If we had a completely decluttered home it would be empty. The urge to be Buddha is deceptive, because asceticism is only hiding from the real issues.

We all want to have full lives, not empty ones. We are limited by space and time, but the goal isn’t empty rooms and blank calendars when we seek to simplify. And we don’t want sparse lives. We want maximum use of our time and space. Can you imagine living in the Zen living room above? It conveys serenity, but no action. I am anal enough to keep my books orderly. Here’s a fairly recent photo of my shelves. I can’t photograph my Kindle and Audible books though, but Amazon keeps them reasonably tidy.

My problem is not really clutter, but lack of focus. I want to do too many things, and I have the possessions for lifetimes of activities if I ever made use of all my stuff. But isn’t that what hoarders say about pieces of tinfoil – that they might find a use for it, so why throw it out? I have well over a thousand unread books, and I buy twice as many books each year than I read. I have more hobbies waiting to be started than I have likely years left in my life. My clutter is mental, rather than physical. It’s a time management conundrum, rather than a space management failure.

Last night I watched Print the Legend, a film about the 3D printer movement, especially about Makerbot founder Bre Pettis. Like Steve Jobs, Pettis is driven to build a tech empire. I have no desire to be like that, but I admire the hell out of the people who can focus on one goal and make something happen. I don’t want to clean out all my drawers and closets, I want to clean out my head. Marie Kondo’s advice is to throw away everything that doesn’t thrill you. My problem is I’m thrilled by a very long queue of ideas in my head. To be a person that makes things requires picking one idea and ignoring the rest. I use to think that was writing a novel, and I even still do, but I just can’t throw out all the other stuff piled up in my brain.

I probably could clean up my house so it looked very Zen, but it wouldn’t make me serene. Organizing the words in this essay does. Maybe what cleans up my mind is sweeping out all the thoughts about a particular subject into a nice tidy pile of words.

If I could be the person I dream of being, I’d need to pick one project and work on it till it’s accomplished. I can throw stuff away all day long from my house, I just can’t throw out the piles of junk in my head. But that’s what I need to do. I used to think if I threw out all my physical possessions I’d have a Zen mind. I don’t think that’s true anymore. I do wonder if I could achieve a Zen mind, would my house end up empty?

JWH

Mind Over Matter In Old Age

By James Wallace Harris, Friday, October 24, 2014

My last day of work was 10/22/13, at a job I started in the previous century on 11/14/77. It’s been one year not working, and the time has flown by like Boeing jetliner. When I retired I had big plans to write a novel, but the urge has diminished. The fantasy of writing doesn’t completely go away, but my discipline to work mostly has. My days pass by so fast that I wonder how I ever found time for a forty-hour work week. And like a butterfly, my memories of being a caterpillar are fleeing fast. It’s really strange to live by flitting here and there, wherever my whims entice me. Maintaining a positive mental state while deteriorating physically is now my chosen career. The job requirements are learning to master mind over matter.

Being happy pursuing piddly activities is a great skill to acquire. I hang out with friends, read books, watch television, play music, write blogs, mess with my computers, shop for used books, cook food, do chores, and that seems to be enough. I now live in a different mental world where I work to maintain my health by not getting mentally old. The daily goal of getting old is to avoid being old. Luckily, I have a naturally happy nature, and I don’t get bored. I’m well suited for retired living.

I’m constantly learning new things, mainly because I love documentaries and nonfiction books, and I love browsing the Internet for fascinating news stories, like “What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?” from this week’s The New York Times Magazine.

The article starts off,

One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.

Ultimately, what this experiment reveals is feeling younger means acting younger.

The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era, but to inhabit it — to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” she told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.

In the end, the men,

At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. On several measures, they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.

The article goes on with more details about additional experiments, and they remind me of how I like to time travel by returning to things I loved back in the 1960s. I always thought when old people returned to the interests of their youth they were merely being nostalgic. Maybe we’re rejuvenating. Maybe wanting to write a novel is taking me back to when I was young and wanted to grow up to write a novel. I’ve often wondered if I’m too old to do something so young. If this research is right, writing a novel will make me young.

Although it doesn’t appear that I’ve done that much in my first year of retirement, I do feel like I’ve learned a lot. It’s a strange new life living without a job to define my days. I absolutely love being retired. It feels like I’m back in college preparing for an exciting career. This time of constant reflection reminds me of the 1970s and all the New Age philosophies I studied. The journey is the destination.

JWH

How Science Fiction’s Futures Changes For Every Generation

By James Wallace Harris, Thursday, October 23, 2014

If you are old, has the future you imagined in childhood unfolded during your life? If you’re young, what do you hope to see happen in your lifetime?

I grew up in the 1960s with my visions of the future inspired by 1950s science fiction. Flying cars were not what I hoped for, but evidently many people from my generation expected them and are disappointed we aren’t living in a Buck Rogers future. No, what I expected to see as I grew old was the colonization of the Moon and Mars, and the manned exploration of the solar system. I wasn’t optimistic enough to expect Star Trek like interstellar travel in my lifetime, but I assumed it would arrive after I died. It’s so disappointing to spend a lifetime watching humans never leave orbit. What are we waiting for?

I did expect large flat screen televisions, and they did come to pass. Didn’t see the internet coming even though I was majoring in computer programming in 1971, nor did I imagine smartphones. I guess I lacked the imagination, but so did everyone else it seems. I’m also disappointed we don’t have intelligent robots, or sentient AI machines. After space travel, robots were the biggest tech breakthrough that 1950s SF promised.

Although I hoped we’d have visitors from other star systems I never really thought it would actually happen. I did think we’d make SETI contact by now.

Contemporary science fiction often feels obsessed with apocalyptic visions of the future, and we had those too when I was growing up. But kids today seemed enchanted by future teens fighting oppressive dystopian governments. I can dig that, back in the sixties challenging authority was very popular. I guess blows against the empire never go out of vogue.

Which brings me to Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, a science fiction anthology of positive science fiction. It was inspired by the essay “Innovation Starvation” by Neal Stephenson, at the World Policy Institute, in which Stephenson proposes, The Hieroglyph Theory,

Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

The list of stories can be found here, with links to discussion and research.

The Hieroglyph anthology offers strangely different visions of the future than the ones I grew up with, and sadly, I don’t find these new futurist vistas all that appealing. Many of these futures seem to come out of Wired Magazine. In the introduction we’re told that young people today are all too often embracing a dystopian science fiction view of tomorrow, and that science fiction writers should offer a positive alternative. I think that’s missing the point of those YA stories, which are exciting adventure stories symbolizing growing up, and not visions of tomorrow.

Actually, the opposite of dystopian is utopian, and none of these tales in Hieroglyph are about perfect societies. I think everyone has gotten over the naive notion that the future will bring us peace and happiness. The real question is can the future always offer us more sense of wonder? This might reveal my jadedness, but this anthology doesn’t show me it will.

Although I’m embarrassed to admit this, I’m nostalgic for my old futures. Hieroglyph seems more inspired by 3D printers, the internet, giant towers that climb into space, mining the asteroids, social media possibilities, smartphone apps that make us empathetic, etc. Many of the stories are quite engaging as stories, but they aren’t inspiring like the science fiction I grew up with. Now that will be an unfair criticism if young readers do find a sense of wonder in them.

It might be because I’m 62, and these stories lack a sense of wonder to someone with so little future. Yet, even if I don’t have much of a future, I’m not sure I’d want to live to see these futures come to be? I’d love to know if kids 12 or 22 reading these tales do find them wondrous?

There are millions of people around the world still hoping to build interplanetary colonies and conquer the final frontier, but there are billions of people on Earth that don’t see that future anymore, or maybe never did. Anyone who has embraced science more than science fiction knows faster-than-light travel is about as realistic as time travel, and that living on the Moon or Mars will be closer to cruel and unusual punishment than finding greener pastures to homestead.

Many of the stories in Hieroglyph did capture the struggle of humans surviving. They are more grown-up than the fictional adventures I took in my teens. I did love Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement.” It was about technology being used to increase empathy. So does “Elephant Angels” by Brenda Cooper. “By the Time We Get to Arizona” by Madeline Ashby seems far more savvy about the grit of the future, and the misuse of technology. And Karl Schroeder’s story, “Degrees of Freedom” suggests that there are new frontiers of democracy for us to explore. The stories of billionaires conquering outer space didn’t impress me. And although I loved the character development of Cory Doctorow’s “The Man Who Sold The Moon” a great deal, 3D printing leaves me limp. Bruce Sterling’s story about a man and his horse got me until it became science fiction.

All to often the best science fiction is about being human, and not spacemen, even when the characters live in outer space.

Overall, I’m left with the impression that the women writers in Hieroglyph have thought more about how technology could be good for us than the men. Now that I’m living in my childhood future, I imagine a much different future that might come to be after I ceased to be. It’s not about space adventures but solving our problems, both as individuals and as a species. It’s like an old man I saw in a documentary when he said, “If you’re the problem, and you go somewhere else, you’re still the problem.”

JWH