Month: September 2013

“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not,” – Philip K. Dick.

Among the many tributes to the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney, a remembrance from Henri Cole stands out:

A poet must remain, no matter the cost, “open,” experiencing, if possible, both sides of any debate—whether it be with one’s government, or with one’s beloved, or with one’s self. And so it is no surprise that Heaney’s “Opened Ground” ends with that word—“open”—for this is the necessary condition of any authentic, great poet. But “How to be socially responsible and creatively free, while being true to the negative evidence of history?” This is the question Heaney was always struggling to answer while making poems of aesthetic beauty and converting the roughness of our human experiences into complex harmonies…

To me, Heaney’s title, “Opened Ground,” also suggests that something is being exhumed and examined, as if from a grave. It reveals a man refusing to be sentimental as he digs around and extracts truths from his soul and from the world. Whenever I read a Heaney poem, I am reminded of Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” where he looks out over the side of the boat at still water, solacing himself, and sees the gleam of his own image mixing up with pebbles, roots, rocks, and sky. Time, history, thought, and self all merge in an alluring way—exactly as they do in Heaney’s best poems, where, after he has been digging, there is germination and a flowering.

Read the poems the Dish has been running to honor Heaney after his death here, here, and here.

Thomas Flores considers the appeal of technocrats, tracking their rise over the past half-century:

Politicians are an easy object for derision, even among themselves. Calling a decision “political” is a sure-fire way to impugn it. Technocrats promise a different style of governance, one in which expertise and objectivity matter more than venal political calculation. In a way, the desire for technocratic rule hearkens back to Plato’s conception of the philosopher king who rules with wisdom and knowledge.

Technocratic rule holds yet another promise, that of a value-free politics.

The vexing political issues of our day that enjoin us to deeply consider our political values — climate change, racial relations, and privacy in the global war on terrorism – are in part the cause of political conflict. So the prospect that these troubling questions ultimately have technical solutions remains tempting, since it allows us to evade the political act of reconciling our values to ourselves and to each other. TED talks are perhaps the most prominent public forum for such thinking, promising that technological change and creative thinking hold the key to human progress, rather than struggles over value questions such as justice and equity, as cultural critics such as Evgeny Morozov have argued.

Yet we cannot escape the political, no matter how hard we may try. All forms of politics, even anti-politics, are embedded in political values. A desire for technocratic politics constructs an ethos of rule favoring certain values – expertise as a form of political legitimacy and economic efficiency as the goal of economic policy – over others. Technocrats may offer us improved economic management, but not an escape from the importance of values in politics. Political questions are, in the end, political.

In his review of Bleeding Edge, Jason Tanz dubs Thomas Pynchon a “prophet of the post-Snowden era”:

The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions—between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos—through which he has framed the last half-century. It’s hard not to see Anonymous in one character’s desire for “good hackers around interested in fighting back” against the Web companies “screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys.” Hard not to see everything from SecondLife to BitCoin in “DeepArcher,” a virtual world in which avatars conduct encrypted transactions far from government’s reach. Hard not to see AT&T and Verizon in one character’s prediction that the Internet, once connected to cell phones, would become “a total Web of surveillance, inescapable.”

For all his famed paranoia, Pynchon never fully casts his lot with the conspiracy theorists, although it’s clear they have his sympathies — even the 9/11 truther that pops up in these pages. I guess this could be considered a spoiler, but no regular Pynchon reader will be surprised that Maxine’s mystery never gets fully defined, much less resolved. As usual, Pynchon doesn’t provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a lot like life.

Recent Dish on Pynchon here and here.