“The Crisis of Modernity”

Today I sat in front of the television and saw images of a manhunt taking place in Tampa, Florida. State officers were led by police dogs, and the whole scene was being viewed from the outside by aerial photography. The sound was turned down, but through the exclamation mark filled captions I was able to piece together that a police officer was shot and killed, and they were now tracking down the man responsible. The search dogs combined with the southern setting must have clicked together in my head because I began to imagine my own dialogue for the anchors, and thought that these must have been the sort of pictures that would have been on an 1865 version of CNN.

This was an interesting idea. What would they have put on a 24 hour news channel a hundred fifty years ago? The dogs probably would have been chasing an escaped slave rather than a murder suspect. I just kept watching, imagining what had come before and what would have been after the runaway slave story on this historic CNN broadcast. Maybe an interview with a southern Democrat, and a northern abolitionist, and we would hear their spin on the escape, then anchor would tie this story in with the disputes in Kansas and Nebraska and go to that story. Certainly the reason there wasn’t a 24 hour news network wasn’t because there wasn’t enough news. I think often we start to think that though.

Sometimes we look back on the past with nostalgic yearning, wishing for a return to a ‘simpler time’. The idea that the present is fundamentally different socially, and culturally than the past is called ‘modernity’ by sociologists, and the struggle against it by people is the ‘crisis of modernity’. It is at the foundation of works by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and many others, and is a figment of the imagination. We see history as fragments- as time periods with clear beginnings and ends, when history is in fact a long flowing river. We have ingrained in our heads concepts of eras like “the sixties”, “the cold war”, and “the roaring twenties”. Hearing each one of those terms fill our heads with specific pictures, videos, and moods attached with them.

Life however is not as abstract as that. People don’t fundamentally change from one time to another though- we just like to think we have. We don’t even have to like or dislike it, it’s just something we automatically do. It doesn’t have to be associated with yearning- I certainly don’t know many who wish we could go back to a time when slaves were chased by dogs- but for whatever reason we think the world is different now than it was then.

When you think of a moment in your life, you’ll recall a mood, the atmosphere of the events, and maybe a few things that were said. What you recall though, and what you actually felt when the experience was taking place are two different things. I’m writing this now and I feel a breeze from a fan on my face, and keep looking up at the rain on my window. I’ve got a pimple on my forehead that hurts if I touch it. Twenty years from now, if I should for some reason think back on writing this I’ll probably have a fond memory of being young and naive- that I was up until the early morning hours writing because I was thirsty and on a quest to put meaning to the world, or whatever such thing I would like to remember in twenty years. The rain, the fan, and the pimple will have been forgotten. Memory is as honest as a photograph of a model with the saturation raised and the blemishes removed, and our personal memories are not nearly as embellished as history’s.

Yes people are having to adjust to things that are different now. Certainly there have been leaps in technology made in our lifetimes. We have been subject while I’ve been alive to being able to constantly be in touch with one another on the internet, and to new medical technologies have raised questions nobody’s been asked before. The mistake made by people is thinking we are the first to have to make such great adjustments. Or we’ll cede that people have had to change their ways of life, but not as much as we are having to do today. Before the internet though, people had to adjust to nuclear technology and moving to the suburbs. Before that the railway and the city, before that the steam engine, before that the expansion to the west, the colonization of the new world, the renaissance, the printing press, bronze working, and to leaving our caves. Each generation has been faced with their own unique set of questions and hardships.

This is because attention is paid to the advancements, but never the fact that they are received by the same fundamental human nature that people that have always had. I have been shown a saturated photo of the internet and the computer since I’ve been born. Beautiful, almost poetic words are spoken on television and in magazines about the wonderful new ways for people to interact, and how easy it is for people to share with one another. I’m a real person though, not a hypothetical user, and I go on my computer to write, and collaborate with people I know from real life. People aren’t replacing local human bonds with ones created around the world. Literature, art, music, and politics have existed for thousands of years, it is just now easier to access them. The things of life are not different- only the way in which the modern person is able to produce, consume, and experience them. The tools have changed, but not the users.

It is hard to recall the gray skies and grittiness in your memories, and it is so much easier to think that those skies were bright blue, and the grass was much greener. The same is true with history. When I started thinking of my fictional 1856 CNN I thought of men with thick beards and sideburns, and of frontiersmen in covered wagons. I wasn’t thinking of people facing the issue of slavery, and how they viewed news- I was thinking of how the nineteenth century man saw it, as if he was a different species. When you closely study the politics of history it becomes clear just how human our ancestors were. Parties viewed and reacted to news in 1856 the same way we do today, and the same way the ancient Romans did. This combined with the fact that technology and discovery have constantly been advancing, says that the “crisis of modernity” isn’t modern at all. We as people have always felt as if we are in crisis.

“First Year Bullshit”

I hate my first year success seminar. First year success is a mandatory one credit, one semester class, with the sole purpose of wasting my time. We sit around and talk about our lives, complain about how much work we have and how much people miss their high school boyfriends and girlfriends. Every week we sit in a circle and our teacher asks us what the best and worst part of our weeks were. I wonder how many weeks of everyone saying their favorite thing was going to parties and the hardest part was getting up the next morning I need to sit through before I’m adequately prepared for college. Perhaps I should be honest and say the worst part of my week is wasting an hour in FYSS.

This week I got an email on Wednesday or Thursday that said instead of meeting in our classroom at eleven, we would be meeting at the theater at noon. At the theater there was a ceremony for the anniversary of the Constitution’s ratification- professors were going to be reciting the text, and they would be doing it when I normally eat lunch. I thought that this idea was ridiculous- I’ve read the Constitution, I didn’t sign up for a class at noon, and sitting through a reading of the document had nothing to do with my “first year success” (whatever that means). So I didn’t go.

Why should I have to waste my time, and why should I have to waste my money? I am compelled to take this class to be enrolled three of my five real classes. The idea of doing something for the sole reason of having been told to is fairly stupid I think.

People are always preparing for the next stage in their life. Each new school I’ve gone to has been proclaimed different than the last, but it hasn’t been really. In each one I’ve faced mandatory wastes of time. Soon there will be teachers telling me “Now in grad school you’re really going to have to work”, and then when I’m there (if I can last that long) I’m sure there will be seminars I can attend that will help me find a job, and kiss my bosses ass. People would like to think that eventually there’s a time when it’s easy to not do something proclaimed as mandatory because you don’t think it makes sense -when you don’t stick it out a little longer because you hope something better is around the corner- but I’m starting to think neither of those points in life ever arrive. If you ever want full control of your life you have to just reach out and grab it. Accept whatever happens as the cost of being free and happy. Maybe Madison would agree (….probably not).

“My Julliard Jazz Experience”

*limited to 750 words by my composition teacher*

When I was in high school I discovered and fell in love with two things that together gave me the tools to express myself- the bass, and jazz. They gave me a musical freedom I never had before. In orchestra you sit there and play notes on a page. A classical musician takes lessons and spends years learning how to play exactly what someone wrote on a page and I always thought that was boring. When you play jazz the only thing that has been predetermined is the song’s melody and harmony (and sometimes not even that). The rest is up to the spontaneous imagination of the musicians, and learning how to play great jazz is really learning how to express your creativity.

I decided that this was what I wanted to do- that even if it didn’t bring much money, and even if it meant living in a tiny studio apartment my entire life I would be happiest going out and playing music every night. It gave me a sense of purpose. All my actions were aimed at becoming a great jazz musician and getting into music school. As I improved I got more and more ambitious, and when it came time to apply to schools I threw myself at the most challenging goal I could think of- to get into the Julliard jazz school.

I thought that I would use it as a litmus test to see if I was cut out for the jazz life. The school is very selective- people from all over the world apply and they only had one bass seat open. Getting in would mean learning from some of the best jazz musicians alive today, touring with the band around the world, and playing in all the famous jazz clubs in New York City. The school and dorms are in the middle of Lincoln Center, and going there became my dream. If I could get into the school after only playing for three years, I knew I could make it it as a jazz musician.

The first step of the audition process was choosing six songs from a list of twelve, and recording yourself playing the melodies, soloing, and walking basslines for each tune with a band. My band teacher Mr. Osborn got me in touch with the pianist in his wedding band, and the pianist suggested a drummer. We recorded in the piano player’s little studio built in a spare bedroom, and I got off to a shaky start. We only had the one session to record everything , so there was a lot of pressure to get everything right the first time. It wasn’t until I stopped looking at the music though, and just got totally involved in playing that we got any usable takes. When I really get into the music I start dancing in my seat while playing, and I was dancing by the end of the session.

I sent the tape off and didn’t hear back until January, when I finally got the invitation to the live audition. I was thrilled, and could barely contain my excitement all month. That’s how long I had to prepare four new songs they sent, and brush up on the six I had played on the tape. I had to know the songs inside and out and I wasn’t allowed to bring any sheet music with me. The audition was all I thought of all month, and when it came I was confident that I was as prepared as I could be.

There were four other players auditioning. Just four. I was told that out of the hundreds of applicants I was one of five bassists invited to audition for the professors. We all warmed up in the same room. It was obvious they had been playing since they were kids, and I was behind. Two of the players were going for the graduate program. We played together in that warm up room though, and I began to grow confident. These guys were great, amazing technically, but they weren’t dancing in their seats. They tried playing as fast as they could, but at the cost of being musical. When one of they all began improvising very complicated solo with lots of fast and complicated runs, I became excited. Good jazz is laid back, melodic, and these guys didn’t get it. I grinned the entire way home, because I knew that I had gone in there and had played very maturely, with an emphasis on musicality, rather than showing how many notes I could play. I thought I had expressed myself better, and more clearly than any of the applicants, and that the great musicians I played for must have appreciated that.

I don’t know if they did or not, but in another month I had gotten my rejection letter. I was terribly disappointed my dream was not coming true, but I also held some satisfaction that I had pushed myself as much as I could have. I began to realize that I didn’t need to prove myself, that I had expressed my ideas through music, and nobody could say they weren’t as good as anyone else’s.

250 Words on our responsibility to Africa

An English exercise:

As Americans we should feel obligated because our industries have made their deserts grow, and their wells dry. As Westerners we saw them and their land as a commodity, drew our borders in their sand, and destabilized their entire continent. As people we are obligated by brotherhood.

A poll conducted in 2000 found that the average American thought we spent 20% of our federal budget on foreign aid, when in reality it’s less than 1%. That is about 1/30th our defense spending pre-Iraq. In terms of GNP spent we provide less than every other country in the Western world. People are starving, and people are dying from diseases we haven’t worried about in America for over a century, but for some reason Israel receives more developmental assistance from us than Ethiopia- a country where only six percent of the population has access to safe sanitation, and seventy-eight percent go without safe drinking water.

We have a war on terror, a war on drugs, a war on crime, but no war on poverty. Famine and hopelessness don’t poll well because the ones polled have never seen a loved one starved to death. It’s not a hot topic because our streets aren’t filled with twelve million children orphaned by AIDs. The struggle in Africa is not on the daily news, it is not in our nation’s consciousness. People are living in conditions we don’t let animals suffer in this country and we don’t care. And we wonder why people hate us.

“The Labor Union’s Usefulness, as demonstrated by the Ford Motor Company”

Thursday Ford Motor company and the United Auto Workers union agreed to a contract buyout arrangement, where Ford workers could opt to leave the company and receive a variety of enticements. A departing employee could choose between leaving with a $140,000 bonus, enrolling in a four year college while receiving 50% pay, or a two year college and receive 70% salary. This story is a reminder of how far labor unions have brought us, and how important they still are for workers.

Without the UAW, Ford wouldn’t have been in this position. It could have just fired employees without giving them any reason. It also wouldn’t have had the financial burden of needing to pay pensions and health plans it had committed to, because a hundred years ago neither of those things had been heard of. Ford didn’t offer these things because it cares about it’s workers, but because it was in their bottom line best interest when faced with an organized labor force. The link between our labor rights today and unions is axiomatic, a hundred years ago, these workers would have been out of luck.

Thankfully for today’s Ford employee they have a strong union fighting for their rights. Due to the union those being laid off will still be able to pay their mortgages. That’s obviously great for the people working there with families. What is interesting though, is the enticements aimed at young workers. Their volunteer job loss is presented as an opportunity. A free education, and continued salary could mean better jobs, the bonuses could help these white collar workers realize their dreams of owning a small business or putting a down payment on a house. Never before has the employee had so much power that he can chose to be fired, and have it presented as an opportunity rather than a hardship. These Ford workers lives are much better because they participate in a union.

Of course some see this as a bad thing. This is going to cost Ford millions- millions they can’t afford right now. People will tell you that the Ford company’s financial problems today stem from their financial obligations forced by the union. If they didn’t have to pay out pensions or health care then their stock wouldn’t be performing so poorly. There are two equally valid responses to that I think. First, the company isn’t doing badly because of their employee costs, it’s doing badly because Toyota and other companies are selling better cars at a better value. Saying that it’s the union’s fault is post-hoc reasoning, it only looks at the symptoms and not the overall problem. Even if worker costs were the reason for the companies failings, the workers are people. Ford is just a company. Certainly the individual is more important than a fictitious being. While a few portfolios may take a dip, I doubt very much any of the stockholders would hurt as much as a Ford worker without health care, a pension, or a contract buyout.

Bass

I fell asleep last night with my music playing, and woke up three hours later to the audition tape I made last year. I recorded it a few days before Thanksgiving, and wasn’t very satisfied with it, but Victor Goinz liked it enough to invite me for a live audition at Julliard, and now that I’m hearing it a year later I’m not quite as critical. I decided to upload three of the six songs to a PureVolume page, so anyone who’s never heard me play can check it out. They are Dig by Miles Davis, Strollin’ by Horace Silver, and Footprints by Wayne Shorter. The audition required me to play the melody, solo, and walk behind each (I usually had the pianist play the melody at the end while I walked my line so it had SOME resemblance of real music).

http://www.purevolume.com/davegill

I’ve improved since then, but I’ve also been without my upright since getting to Potsdam, and I’m starting to miss it. I didn’t realize it until listening to this. I miss my upright, and I miss playing jazz. The feeling when you’re totally in the music, you stop thinking about the chords or where you are, and you can hear what you’re going to do before you do it….

A Note on “Inevitable Progress”

If you read my essay “Inevitable Progress”, you won’t have a hard time finding the unsettling idea embedded inside it, that it isn’t in the interest of us as a species to heal the sick or help people. It isn’t (in the greater long term), but I’m not suggesting that’s a good enough reason not to do it. It’s certainly something interesting to think of. I’m convinced that a great crash is on the horizon for the human species and that at some point we’ll have to more seriously contemplate the issue. I think I’m going to begin working on a larger fictional story about this.

“Inevitable Progress”

Bioethics and the law is a class that is all about the questions new technologies raise. An improvement in one person’s life might mean a setback in another, or an unforseen precendent might be created for something we never intended. They are questions every generation has been faced with in one form or another, but in the computer age we live in it seems as if we are constanly bombarded with these issues. Looking back on history we usually judge most critisiscm of new ideas as silly and unfounded, the side of progress always winning in the end. So is “Is progress inevitable?”. Could we stop this if we wanted to?

We know of course that technically we could. Our decision to use a new technology, or acknowlege a new idea is totally under our control. Nothing truly compells us to do it. It’s like saying that war is inevitable- if everyone stopped fighting then there would be no war. There’s no absolutely correct answer you can find for any question of morality, and if you’ve found one you should re-examine your objectivity.

So if it’s not absolutely inevitable, and the reason it’s not is that no moral position can be absolute, then at the same time progress can not be absolutely avoided. There’s no crawling back into the cave after we’ve seen the outside. You could never get everyone to agree to it. It is our nature to explore and conquer new lands. I don’t think anybody can reasonably expect all “progress” to be halted because of their beliefs (and \an alarmingly large group of people would like to see that happen). Why if we have the technology to make a person’s life better shouldn’t we use it? How is that justified? Problems may arise in the future, but those are hypotheticals, and these are real issues today. Solutions will be found.

This is when you back your mind into a corner. You know that by helping one person, and the next person that somewhere down the line something disastorous is going to happen. It’s bound to. We are interrupting nature. Charles Darwin said that a species naturally produces more offspring than the environment can support, and only the strongest of that species will survive and reproduce. When you step in and defend the weak, it’s like daming a river, and the excess just builds and builds behind it. Eventually the new lake has grown larger than your dam can support, and then you’re in trouble. If our children continue to survive at the rates they do, at some point the environment won’t be able to support them.

Nobody wants to be cruel. Nobody wants to create suffering. If you help this man’s suffering though, many more will most likely meet a worse fate. Or they may not. Technology may keep pace and maintain the dam. Or it may not. By helping today’s society you run the risk of condemning tomorrows. Our progress is that great at this point, where if it doesn’t keep up we’re doomed.

So the question really isn’t “Is progress inevitable?”. That is irrelevant- we need progress at this point to survive. We just need to define what progress is, and make sure that it is being made in the right fields. It is as if our ancestors have set this giant ball in motion, and we are stuck running in front of it, struggling not to be crushed. We have so many more problems facing us as a world. We have to combat global warming, overcrowding, find how to support a huge population with food, housing, medical care, we must find new sources of energy to support all this, and we need to make sure that we are training people to answer the questions we must answer. Those are the next steps in making sure the dam doesn’t burst. The world doesn’t realize that a huge crisis is looming on the horizon, and the time has come in the movie for us all to set aside our differences to combat our common enemy.

My New Analogue Secretary

Today I bought a handheld Sony Microcassette recorder. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, but I finally got around to it today. I was organizing my thoughts on an article I want to write about Death and Mourning in the 21st Century (and the role the internet plays in that). I realized that if I was going to write an informed article I should speak with some professors on campus, because this subject has legal, psychological, and sociological issues that are beyond me. So if I was going to interview all these different people, I should have a better way to record their responses than with a notepad and pen.

That’s what I had been using to record my thoughts, a little pocket sized notebook. I would carry it and a mechanical pencil with me wherever I went and when I got a good idea, or something interesting struck me I’d whip it out and begin scribbling. It was inconvenient for a few reasons, the pencil would end up stabbing me when I sat down, or I’d have to fish around my pockets, and pull it out (which was troublesome sometimes if I was sitting). The worst thing about it though, was that it would interrupt my train of thought. I would have to pause what I was thinking to pull the notebook out and write, then afterwards I’d have to jump back into the stream of consciousness. Sometimes it was hard.

I didn’t have this idea on my own. I’ve heard of a lot of people I admire doing it, namely Andy Warhol, and Hunter S. Thompson. I think I’m beginning to understand what they were drawn by. My tape recorder picks up everything, it is a completely accurate account of history. I’ve already gotten some looks when holding it in my hand with the little red light on. What’s on the tape is real, it doesn’t pick up what you wanted to say or whether you’re a nice guy or not. Only what you said. So if people don’t want to be recorded, does that mean they don’t like what they’re saying? And if that’s the case, the next question is obviously “Then why are you saying it?”

The notebook will still play a role in my brainstorming process, I think writing something down is important for organizing purposes- you chose exactly what goes on a piece of paper and have as long as you want to revise it. If anything now I’ll need two notebooks- one for organizing and outlining, the other for cataloging my tapes. I can envision one day having a whole drawer full of tapes, each with a number and an old worn notebook with a one sentence description of the events next to each serial. Maybe one day they’ll help a biographer or colleague after I’ve died.

“Society’s Inheritance”

When Sam Walton, founder of retail giant Wal-Mart died in 1992, he left a fortune of more than $15.2 billion dollars behind to his family. His ownership in the company was transferred upon his death to his children, making the Waltons the wealthiest family in the world. Today this fortune has amassed to $90 billion[1]- almost as much as the State of New York spends providing Medicaid over the course of three years[2]- and all his children had to do to earn this was outlive their father. The idea that you have a god given right to keep an unlimited amount of wealth after your death has been part of our law for far too long.

The wealthiest 5% own 57.5% of the wealth in this country,[3] and while you can argue that they have worked hard for that money (I’m not sold, but that’s besides my scope here), how can you believe that more than half of the wealth in the United States is automatically entitled to a few lucky heirs? That seems to go against what America is about- everyone having the opportunity to make their own fortunes. Such a big deal is made out of the issue of fair trade by the Republican party, and this is the first step towards a truly fair system. How wonderful would it be if the man with the best ideas truly was the one who succeeded? A new hope would be created for those living in poverty- if only because they knew that they weren’t being crowded out of a better life by people who haven’t worked to earn their vast fortunes.

The needs of society outweigh the wishes of the dead. In addition to creating a more fair and level playing field, if wealth was returned to society upon a person’s death (society being represented by the government) it could solve many of the problems facing us today. A whole new stream of revenue would be available to fund Social Security, healthcare, or education. It could go a long way towards bridging the gap between the government’s revenue and expenditure.

Even children in elementary school can explain to you the life cycle. All that is born eventually dies and returns to the earth, returning nutrients so new life can thrive. It’s only natural that this fairness be brought to man’s law. The wealth belonged to society to begin with and when it’s held captive by a few ruling families everyone else suffers. It is only in this way we can keep balance and prevent the very fortunate from taking advantage of those whose only oppressor is the life they were born into[4] (such as in the example I began with- Sam Walton’s huge estate was largely due to the exploitation of sweatshop workers in China and southeast Asia). Empires of wealth unjustly (or unethically) gained would be naturally corrected and put to work for society upon that person’s death. No arguments would have to be made, nor judgments passed on the merit of the finished life, it would just automatically without debate go to the government and begin working once again for the people.

Someone who’s worked hard all their lives should be able to leave something behind for their loved ones. A hundred years ago though, when a man died he would leave behind a wife and family that still needed a man’s providence. Thankfully society has progressed to the point where women are allowed to work, and people that truly need help have recourse (these new rules could provide a great improvement in the support that they are able to receive). Perhaps up to a million dollars in inheritance should be allowed. Part of that should probably taxed (a million dollars after all, is quite a bit of money)- how much is up for debate. Or the terms could be decided by the average (mean average) price of a home in this country- you could leave a house (or the equivalent of a house) behind tax free, and up to two houses with tax maybe. Anything after that is society’s inheritance.

[1]
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/invest/forbes/P61243.asp “The Forbes 400: America’s richest 400 just get richer” by Forbes 9/24/04
[2]
http://www.health.state.ny.us/nysdoh/medstat/quarterly/ssd/2004/cy_exp.htm “Calendar Year 2004 Medicaid Expenditures”, New York State Department of Health
[3]
http://www.federalreserve.gov/Pubs/FEDS/2006/200613/200613pap.pdf#search=%222004%20distribution%20of%20wealth%22 “Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth, 1989–2004” by Arthur Kennickel, Federal Reserve Board, January 30,2006
[4]
Ideally this “societal inheritance” would be managed by a worldwide government, that could help all people. While I am naive enough to write this article, I’m afraid that thought will be nothing but a dream for the better part of this century.