epiphanatic » 2003» April

respectful disagreement of the moment: Charlton Heston

Posted on 04.17.03 by jstoner @ 6:16 pm

Great actor. Gun nut. I differ with Charlton Heston on a lot of points. But I learned something about him: he was involved in the civil rights movement of the ’60s.

And then I thought about some of his best movies, and the roles he played. Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, even the Ten Commandments all played on issues of liberty and respect for the individual.

So I came to understand: Heston is about rights first, guns second. If I felt more strongly about the Second Amendment, I’d probably be concerned about those rights too. I may not agree entirely, but I can respect that.

Filed under: of the moment
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a bad day redeemed

Posted on 04.09.03 by jstoner @ 1:04 am

Today, I learned more about Linux time-keeping internals than I ever wanted to know. And under about the worst possible circumstances.

I had a job interview scheduled today at 2:00. I thought my PC would have automatically changed for daylight savings this weekend. I had seen it happen before. It did not this time.

I thought it was 1:00, and left for my interview. It was actually 2. I was partway there when I figured this out. I came back home and called them. They were charitable, and rescheduled the interview for next week.

I’m not sure how much this will count against me, but I’m fairly sure it will. It’s a position with the Chicago Bike Federation, their bike ambassador program. OK, not my usual thing, but I need a frickin’ job. And it does look like fun.

But yeah, I’d be representing the city, and yeah, punctuality would count. Punctuality here was not just one of those bullshit business-culture formalities, it was a demonstration of something important for the job. Or not, in my case. At the very least, it moves me down the “first-come-first-served” list. Upsetting.

I don’t know what messed up the daylight savings time processing on my machine. I do think I fixed it, though not without copious amounts of foul language. In the fall, if it fails again, I’ll be an hour ahead. So I got that goin’ for me.

This evening, coming home from the gym, I rounded a corner in the State and Grand subway station here in Chicago. A joyful little boy pointed at me and shouted, “You’re a choo-choo train!”

I’m a choo-choo train. Maybe life isn’t so bad.

Filed under: life
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the mind of George W. Bush

Posted on 04.02.03 by jstoner @ 1:23 am

The cover story of the April Atlantic Monthly is entitled “The Mind of George W. Bush.” Interesting article, written by Richard Brookhiser, a fellow conservative and a historian. Not a softball piece. The bottom line: Bush is smart, a capable manager, using his Harvard MBA, running an organization. The question posed but unanswered: does he have the imagination to lead the nation during wartime? Can he fully imagine the consequences of his decisions, or find new ways to think about familiar relationships, for example with Saudi Arabia?

More interesting was the interview of Brookhiser on the Atlantic website. This was quite a telling exchange:

Sage Stossel, Atlantic Monthly: You do suggest, though, that patience is somewhat new for him. In fact it struck me that parts of your assessment of the way Bush functions come across a bit like the evaluation of an elementary school child who’s slowly working his way through Piaget’s developmental stages. You write, for example, that:

Bush knows that following through can require patience. This is new for him: when he was with the Rangers, and in his father’s White House, he was just learning patience. Though he may still see the fundamental issues in black and white, he can now wait to achieve his goals.

From your description, it sounds as though he’s at the Concrete Operations stage at which, according to the Cognitive Science Dictionary, children “can understand concrete problems,” but “cannot yet perform on abstract problems, and … do not consider all of the logically possible outcomes.” I’m mostly being facetious, but do you think there’s anything to that?

Brookhiser: People like you and me tend to assume that someone like him must be a dunce. Right? He hasn’t heard of Piaget, so how smart can he be? But there are people in the world who haven’t read Piaget and they’re smart anyway. That does happen. Obviously Piaget wasn’t around in the Washington Administration, but whoever his equivalent was, I’m pretty sure Washington hadn’t read him. But Washington does seem to have read Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Madison gave him a copy of it, and there are some references in Washington’s speeches, which suggest that he at least looked at it. Did Washington get all the way through it? I don’t know. But I suspect that even after he looked at it, he was not as conversant with Locke’s epistemology as Madison would have been. Does that mean he wasn’t as smart as Madison? Certainly he wasn’t. But in some ways, he was every bit as smart as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and all the college-educated bright boys that he drew around himself.

Notice the evasive response. Bush has never heard of Piaget, but he’s still smart. Stossel is not interrogating Bush’s intimacy with cognitive science. The question is how do Piaget’s ideas about cognitive development apply to “The Mind of George W. Bush?”

I think Stossel is onto something here: as you read the article, you do get that sense of a man with an intelligent mind who knows how to ask good practical questions, but doesn’t know when to question his most basic assumptions. And notice the concreteness in morality: Good and Evil, and no serious inquiry about how anyone could draw the line any other way. No understanding of how–conservatively–half a billion people could consider bin Laden a hero. Not a glimmer of dialectic thought.

But this is the core of political conservatism in America. This is not just the way our president thinks, this is precisely the pattern of thought that distinguishes conservatism itself. Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Mine and Yours, pregiven and uninspected. Concrete operations applied to politics.

Interesting that Brookhiser is also a conservative. He’s not a stupid man, either: his analysis of Bush is nuanced and sharp. Whether or not he thinks concretely in politics, he demonstrates higher capacities in other areas.

I wonder if this question troubled him at all. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t answer it.

(For more political-developmental fun, check out Grave’s Spiral Dynamics, the blue meme. Should look familiar.)

Filed under: politics--us
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