Totalism and Liberalism

Mark Lilla's exceptional piece, The Politics of God, in New York Times paints an historical analysis that has Hobbes front and center in refashioning the Will of God as a political force into a belief that fear is the driver of men's wills and that alleviating fear can bring about peace. Lilla carries forward through Locke and coins "Great Separation" to describe the forceps that pried apart theocratic impulses and political philosophy, echoing Jefferson's Wall of Separation that would come to America.

Strangely, he says of the American experiment that "It's a miracle" that our institutions have held fast against tides of cultural opposition that have desired to refashion liberal, secular democracy with messianic drivers. But I don't think so. There were several unique starting conditions that were essential to American success. There was the lack of existing institutions in the New World combined with the diverse religious character of the early immigrants themselves. This washed over into a unique opportunity to create governance completely anew and in a way that trusted no one and no higher authority. And the preservation of the system during the initial 90 years was derived from a shared belief in the value of institutions, themselves, arising from Northern European sensibilities about order, only crashing mightily during the Civil War but surviving and thriving by dint of Lincoln's victory.

Overlooked, too, is the impact of geography, with America just too far from our allies and enemies for any state to have too great an impact on America's development of an independent strain of morality that verbally holds fast to religious principles but in action subjugates them to secular law.

It's interesting that Lilla begins with a discussion of the letter to Bush by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wherein he claims that liberalism and democracy have failed, and the failure is that they apparently do not provide the kind of totalism that the Iranian president thinks is essential to human existence, with a unification of God's will with that of man. To me, there is no effective answer to that except in Bertrand Russell's notion that contingency is the essential aspect of the liberal mind and the reflexive desire to build ever stronger walls between the liberal and the illiberal.

Moore and Semantic Skepticism

Strange, I found the Paglia essay interpenetrating all of my thoughts over the past few days, dredging up language swarms from old Derrida and Feyeraband essays, and dipping over into my work on disambiguation and ontology. See, linguistics-wise, I was once an empiricist with an almost palpable antagonism to the value of knowledge resources like ontologies in solving specific problems. I would reach first for a statistical model that was trained on the contexts of word occurrences, expecting that words can only be known by the company that they keep.

Even the notion that the Semantic Web can achieve any level of crispness in assigning metadata to online content was doubtful in that it was inherently impossible for content authors to assign metadata consistently. The position is postmodern relativism, if you will, derived from the same kind of semantic and pragmatic arguments that have been used to deconstruct machine learning: do I translate this as "terrorist" or "freedom fighter"? Well, what is your frame of reference? What is your meta-narrative?

A radical position is the folksonomy view that folks are themselves are the best determiners of how to tag metadata. In this view, they use whatever tags seem appropriate based on their own intuitions about the content. But does this get us around the Bono issue, below? Unlikely. It seems more appropriate to purely abstract and controversial concepts like "terrorist" or "justice".

So I think we need a gradation of semantic forms that range from relatively simple propositions about identity up through propositions about meaning and intent. The latter are purely Wittgensteinian word games, with agreement and disagreement strewn across the symbol space, but the former have lower average rates of disagreement over referential attachment.

This parallels the notion of post-postmodernism in a way, by accepting fluidity and chaotic symbol/signifier interactions but still anticipating a useful and uncontroversial basis for facts. G.E. Moore would raise his hand in salute.

Paglia and Reconstructionism

A few things I've read lately:

Camille Paglia's Religion and the Arts in America from Arion (cross-pollinated from 3QuarksDaily)

Pioch et. al.'s A Link and Group Analysis Toolkit (LGAT) for Intelligence Analysis (scary, huh?)

Malcolm Gladwell's The Moral Hazard Myth from The New Yorker

Wikipedia on the Casimir Effect

Paglia's speech at Colorado College was especially interesting. Her central thesis is that the role of religion in the arts in America has been sidelined into pure identity and narrow partisan politics which only reinforce antagonism from the Conservative Right. The end result has been the strangling of arts funding from government sources though she points out that no one in the avant-garde should accept government funding anyway. In some ways she echoes an Allan Bloom in decrying "sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism." Like Bloom, she sees a vacuum created in deconstructing traditional notions of values and aesthetic criteria. Like Bloom, she longs for something more powerful, more lively.

But her answer is, in part, to reinvigorate the arts through a re-examination of the spiritual roots that underlay so much traditional art, from spiritual hymns to rock to rap. In that, I think she misses one of the crowning achievements of our civilization even while she points out how technology is the most current creation of "American genius." Is it the failure of the arts and humanities to embrace materialism, science and technology as a central facet of modern life that leaves us in this condition of limitations and craven ennui?

Even while I read about the Casimir effect and try to imagine some of the most abstract and beautiful ideas ever conceived of--that vacuum itself is pervaded by energetic influences and zero point energy--Paglia thinks polyphonic differences between Calvinist and Lutheran hymns are a source of inspiration. Even while I imagine the subtle mathematics of group dynamic evolution using sophisticated achievements in graph theory, Paglia ponders the political implications of Madonna images festooned with elephant crap.

Why isn't rationality and all that it has achieved the greatest source for artistic inspiration in modernity? These are not sterile thoughts at all, but stunning achievements that have changed human existence more than all the stained glass in all of history.

Swarms and Social Cybernetics

David Sloan Wilson, in his spectacular Darwin's Cathedral, does an in-depth analysis of Korean-American Christian Churches in the Houston area. Newly arriving immigrants, some with only a few hundred dollars in their pockets, use the church as a transitional community asset that supports them through jobs, business development, loans and other benefits. Many second generation children complain that their parents have only the church and other church members as their community, even after twenty or thirty years.

Wilson's analysis also points to some of the relatively simple mechanisms that are used to try to keep church members actively involved. Every Sunday, for instance, there is a flier placed in mail boxes assigned to each member. After the service, the church staff contacts any parishioners who failed to pick-up their flier, giving them a clear attendance record.

Wilson never uses the term "cybernetic" to describe the pushes and pulls that are needed to keep a community actively engaged, especially communities that expect tithes and human capital, but that was the term that kept popping up as I read through his slim manifesto. I visualized a swarm of points in space orbiting each other in close formation. Occasionally a point would break away and start to orbit into another group, only to be pulled back to the original center of gravity by attractive forces (incentives) combined with shame forces (disincentives). The steam governor at work in sociology. The tighter knit or more extreme the ideas, the stronger those attractive forces.

A New York Times article shared similar thoughts. In it, a Harvard Law prof went through a Conservative Jewish Yeshiva and went on to a do great things. When he went back to a wedding of an old friend from school, the subsequent wedding photos did not show him. He had been literally erased from the photos. The reason: he had been accompanied by an Asian American girlfriend. The motivation was to remove the record of his failure to abide the expected rules, thereby both shaming him and eliminating any temptation for other young men who might see the photo and start thinking outside the Hassidic box, so to speak. Defeating free thinking and Hellenism prevented assimilation once. Defeating Asian chicks is a comparatively minor self-correction.

But could such qualitative social forces as shame and sense of belonging be given a quantitative reality that helps describe the rate of change of social and religious groups over time? We might be able to use group membership counts and look at correlations between the subjective opinions of group members as to the attitudes of other group members as a proxy for the cohesion mechanisms or memes in the group. Wilson does a bit of this when he reviews a survey of the orthodoxy of different religious groups as gauged by a random sample of religious scholars.

Semantics and Sonny Bono

"Bono and the tree became one"

That sentence has been an object of scrutiny for me over the past several weeks. It is short enough and the meaning seems fairly easy to digest: Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. It might have shown up in a blog back when the event transpired, or in casual conversation around the same time.

So what is so fascinating about it? It is the range of semantic tools that are needed to resolve Bono to Sonny Bono and not to U2's Bono or any of the thousands of other Bonos that likely exist. First, we need background knowledge that Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. Next we need either the specific knowledge that a tree was involved or the inference that skiing accidents sometimes involve trees. Finally, we need a choice preference that rates notable people as more likely to be the object of the discussion than everyday folk.

We could still be wrong, of course. The statement might be about Frank Bono, a guy from down the street who likes to commune with nature. It might be, but for a statement in isolation the notability preference serves a de facto role as a disambiguator.

How, then, can we design technology to correctly assign the correct referent to occurrences like Bono in the text above? We have several choices and the choices overlap to varying degrees. We could, for instance, collect together all of the contexts that contain the term Bono (with or without Sonny), label them as to their referent, and try to infer statistical models that use the term context to partition our choices. This could be as simple as using a feature vector of counts of terms that co-occur with Bono and then looking at the vector distance between a new context vector (formed from the sentence above) with the existing assignments.

We could also try to create a model that recreates our selection preferences and the skiing <-> tree relationship and does some matching combined with some inferencing to try to identify
the correct referent. That is fairly tricky to do over the vast sea of possible names, but is easy enough for a single one, like Bono.

It turns out all of these approaches have been tried, as well as interesting hybridizations of them. For instance, express the notability preference as a probability weighting based on web search mentions, while adding-in the distance between different concepts in a tree-based ontology, trying to exploit human-created semantic knowledge to assist in the process. It turns out that fairly simple statistics do pretty well over large sets of names (just choose the most likely assignment all the time), but don't really capture the kinds of semantic processing that we believe we undertake in our own "folk psychologies" as described above.

Still, I see the limited success of knowledge resources as an opportunity rather than a source of discouragement. We definitely have not exhausted the well.

Fiber Optics and Amateur Access

An elderly woman in Sweden got a 40Gb/s fiber optic pipe installed to her home, recently. She hardly uses the web but can now download a feature length film in 2 seconds. I was lamenting the death of satellite and cable TV when we all have fiber to the house with those kinds of bandwidths over lunch today. It came up because my neighbor dropped by for a drink the other night and ended up staying until 1 AM, sucking down my gin and complaining about the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. He called home at some point and apparently interrupted his wife's enjoyment of The Closer while also missing dinner.

It was the fact that she missed her TV show that struck me. I don't have that problem. I didn't watch much TV beyond the news, Frontline or some random late-night sitcom until recently when we upgraded everything. Now I have a DVR and actually watch some programs (including The Closer) but only because I can comfortably time-shift and pause TV as I see fit, and all in HD where available.

But what happens with full on-demand TV? The satellites will not be de-orbited for some time as they will continue to serve remote areas, but eventually they will go away. Even the notion of networks and channels would dry up over time. Channels are a delivery mechanism for content that are only useful as branding labels in an on-demand universe. Studios can equally well disintermediate their content and swing deals directly with advertising clearinghouses. This is already happening somewhat in the online video space, but the bandwidth and quality issues remain a stumbling block until that fiber optic pipe arrives.

Now, suddenly, without the channels to filter content choices down to a few hundred options (sheepishly, I have a few hundred channels; George Chadwick's Aphrodite is playing via SIRIUS Symphony Hall through Dish Network right now, blurring the lines between mediums) we will instead start using other mechanisms to make content choices. There will be individual critic lists, popularity recommendation engines and, most importantly, content cross-advertising to try to attract eyeballs. The amateur will mix with the pro as technological and artistic means for producing amazing content becomes increasingly inexpensive.

Framing and Dissonance

Finally, and with little fanfare, I closed on my final report for my most recent grant this evening. The champagne rests in the fridge for the moment. The last two weeks have been, well, consuming. Now I rush headlong toward a second phase.

While writing and experimenting, I was occasionally drawn into blog and editorial discussions, some of which were mildly amusing. I even learned some new things, though not directly from the blogs, I'm afraid. Specifically, the topic of semantic "framing" came up during a cross-Wikipedia excursion in pursuit of a recollection about Newspeak driven by Christopher Hitchens' discussion of cognitive tyranny in a variety of forums. As a biographer of Jefferson and Orwell, Hitchens is uniquely qualified to address the problem of tyranny and fascism.

Semantic framing is the use of distinctive metaphorical terminology that is designed to provide a clarifying distinction with alternatives. It is the opposite of nuance in a way, and relies on positioning issues as risky (when opposed) versus beneficial (when in agreement). Interestingly, framing effects on economic decision making appear to be less effective on some people than others, with the distinguishing mental characteristic related to emotionalism (exposed as increased amygdala activity during fMRIs).

But the question that arose to me was whether we have an innate property that resists framing (and that, when we have it, drives us towards more analytical tasks and higher education levels; yes, based on my own supposition that higher education levels correspond to greater cognitive moderation) or whether it is itself a learned response to moderate one's emotional reaction to arguments and information that corresponds to the "liberal" aspects of higher education?