outsourcing our brains*

Welcome to the information age where knowledge is abundant and accessible. GPS devices replace maps and directions. Cell phones abolish the need for recalling phone numbers or writing them down on slips of paper. Itunes helps you organize your music and figure out what your musical tastes are while Facebook allows you to remember who your friends are and what they’re up to.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

~ excerpts from the article “The Outsourced Brain” by David Brooks

We’re so eager to implement the latest technology to solve our problems, that we forget the use of computers often diminishes our own cognitive abilities. Doctors come to rely too much MRI scans, and their diagnosis skills grow rusty. Our memories grow weak as we can google the texts in books and search for the latest trivia answers. And apparently, a third of people under thirty can’t remember their phone numbers.

Our infatuation with technology is spreading. We’re excited about the potential of giving laptops to third world countries in order to help improve education, and connect children to the rest of the world. Though many are hopeful about the changes that these laptops may bring, and I do applaud the people involved who have forsaken higher salaries in order to try to positively impact the world, I find it strange that we’re doing this while studies and commentary are coming out that show that technology doesn’t really enhance education.**

So before we continue on our high and noble quest to turn the rest of the world into a spitting image of ourselves, let us remember what we lose with all that we gain. In the period of colonialism, cultural and political dominance was conducted in the name of Christianity. Perhaps today, we are conducting cultural and economic dominance in the name of “development” and “poverty alleviation”.

~

Meanwhile, on this side of the globe, we continue to carry around more electronic gadgets, and Google continues to learn more about us than we could ever know about ourselves. David Brooks notes:

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

Perhaps the disappearance of agency*** is the biggest cost of our postmodern information age:

though knowledge is vast and abundant, understanding has become a lost art
though our identities are distinct, unique and express, our lives still fail to have meaning


* Title taken from Brooks’ article. I can’t take credit for it.
** Unplugged schools is an interesting reflection on the role of education and technology in America.
*** Arguably, I could list many other costs that may also be conferred the honor of being the “biggest loss”: authenticity, community, Meaning, Answers with capital letters
**** Speaking of loss of agency, there’s a fear that one day people will believe that they’re not responsible for things that their brain made them do!

why less is more

The four horsemen of my apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out.
…
This is most manifest in the life of the suburban commuter who weekly spends a dozen or more hours on the road between the putative dream house and the workplace, caught in the gridlock of tens of thousands likewise trying to move from the residential-warehousing periphery to the economically productive inner rings. Space is quantifiable and we are constantly taught to covet it (though leisure is advertised too—mostly as vacation packages). You can own those two thousand square feet including two-car garage, and it is literally real, the real in real estate. But to have this space you give up time, the time that you might be spending with the kids who are housed in the image of domestic tranquility but not actually particularly well nurtured by their absentee parents, or time spent immersed in community life or making things with your own hands or doing nothing at all—a lost art. You give up time, and you often give up the far more than two thousand square feet that you don’t own but get to enjoy when you live in, say, a rented apartment in a neighborhood full of amenities nobody advertised to you, because you don’t have to buy the public pool or playground that your kids don’t need to be driven to. The language of real-estate ownership is loud, clear, and drilled into us daily; the language of public life and leisure time is rarer and more complex.
…
Ultimately, I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don’t get measured and can’t be bought.

~ excerpts from the article Finding Time by Rebecca Solnit

While we are working really hard to increase profits and grow our GDP—attempting to make an image of white picket fence life real—we sometimes never figure out what a good standard of living truly is (it’s easy to waste our life away in a life that isn’t really life).

I quit a high-paying, high-flying job almost six months ago. A job that put me on the fast track for that suburban dream of comfort and security. A job that promised much, but arguably delivered little.

Due to this unnaturally warm spell in October, the weather has greatly resembled what it was like when I first moved back to Philadelphia in May. The shade of green of the trees in Rittenhouse, the mostly full park benches, the gentle sunlight, the music from the street performers. The sensory details have been ushering back my memories of how free it felt to make that change of pace.

Though I now eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead of pricey Mediterranean cuisine for lunch (and cannot eat out very often), though I now have to stay in hostels for my honeymoon instead of 5-star hotels, though I now must take the Chinatown bus to travel, instead of Amtrak, I wouldn’t go back. Not even if you paid me :)

~

Some other excerpts from the same article (on the subject of walking, instead of driving):

The problem is partly one of language. The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous—and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It’s exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout. It’s myriad little epiphanies and encounters that knit me more tightly into my place and maybe enhance the place overall. The carbon emissions are essentially nil. Many more benefits are more subjective, more ethereal—and more wordy. You can’t describe them in a few familiar phrases; and if you’re not practiced at describing them, you may not be able to articulate them at all. It is difficult to value what cannot be named. Since someone makes money every time you buy a car or fill it up, there’s a whole commercial language built around getting us to drive; there’s little or no language promoting the free act of walking. Have you not driven a Ford lately?

Even the idea of security illustrates the constant conflict between the familiar and the intricate. When I drive, I have a large steel and glass carapace wrapped around me and my contact with other human beings is largely limited to colliding with their large metal carapaces at various speeds or their unbuffered bodies in crosswalks. Fifty thousand or so people a year are killed by cars in this country, but its citizens officially believe that safety lies in the lack of contact that cars offer. Walkers make a place safer for the whole community—what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”—and in turn become more street-smart themselves. Too, safety is a reductive term for what being at home in the world or the neighborhood can provide. This is a more nebulous kind of security, but a deeper and broader one. It is marked by expansiveness, not defensiveness.

Walking versus driving is an easy setup, but the same problem applies to most of the technological changes we embrace and many of the material and spatial ones. The gains are simple and we know the adjectives: convenient, efficient, safe, fast, predictable, productive. All good things for a machine, but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties—epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures—that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell. What we cannot describe vanishes into the ether, and so what begins as a problem of language ends as one of the broadest tragedies of our lives.

tax deductible

With all my commentary on the injustices committed by big corporations, and my own personal career trajectory from for-profit to nonprofit, it may appear that I think all nonprofit organizations are good and all for-profit companies are bad.

But to clarify, I don't think such a distinction can be made. I’d much rather work for In-N-Out Burger, who pays their employees benefits and good wages, and sources local fresh food, than be part of the National Sleep Foundation, whose heavy funding from pharmaceuticals appears to strongly influence their studies and campaigns.

In fact, nonprofits can be particularly susceptible to corruption and fraud. Just think about all the sex scandals involving priests, and adultery cases involving pastors. Because people are less suspicious of nonprofits, hiding under the guise of being "independent" and “doing good work”, it’s easy to get away with deceptive research studies, misleading marketing and unhelpful programs. Meanwhile, for-profits that take social responsibility seriously can be extremely beneficial to society.

Yet public for-profits are accountable to maximizing their shareholder wealth, making them susceptible to make profit-increasing decisions that may not be beneficial to their employees, customers or society at large. In contrast, nonprofits are held accountable to their funders to accomplish their mission.

The nonprofit vs. for-profit classification originated as a tax distinction. Do you really trust the federal government to determine what is "altruistic" and what is not? So if you work for a nonprofit, don’t think that you’re immune from the “evils of the corporate world”. And if you work for a for-profit, then I don’t think that should be an excuse not to consider corporate social responsibility.*



* I don’t really like that term very much. I don’t really know if it means anything anymore… but since it may still signify a hint of what I do want it to mean, I’ll use it, rather than ramble on and try to explain what I’m trying to say…..

why more?

When a nation’s standard of living is measured by GDP divided by population, and companies are driven to maximize shareholder’s profits, we seem to be caught in an endless upward spiral.

We invent new illnesses so we will buy more medicine.
We manufacture new processed foods so we can buy more groceries.
We create trends so we can buy more clothing.

It’s sometimes acknowledged in the nonprofit sector that growth isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes, it’s perfectly okay for a nonprofit to stay the size it is, and just continue serving the people it has served in the past.

Why can’t we acknowledge this in the corporate sector as well?

Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms, heavily featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, acknowledges that his environmentally regenerative agriculture is not reproducible at a large scale. Though he encourages others to engage in similar agricultural practices in their local areas, Salatin himself doesn’t want to expand and sell more.

Why can’t companies take a more holistic view at their operations? Call it social responsibility or what you want. A company’s worth is not solely in the profit it confers to its elusive shareholders, but in the value it can provide to its customers and its employees. The narrow-minded focus on profits has become incredibly destructive--from the promotion of drugs that pharmaceuticals knew could kill people, to cost-cutting measures that have kept employees at poverty level.

Can a company not rest at peace in operating year to year selling good quality products, and providing well for its employees? Why does there exist this constant need to grow the business every quarter?*

Why do we need more? Why do we demand more?
When does it stop?

we're all going to die

"Our relentless search for wellness through medicine has created a kind of therapeutic imperative, the urge to treat every complaint, every deviation from the norm, as a medical condition. We’ve come to believe that if a test can be performed, it should be performed; if a treatment can be used to lengthen life, no matter how incrementally, it should be used, regardless of whether the intervention will improve the patient’s sense of well-being, or is what the patient really wants. Families often tell doctors to “do everything possible” for their elderly and dying loved ones, often without realizing that “doing everything” won't necessarily stave off death for so long but could make the patient’s last few days or weeks more miserable than they might have been. Physicians, too, forget that their power to prolong life is limited, and that they are still able only “to cure, sometimes; to relieve, often; to comfort, always”, in the words of a French proverb.”

~ Overtreated: Why More Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Shannon Brownlee)

I guess I may get labeled as insensitive when I say this. But sometimes I get frustrated with all the rhetoric you hear about finding cures for diseases, especially ones relating to aging, such as certain types of cancers, Alzheimer’s, stroke etc… I get frustrated because we talk about prevention and cures for these diseases as though we could ward off death indefinitely.

On average, one hundred thousand dollars are spent per Medicare recipient in the last two years of life, from numerous tests for problems, to treatments that promise to prolong life for a few more months, to nasogastric feeding tubes and breathing machines designed to keep people alive far beyond what their natural bodies would allow.

We are all going to die someday. Why not accept it and do it with dignity? Why not do it without putting a huge burden on the health care system? Perhaps it’s better to die 10 years earlier, than to spend 20 years undergoing multiple treatments for various “diseases” that are but products of aging.

This is not to say that I’m against medical research altogether relating to aging or against any sort of medical treatment for the elderly. I do believe that they should be cared for and should be enabled to live their lives as fully as possible. But I guess because of this very belief, I agree with Brownlee—I wish the medical research we engage in and the treatments we use for the elderly would be more focused on alleviating their suffering and promoting their ability to enjoy the last years of their life, rather than trying to “cure” them of what is inevitably their old age and proximity to death.

But maybe I can only say this, because I'm young and haven't yet experienced the gradual decline of my body-- the aching of joints, the susceptibility to falls, the fuzziness of memory.... Perhaps because I haven't known my body becoming something other than my body as I know it, that I can say these words so easily. Perhaps because I have yet to experience the passing of a close friend or family member, that death for me is still an abstract concept that I can wax and wane eloquent on without actually knowing anything.

But we are all going to die. Maybe one day we will cure all cancers, but we will never be able to escape death.

~

“So little of what is done for old people seems aimed in any direct way at making the patient feel better. With medicalization, the role of physicians has become so expanded and technologized that we fail at our most important task—providing relief from suffering. Medical care of the elderly is particularly distorted by this new focus. Medicalization externalized experience, whereas the major tasks of aging are internal. Every clinician has witnessed the medicalized 80-year-old obsessed with arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and serum cholesterol levels. Contrast the patient with someone else in the same physical condition, who admits that her knees are bad and that she has trouble remembering things. Which patient is better off? Attention to some proto-illnesses arguably could benefit 80- and 90-year-olds: certainly osteoporosis, probably also high blood pressure. But 80-year-olds can ill afford the ceding of responsibility and loss of control inherent in medicalization. The challenges of very old age are spiritual, not medical. The appropriate role of the physician is a counselor or helper, not as scientific expert."

~ James Goodwin, geriatrician at the University of Texas Mexical Branch, in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine

in pursuit of riches

quick thoughts on lottery games

Many states in America depend upon income from lottery games to support public education and other important social services. The ends seem satisfactory —when you buy a lottery ticket, not only do you have a chance of winning a lot of money, but proceeds are also going to educate children. It seems like a win-win situation.

However, many studies have shown that lotteries actually function like a regressive tax. Someone earning several million a year isn’t going to be tempted by the lotto game, whereas low-income single mothers see winning the lottery as an opportunity out of poverty, and could regularly buy several tickets a week. If their weekly earnings are only near minimum wage, e.g. $250 or so, then $5 is a 2% tax. This may not seem like a lot, but I remember reading about how difficult it was for people to afford the fare increases with public transportation which only amounted to a few dollars each week. Through supposed “voluntary contributions”, the lottery has basically made the poor pay an unfair share of state services.

Meanwhile, studies have shown that lottery winners returning to their same level of happiness as before. The burdens of wealth can cause an undue strain on relationships with family and friends. Lottery winners can also end up poorer than before by buying cars, houses and electronics that they cannot sustain with their income (especially because lottery winnings are often paid out over a long time period so people end up taking out loans to make these purchases). Lower-income winners of the lottery are probably more susceptible to this as they are less educated about proper financial management.

While winning the lottery may promise an end to payday-to-payday subsistence to a few select, it does nothing to alleviate systemic poverty. It dangles false hopes of happiness and riches for the poor and for the middle class. Instead of being content with what we have, we find ourselves secretly hoping for a quick solution to our problems—getting rich really fast and easy.

So yes, lottery games are a good government revenue generator—but do they do any good?



* There was recently a huge lottery jackpot a few months ago. Our office had a pool and despite the fact that several years ago, I had made a decision not to buy lottery tickets, I found myself tempted to participate in my office pool. It didn’t seem like a big deal. It would only be a dollar or two contributions, and I found myself daydreaming about what I could do with all the money—pay off my loans, pay for graduate school, pay off my parents’ mortgage. It seemed so easy and it was so hard not to pull out a dollar from my wallet. But I don't want to support a system that is unjust to the poor, nor do I want to chase pipe dreams of wealth, because I want to be content with what I have. And for all that I do not have right now, I want to trust that God will provide. All those high and lofty things said aside, I did breath a huge sigh of relief when I found out that my office did not win. Life returns to normal. And those dreams of wealth are put to rest, atleast for the time being.

killing religion, tolerating culture

Apparently, China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs has instituted Order No. 5, a law announcing: “the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.” This “important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation” basically prohibits Buddhist monks from returning from the dead without government permission”

Slavoj Zizek in a New York Times op-ed piece, responds:

It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it? When in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, many Westerners were outraged — but how many of them actually believed in the divinity of the Buddha? Rather, we were angered because the Taliban did not show appropriate respect for the “cultural heritage” of their country. Unlike us sophisticates, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great respect for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions.

The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to “culture.” All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.**

“Culture” has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” with a “medieval mindset”: they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.**

Perhaps we find China’s reincarnation laws so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.

~

On a side note, Zizek also points out that these government measures may pale in comparison to other economic transformation—Lhasa now is also home to karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks:

“In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?”

Better than all the crusades and genocides and laws, what better killer of religion than the promise of material comfort?


* Except that for all I know, there’s nothing ACTUALLY Christian about Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts. I guess I owe my thanks to Hallmark, but I can’t be too critical, I use their e-cards.
** As a counterpoint, Meic Pearse argues in his book Why the Rest hates the West: "By their constant, mindlessly inaccurate resort to the “f-word” – fundamentalism – to describe the upsurge of religious fervor in much of the non-West, Western secularists are employing a boo-word that long ago lost its original meaning and has come to signify “more-religious-than-I-happen-to-like”—and thus to say more about the speaker than about the persons, things or phenomena described. It is one more signifier that Western self-styles “multiculturalists” are, in fact, refusing to take seriously any culture but their own