Kudos to whoever came up with the Olympic motto for 2008, it's a really great one.
CCTV, the government run Chinese media conglomerate, has of course been running Olympic coverage all day. Today while eating lunch, I got to see on television a bunch of Presidents and foreign leaders and their spouses shake hands with President Hu Jintao of China, pause for pictures, and watch the scene repeat itself as hundreds of countries were represented. President Bush gets the award for seeming the most friendly, while President Putin seemed to be a bit tardy (he came in last, and I don't think he was supposed to do that). While these influential leaders walked across the floor, and while we saw some visuals afterwards of their huge lunch reception afterward, I couldn't help but think that although the Olympics are an athletic, nonpolitical event, if these people wanted to, they could really address some serious issues right now, besides determining whether or not to try to use the chopsticks and risk embarrassment, or cut your losses by using a fork and knife from the beginning.
Politics aside, I can't help but be really excited for tonight! It'll just be awesome because the Chinese people and Chinese government have done so much psychologically, physically, financially, politically, etc. etc. to prepare for today. One of my friends has so kindly allowed me the use of a coveted hotel room to host a gathering for me and my friends! Allright China, the world is watching! 中国加油！
Friday, August 08, 2008
One World, One Dream
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Prisons and Immigration
I've been meaning to say something about the U.S. prison system and current immigration policies for a while now. Right now, though, I feel like I'm writing out of the blue, so I'm not prepared to put my heart into this post yet. Maybe I'll get to that certain place you get to when you open up your heart and just write- if I just start somewhere.
So let me start with a few thoughts:
Give me your tired, your poor,When I think about our country, I think about the great ideals that we were founded upon. They weren't perfect. We were, after all, founded upon a time of slavery, of sexism, and on war and territorial expansion. But even with all these caveats, we created a country. It was a country which I think was created for the purposes of aiming for ever higher ideals of compassion and benevolence, with the goal of progressively creating a better civilization and society for us and those after us. It was written, after all, that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Not some, not only citizens, not whites or landowners or those who are educated or Christian, but "all".
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-post to me,
I lift my golden lamp beside the door.
I love the inclusive "all" in that sentence. I love the words "yearning to breathe free", and "I lift my golden lamp beside the door." I think of these words, and I get so inspired. I feel full of love and sympathy. I want to get into public policy when I think these thoughts. I want to teach our next generation of students to feel the same way. I want to do something that expresses these wonderful thoughts that were written naught three hundred years ago.
We have come a long, long way since those early days. We have expanded suffrage and granted minorities more rights and liberties and equalities progressively with time. At the same time, I think, we are getting a little bit more isolated. I think a lot of people tend to be drawn into their own little comfortable social circles, and try not to worry about social problems unless these problems directly affect them. I look at capable people who could do some good for this world, and I see some of them distracted by suburban living, by wealth and luxury, by sailboats and video games, by everything other than thinking about what's wrong with our society and working towards a solution. I see people that look down on others, and disparage them, and add to their hopeless situation.
I don't want to disparage these people, and I don't want to say that "if they only knew better, they would think the same way that I do. " I don't think that way. At the same time, I just wish that more people were compassionate in our society. I see compassion as something that's fading away with time. I think of the people in prison, and I ask the question, why do we let so many people rot there, for so long? I think of some people's reactions to immigrants, and I wonder how they have little compassion for people who, just like their forebears, are only looking for a better life? I love Maya Angelou's poetry, especially "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." I don't want anyone to be the caged bird. But we have so many caged birds. Literally, we have a growing prison population (the highest in the Western world, even higher than China's on a proportionate basis) for silly things like drugs and petty crimes, which are bad, but why aren't we exploring rehabilitation and other policies just like other societies do? If our system's broken, why aren't we trying to fix it? Where is our compassion for our human brethren?
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
What are your thoughts? Reactions?
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Bureaucracies and Politicians
"Arrested for killing his father late one night in 1958, James was ruled mentally ill by a judge, sent to an asylum for the criminally insane — and forgotten. Decades after his doctors pronounced him cured, he remained trapped in a criminal justice nightmare. The hospital could only release him to the prisons authority. The prisons authority could only pick him up under a court order. The courts never called for him because they couldn't find his file. Longing for some of his lost years, James wishes he had been convicted of murdering his father. At least then, he would have been freed after only 15 or 20 years in prison. But a conviction would have been unlikely. His father was still alive." (link to the full story) "Farm bill negotiators may have to trim these programs to make room for billions of dollars in automatic payouts to a few big commercial farms growing a few grain crops whose market prices are shattering records. The 91 percent of California farmers who grow produce and are struggling against urban encroachment and environmental regulations will get none of that money. The farm bill throws a comparative pittance to the organic farming that shuns pesticides and rotates crops in a traditional method that attracts wildlife. Organic farming remains just 0.5 percent of U.S. agriculture despite soaring demand. Buyers are forced to look to China for organic produce."
A while ago I posted an essay discussing Weber's view of the politician and the scientist in terms of the budding modern bureaucracy. I wrote that modern societies may not be as disenchanting as Weber realized. On the other hand, I have to give Weber credit for predicting that bureaucratic mismanagement could bring about disasters such as this:
from sfgate.com
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Weber’s Conceptions of the Roles of Two Types of Individuals: the Politician vs. the Scientist
This paper is primarily interested in the great sociologist and philosopher Max Weber’s account of the characteristics of the politician and the scientist and the contributions each has made to modernity. In order to place Weber’s discussions on the roles of the politician and scientist in their proper context, we must briefly discuss the rise of the bureaucratic order of the Weberian society. We begin with Weber’s sobering idea that modern society is headed toward a colorless, completely rational and bureaucratic order, which Weber indicated was the “disenchantment of the world.” We then discuss the roles and characteristics of the politician and scientist themselves, and critically examine Weber’s claim that the politician plays a bigger and more irreplaceable role in modern society than the scientist. We evaluate this idea and attempt to look at historical and current examples to support and discredit this claim, primarily focusing on the role of the scientist in modern society. Finally, I come up with my own modified analysis of the roles of the politician and the scientist. I indicate that, considering their overarching tendency to promote social progress and the overall goals of society, the roles, characteristics, and contributions of the politician and the scientist are not as mutually exclusive as Weber believed. I conclude with the thought that because politicians and scientists can contribute to society in a way that Weber may not have considered, then modern society may not be as depressing as Weber believed.
Max Weber was fascinated by the issue of modernity. Weber’s prognosis of what will result from modern society, however, was very discouraging. One of Weber’s most famous quotes reads, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’”
“Bureaucracy inevitably accompanies modern mass democracy in contrast to the democratic self-government of small homogeneous units. This results from the characteristic principle of bureaucracy: the abstract regularity of the execution of authority, which is a result of the demand for ‘equality before the law’ in the personal and functional sense—hence, of the horror of ‘privilege,’ and the principled rejection of doing business ‘from case to case.’ Such regularity also follows from the social preconditions of the origin of bureaucracies.”
Two types of individuals loomed large in Weber’s account of modernity and the rise of bureaucracy: the politician and the scientist. Weber, as a preeminent sociologist, was particularly interested in studying the patterns of social relationships and interaction among and between the scientist and the politician. Furthermore, he investigated their effects on the modern social state, which we just described as increasingly rational, intellectualized, and disenchanted.
For Weber, the politician and the scientist both play key roles in the highly bureaucratic modern society. In his analysis, Weber has mostly given up on the ability of either of these two types of individuals to bring back romantic and inspiring notions of humanity and enchantment into social order. Weber overall held a low opinion of scientists. He described the culture of science as a “predominance of mediocrity” because in his mind random chance, rather than naturally endowed and/or developed ability, played a larger role in the process of academic selection. In his lecture Science as a Vocation Weber wrote:
The fact that hazard rather than ability plays so large a role is not alone or even predominantly owing to the ‘human, all too human’ factors, which naturally occur in the process of academic selection as in any other selection. […] The predominance of mediocrity is rather due to the laws of human co-operation, especially the co-operation of several bodies, and, in this case, co-operation of the faculties who recommend and of the ministries of education.
Weber argues that networking and other “human, all too human” factors play too large a role when scientists achieve academic recognition and/or academic positions in academia. Weber also believed that great scientific discoveries may happen only once in a blue moon, and that these discoveries will be out of date in too short a time frame. A scientist seeking to enter the field will have to gamble on whether or not an idea will strike them at the appropriate moment. Weber famously mused that “ideas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us,” and that “each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years.”
It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.
It is important to note that Weber sees one key distinction between science as a vocation and politics as a vocation. Science as a vocation directly leads to the disenchantment of natural occurrences and our understanding of natural events. Politics as a vocation, on the other hand, (for reasons which we will discuss after this note), only indirectly leads to bureaucratization and rationalization. Furthermore, it is possible for a very talented and rare political leader to be able to inspire others and serve “the vocation for politics in its deepest meaning.”
Weber begins his lecture on Politics as a Vocation with the line, “This lecture, which I give at your request, will necessarily disappoint you in a number of ways,”
Weber does, however, as previously noted, hold on to the hope that politicians can circumvent the rationality of their time through charismatic leadership. Weber writes that “As a permanent structure with a system of rational rules, bureaucracy is fashioned to meet calculable and recurrent needs by a means of a normal routine.”
It is safe to say that Weber emphasizes the role of the politician more than the scientist. As previously noted Weber believes that scientists serve a technical purpose rather than a deeper meaning—which is to say that science as a vocation doesn’t increase human society’s sense of purpose. Weber writes,
Under these internal presuppositions, what is the meaning of science as a vocation, now after all these former illusions […] have been dispelled? Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: “What shall we do and how shall we live?”’ That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable.
On this point, Weber is overly critical of the field of science. Weber does not recognize that a key characteristic of the scientist is that the scientist necessarily first takes into account the greater needs of society before embarking in scientific investigation. In order for the scientist’s discoveries to be relevant to society, which is to say that in order for the scientist to make money off his or her discovery or achieve renown from it, the scientist needs to understand toward what purpose their discovery shall serve. For example on one hand Weber makes the argument that most of humanity need not understand the physics behind a moving streetcar. Weber writes that “unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know.”
Weber takes issue with the fact that the invention and improvement of the streetcar itself does not shed light on important questions such as “What shall we do and how shall we live?” Responding to Weber’s example, the streetcar assists human transport, and the train helps increase human industrial capacity and supports an increasing human population by transporting goods and supplies. The scientist is eminently aware of these facts, and for this reason the scientist’s technical discoveries are not outside the domain of serving larger social purposes as Weber would believe. For this reason Weber underestimates the contributions scientists have made to further the larger social questions.
It is obvious to the modern observer that science has greatly changed the experience of human society and how we humans go about our lives. Without our latest technical advances, humans would not be as connected as they are if we did not have cheap and ready access to telephones, speedy travel, and the internet. Governments, such as the United States, and other entities such as the United Nations, would not be motivated to interfere in genocides such as Sudan and Darfur if it weren’t for the populace’s easy access to news of worldly events (modern communication is a byproduct of science). The fact that international countries are pressured to react to catastrophes and crises in other states are a testament to how increasingly inter-connected human society is compared to human societies of the past where such incidences would be ignored. Science can also change human society for the worse, as well as for the better. The advent of the nuclear bomb allows motivated groups of people the option of destroying the planet as we know it. Society has necessarily reacted to these threats, especially political bureaucracies concerned with self-preservation.
Weber’s major critique of this assessment would focus on the ultimate authority by which scientists are held accountable. He would argue that scientific accomplishments are only a response to the general needs of the day, and are exploited by others such as politicians. Weber writes that individual scientists generally “maintain that he engages in ‘science for science’s sake’ and not merely because others, by exploiting science, bring about commercial or technical success and can better feed, dress, illuminate, and govern.”
In response to Weber’s critique concerning the politician’s greater authority over society than the scientist, I would argue that the relationship between politicians and scientists are more complex than Weber recognizes. Weber holds the reasonable assumption that politicians hold the ultimate authority within a state. On the other hand, as Weber also recognizes, there is much movement on behalf of democratic societies of the modern era to level social stratification and enable governments to tap into the will and desires of their citizens in order to better serve them (see Bureaucracy page 224, which was quoted early on in this paper). In this manner, citizens, being “occasional politicians”
Weber believed that the scientist and the politician generally promoted bureaucratic order that increased rationalization, intellectualization, and disenchantment of worldly affairs. On that same vein, he criticized scientists for their technical study, and did not recognize that their discoveries and achievements can in actuality serve general social pursuits. Their discoveries in many instances are necessarily based on their understanding of social progress and how their achievements can service societal needs. To name a few of their accomplishments, many of their inventions have allowed humans to increase their population and live in greater luxury than at any other point in history, to better enjoy each other’s company even from faraway locations, to be exposed to many different geographies and cultures through advances in transportation, and each of these achievements and others (while we may take them for granted) have encouraged us to dream of other future advances in store for us. These advances have also enabled us to reach ever higher in whatever pursuit we choose to strive for. For example, we would not be able to dream about exploring space, or even conceive of space exploration, if not for the technological achievements before our time. I would argue that rather than being disenchanting, these accomplishments, and the possibilities for greater achievements, is more enchanting than he realized.
Works Cited
Weber, M. (1958). Bureaucracy. In H. Gerth, & C. W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 196-244). New York City: Oxford University Press.
Weber, M. (1958). Politics as a Vocation. In H. H. Gerth, & C. W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 77 - 128). New York City: Oxford University Press.
Weber, M. (1958). Science as a Vocation. In H. Gerth, & C. W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 129-158). New York City: Oxford University Press.
Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism. (S. Kalberg, Ed.) New York City: Oxford University Press.
Weber, M. (1958). The Sociology of Charismatic Authority. In H. Gerth, & C. W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 245-252). New York City: Oxford University Press.