What Makes Humans Human?

Little, today, is as it was.

Anatomically modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years, but only since the end of the eighteenth century has artificial lighting been widely used. Gas lamps were introduced in European cities about that time, and electric lights came into use only in the twentieth century.

In other words, for most of human history, when night fell, it fell hard. Things got really, really dark,

and people gathered under the stars, which they could actually see, in those days before nighttime light pollution,

and under those stars, they told stories.

In EVERY culture around the globe, storytelling, in the form of narrative poetry, existed LONG before the invention of writing. We know this because the earliest manuscripts that we have from every culture record stories that were already ancient when they were finally written down. One of the earliest texts in English is that of the poem Beowulf. It reworks and retells, in a much distorted manner, much, much older stories—ones that predate the emergence of English as a distinct language. Stith Thompson, the great folklorist, did the literary world an enormous favor by compiling a massive index, today known as the Arne-Thompson Index, of motifs of ancient folktales worldwide. Name a story motif—three wishes, talking animals, the grateful dead, cruel stepsisters, golden apples, dragons, the fairy or demon lover, the instrument that plays itself –and you will find that the motif has an ancient pedigree and was already spread about the world long before historical times.

English is a Germanic language. All ancient Germanic societies had official storytellers whose job it was to entertain people in those days before modern entertainments like television and movies and the Internet and drones with laser-guided Hellfire missiles. In ancient Denmark, the storyteller was called a skaald. In Anglo-Saxon England, the storyteller was a scop (pronounced like MnE “shop”). The scop accompanied his stories on the Anglo-Saxon harp, a kind of lyre.

Of course, the telling of stories wasn’t the only entertainment around campfires. In most cultures, people danced and chanted and sang as well, and sometimes stories were told by the dancers or singers or chanters. All this was part of acting out the stories. (Want to know where the Christian devil, with his red body and horns, comes from? Well, in ancient Europe, people worshiped an Earth Mother and her consort, a Lord of the Forest, and they told stories of the hunt. When they acted these out around campfires, they held up to their heads animal horns, or branches in the shape of horns, and that’s how they pictured their Lord of the Forest, as a therianthrope, red from the campfire, with horns. When the Christians spread North across Europe, they made the god of the Old Religion into The Adversary. Grendel’s mother, the monster from the bog in Beowulf, is a demonized version, in a Christian story, of the ancient Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess Nerthus, to whom sacrifices were made by binding people, cutting their throats, and throwing them into a bog. You can see an ancient bas relief of the Lord of the Forest, btw, on the Gundestrup cauldron dating from 150 to 1 BCE. See the accompanying illustration.)

But where does this storytelling urge among humans come from, and why is it universal? Storytelling takes energy. And it doesn’t produce tangible results. It doesn’t mend bones or build houses or plant crops. So, why would it survive and be found among every people on Earth from the earliest times onward?

Contemporary cognitive scientists have learned that storytelling is an essential, built-in part of the human psyche, involved in every aspect of our lives, including our dreams, memories, and beliefs about ourselves and the world. Storytelling turns out to be one of the fundamental ways in which our brains are organized to make sense of our experience. Only in very recent years have we come to understand this. We are ESSENTIALLY storytelling creatures, in the Aristotelian sense of essentially. That is, it’s our storytelling that defines us. If that sounds like an overstatement, attend to what I am about to tell you. It’s amazing, and it may make you rethink a LOT of what you think you know.

At the back of each of your eyes are retinas containing rods and cones. These take in visual information from your environment. In each retina, there is a place where the optic nerve breaks through it. This is the nerve that carries visual signals to your brain. Because of this interruption of the retinas, there is a blind spot in each where NO INFORMATION AT ALL IS AVAILABLE. If what you saw was based on what signals actually hit your retina at a given moment, you would have two big black spots in your field of vision. Instead, you see a continuous visual field. Why? Because your brain automatically fills in the missing information for you, based on what was there when your eye saccaded over it a bit earlier. In other words, your brain makes up a story about what’s there. Spend some time studying optical illusions, and you will learn that this is only one example of many ways in which you don’t see the world as it is but, rather, as the story concocted by your brain says it is.

This sort of filling in of missing pieces also happens with our memories. Scientists have discovered that at any given moment, people attend to at most about seven bits of information from their immediate environment. There’s a well-known limitation of short-term memory to about seven items, give or take two, and that’s why telephone numbers are seven digits long. So, at any given moment, you are attending to only about seven items from, potentially, billions in your environment. When you remember an event, your brain FILLS IN WHAT YOU WERE NOT ATTENDING TO AT THE TIME based on general information you’ve gathered, on its predispositions, and on general beliefs that you have about the world. In short, based on very partial information, your brain makes up and tells you a STORY about that past time, and that is what you “see” in memory in your “mind’s eye.”

So, people tend to have a LOT of false memories because the brain CONFABULATES—it makes up a complete, whole story about what was PROBABLY the case and presents that whole memory to you, with the gaps filled in, for your conscious inspection. In short, memory is very, very, very faulty and is based upon the storytelling functions of the brain!!!! (And what are we except our memories? I am that boy in the Dr. Dentons, in my memory, sitting before the TV with the rabbit ears; I am that teenager in the car at the Drive-in with the girl whom I never thought in a million years would actually go out with me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

You can also see this storytelling function of the brain at work in dreaming. Years ago, I had a dream that I was flying into the island of Cuba on a little prop plane. Through the window, I could see the island below the plane. It looked like a big, white sheet cake, floating in an emerald sea. Next to me on the airplane sat a big, red orangutan smoking a cigar.

Weird, huh? So why did I have that dream? Well, in the days preceding the dream I had read a newspaper story about Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba, being ill; I had flown on a small prop plane; I had attended a wedding where there was a big, white sheet cake; I had been to the zoo, where I saw an orangutan; and I had played golf with some friends, and we had smoked cigars.

The neural circuits in my brain that had recorded these bits and pieces were firing randomly in my sleeping brain, and the part of the brain that does storytelling was working hard, trying to piece these random fragments together into a coherent, unified story. That’s the most plausible current explanation of why most dreams occur. The storytelling parts of the brain are responding to random inputs and tying them together—making sense of this random input by making a plausible story of them. This is akin to the process, pareidolia, that leads people see angels in cloud formations and pictures of Jesus on their toast.

So, those are three important reasons why the brain is set up as a storytelling device. Storytelling allows us to see a complete visual field; creates for us, from incomplete data, coherent memories; and ties together random neural firings in our brains to into the wholes that we call dreams.
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But that’s not all that storytelling does for us. Storytelling about the future allows us to look ahead—for example, to determine what another creature is going to do. We often play scenarios in our minds that involve possible futures. What will she say if I ask her to the prom? What will the boss say if I ask for a raise? How will that go down? In other words, storytelling provides us with a THEORY OF MIND for predicting others’ behavior.

Stories also help people to connect to one another. When we tell others a story, we literally attune to them. We actually get “on the same wavelengths.” Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton, recorded the brainwaves of people during rest and while listening to a story. During rest, their waves were all over the place. While listening to the same story, even at different times and places, those people had brainwaves that were in synch.

Storytelling also provides a mechanism for exploring and attempting to understand others generally. Our basic situation in life is that your mind is over there and mine is over here. We’re different, and we have to try to figure each other out—to have a theory of other people’s minds. By telling myself a story about you, I can attempt to bridge that ontological gap. Unfortunately, the stories we tell ourselves about others tend to be fairly unidimensional. You are simply this or that. I, on the other hand, am an international man of mystery. This is a tendency we need to guard against.

We also tell stories in order to influence others’ behavior–to get them to adopt the story we’re telling as their own. This is how advertising works, for example. The advertiser gets you to believe a story about how you will be sexier or smarter or prettier or more successful or of higher status if you just buy the product with the new, fresh lemony scent. And it’s not just advertisers who do this. The coach tells a story in which her team envisions itself as the winners of the Big Game. The woo-er tells the woo-ee the story of the great life they will have together (“Come live with me and be my love/And we shall all the pleasures prove”). And so on. Successful cult leaders, coaches, lovers, entrepreneurs, attorneys, politicians, religious leaders, marketers, etc., all share this is common: they know that persuasion is storytelling. The best of them also understand that the most successful stories, in the long run, are ones that are true, even if they are fictional.

When we tell stories, we spin possible futures—we try things on, hypothetically. And that helps us to develop ideas about who we want to be and what we want to do. Gee, if I travel down that road, I may end up in this better place.

And that observation leads to one final, supremely important function of storytelling: Who you are—your very SELF—is a story that you tell yourself about yourself and your history and your relations to others—a story with you as the main character. The stories you tell yourself about yourself become the person you are. The word person, by the way, comes from the Latin persona, for a mask worn by an actor in the Roman theatre.

So, our very idea of ourselves, of our own personal identity, is dependent upon this storytelling capacity of the human brain, which takes place, for the most part, automatically. There is even a new form of psychotherapy called cognitive narrative therapy that is all about teaching people to tell themselves more life-enhancing, affirmative stories about themselves, about who they are.

Telling yourself the right kinds of stories about yourself and others can unlock your creative potential, improve your relationships, and help you to self create—to be the person you want to be.

So, to recapitulate, storytelling . . .

helps us to fill in the gaps so that we have coherent memories,

ties together random firings in the brain into coherent dreams,

enables us to sort and make sense of past experience,

gives us theories of what others think and how they will behave,

enables us to influence others’ behavior,

enables us to try on various futures, and

helps us to form a personal identity, a sense of who were are.

Kinda important, all that!

Storytelling, in fact, is key to being human. It’s our defining characteristic. It’s deeply embedded in our brains. It runs through every aspect of our lives. It makes us who we are.

It’s no wonder then, that people throughout history have told stories. People are made to construct stories—plausible and engaging accounts of things—the way a stapler is made to staple and a hammer is made to hammer. We are Homo relator, man the storyteller.

(BTW, the root *man, meaning “human being” in general, without a specific gender reference, is ancient. It goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, but there’s still good reason, today, to seek out gender-neutral alternatives, when possible, of course.)

Copyright 2015. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved.

Art: Detail from the Gundestrup Cauldron. Nationalmuseet [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)]

For more pieces by Bob Shepherd on the topic of Education “Reform,” go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/

For more pieces on the teaching of literature and writing, go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/teaching-literature-and-writing/

It’s about Time (a Catena)

  

A brief tour of fascinating (and lunatic) notions that philosophers (and a few poets) have had about time. 

The Mystery of Time

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.”

–St. Augustine (345–430 CE), Confessions

PART 1: What Is Time? Types of Time

Absolute or Scientific Newtonian Time

“Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration.”

–Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)

The Specious (Nonexistent) Present

“The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past — a recent past — delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. [Each of] all the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the [specious] present. [Each of] all the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the [specious] present. At the instant of the termination of [each element in] such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be [an obvious] past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three . . . nonentities — the [obvious] past, which does not [really] exist, the future, which does not [yet] exist, and their conterminous, the [specious] present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present.”

–E. Robert Kelley, from The Alternative, a Study in Psychology (1882). Kelley’s concept of the specious present has been extremely influential in both Continental and Anglo-American philosophy despite the fact that Kelley was not a professional philosopher.

Subjective Time

“Oh, yeah. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I never finished it, though I did spent about a year with it one evening.”

Experienced Time: The “Wide” Present

“In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation or succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and forming the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it.”

–William James, “The Perception of Time,” from The Principles of Psychology, Book I

A, B, and C Series Time (Three Ways of Looking at Time)

• The A Series: Time as Past, Present, and Future
• The B Series: Time as Earlier, Simultaneous, and Later
• The C Series: Time as an Ordered Relation of Events (with the direction being irrelevant)

Influential distinctions made by John Ellis McTaggart in “The Unreality of Time.” Mind 17 (1908): 456-476. The three types are much discussed by philosophers in the Anglo-American analytic tradition.

See also The Unreality of Time 2: Block Time, below

PART 2: Does Time Exist?

No, It Doesn’t: Change Is a Self-Contradictory Idea

“For this view can never predominate, that that which IS NOT exists. You must debar your thought from this way of search. . . .There is only one other description of the way remaining, namely, that what IS, is. To this way there are very many signposts: that Being has no coming-into-being . . . . Nor shall I allow you to speak or think of it as springing from not-being; for it is neither expressive nor thinkable that what-is-not is. . . . How could Being perish? How could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; and so too if it is about-to-be at some future time. . . .For nothing else either is or shall be except Being, since Fate has tied it down to be a whole and motionless; therefore all things that mortals have established, believing in their truth, are just a name: Becoming and Perishing, Being and Not-Being, and Change of position, and alteration of bright color.”

–Parmenides of Elea (c. 475 BCE), fragment from The Way of Truth, in Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, ed. Kathleen Freeman

“Does the arrow move when the archer shoots it at the target? If there is a reality of space, the arrow must at all times occupy a particular position in space on its way to the target. But for an arrow to occupy a position in space that is equal to its length is precisely what is meant when one says that the arrow is at rest. Since the arrow must always occupy such a position on its trajectory which is equal to its length, the arrow must be always at rest. Therefore, motion is an illusion.”

–Zeno of Elea (c. 450 BCE), fragment from Epicheriemata (Attacks), in Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, ed. Kathleen Freeman

“One part of time has been [the past] and is not, while the other is going to be and is not yet [the future]. Yet time, both infinite time and any time you care to take, is made up of these. One would naturally suppose that what is made up of things which do not exist could have no share in reality.”

–Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Physics, IV, 10–14. 217b-244a.

Yes, It Does: Change Is the Fundamental Reality of Our Lives

“It is not possible to step twice into the same river.”

–Heraclitus, (c. 475 BCE), fragment from unnamed book, in Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, ed. Kathleen Freeman

[Heraclitus seems to have held this fact to be one of many indications of the essential unworthiness/irredeemability of this life; the other fragments of his writings that have survived suggest that Heraclitus was a kind of 5^th century fundamentalist preacher, upset about the moral decay around him, who viewed the world as synonymous with decay, and who wanted to point his readers, instead, toward the eternal Logos. Plato inherited this view; the Christian church inherited Plato’s. Such contemptu mundi (contempt for the world) is often, in that tradition, expressed as contempt for that which exists “in time” and is not eternal.]

“Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

–Woody Allen (1935–      )

No, It Doesn’t: Time is an Illusion Due to Vantage Point in an Eternal Space Time (the “Block Time” Hypothesis):

“Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing, for we physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”

–Albert Einstein (1879­–1955), in a letter written to the family of Michele Besso, on Besso’s death

“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007), who is in heaven now, Slaughterhouse Five

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

–T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), “Burt Norton,” from Four Quartets

No, It Doesn’t: The Now as Consequence of the Blindness of the Brain to Its Own Processing of Temporal Data (the “Blind Brain” Hypothesis)

“Nothing, I think, illustrates this forced magic quite like the experiential present, the Now. Recall what we discussed earlier regarding the visual field. Although it’s true that you can never explicitly ‘see the limits of seeing’–no matter how fast you move your head–those limits are nonetheless a central structural feature of seeing. The way your visual field simply ‘runs out’ without edge or demarcation is implicit in all seeing–and, I suspect, without the benefit of any ‘visual run off’ circuits. Your field of vision simply hangs in a kind of blindness you cannot see.

“This, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests, is what the now is: a temporal analogue to the edgelessness of vision, an implicit structural artifact of the way our ‘temporal field’–what James called the ‘specious present’–hangs in a kind temporal hyper-blindness. Time passes in experience, sure, but thanks to the information horizon of the thalamocortical system, experience itself stands still, and with nary a neural circuit to send a Christmas card to. There is time in experience, but no time of experience. The same way seeing relies on secondary systems to stitch our keyhole glimpses into a visual world, timing relies on things like narrative and long term memory to situate our present within a greater temporal context.

“Given the Blind Brain Hypothesis, you would expect the thalamocortical system to track time against a background of temporal oblivion. You would expect something like the Now. Perhaps this is why, no matter where we find ourselves on the line of history, we always stand at the beginning. Thus the paradoxical structure of sayings like, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” We’re not simply running on hamster wheels, we are hamster wheels, traveling lifetimes without moving at all.

“Which is to say that the Blind Brain Hypothesis offers possible theoretical purchase on the apparent absurdity of conscious existence, the way a life of differences can be crammed into a singular moment.”

–Scott Bakker, “The End of the World As We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse”

PART 3: What Contemplation of Time Teaches Us about Living

Carpe Diem

“Such,” he said, “O King, seems to me the present life of men on Earth, in comparison with that time which to us is uncertain, as if when on a winter’s night, you sit feasting . . . and a simple sparrow should fly into the hall, and coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another. In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of winter; but yet, this smallest space of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to our eyes.

“Something like this appears the life of man, but of what follows or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.”

–The Venerable Bede (c. 672–735), Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book II

“Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.”

–Horace (65–8 BCE), Odes 1.11

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), “Rubiyat,” trans. Edward FitzGerald

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

–Robert Herrick (1591–1674), “To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time”

But at my back I alwaies hear
Times winged Charriot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lye
Desarts of vast Eternity.
Thy Beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound
My ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try
That long preserv’d Virginity:
And your quaint Honour turn to durst;
And into ashes all my Lust.
The Grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning glew,
And while thy willing Soul transpires
At every pore with instant Fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow’r.
Let us roll all our Strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one Ball:
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the Iron gates of Life.
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

–Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), “To His Coy Mistress”

“Get it while you can.
Don’t you turn your back on love.”

–The American philosopher Janis Joplin (1943–1970)

Give Up/It’s All Futile Anyway

“A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands of years of nonexistence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.

“Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it is; for ever after, that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a day. It might, perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span of time ebbs away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our being we are secretly conscious of our share in the exhaustible spring of eternity, so that we can always hope to find life in it again.

“Consideration of the kind, touched on above, might, indeed, lead us to embrace the belief that the greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.”

–The ever-cheerful Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), “The Vanity of Existence,” from Studies in Pessimism

Three Phenomenologist/Existentialist Views of Time

NB: the following are NOT quotations. I’ve summarized material that appears in much longer works. You’re welcome. I have included Husserl in this section, even though his work is just an attempted explanation of time, because the other two philosophers treated here are reacting to Husserl’s ideas.

Husserl (very bright dude, this one): All our ideas about time spring from our conscious experience of the present. That experience is characterized by being intentional, by being toward something. We typically recognize three kinds of time: 1. scientific, objective, Newtonian time, which we think of as being independent of ourselves and as independently verifiable; 2. subjective time, in which events seem to move slower or faster; and 3. phenomenological or intentional time, which is the fundamental experience on which the other concepts of time are based, from which the other concepts derive because the phenomenological present includes not only awareness of present phenomena (the present), but retention (awareness of that which is not present because it no longer is—the past), and protention (awareness of that which is not present because it is about to be). The present is intentionality toward phenomena before us here, now. The past is present intentionality toward phenomena that are not present but are with us and so must be past (that’s where the definition of past comes from). The future is present intentionality toward phenomena that also are present but are not with us (as the past is) and so must be the future, which will be (that’s where the definition of future comes from). Therefore, in their origins in our phenomenological experiences, the future and the past are parts of the present, conceptual phenomena held in the present, alongside actual phenomena, as phenomena no longer present and not yet present.

Heidegger: Husserl had it all wrong. It’s the future, not the present, that is fundamental. We are future-oriented temporalities by nature, essentially so. Our particular type of being, Dasein, or being-there, is characterized by having care (about its projects, its current conditions, about other beings)—about matters as they relate to those projects. Our being is characterized by understanding, thrownness, and fallenness. Understanding, is the most fundamental of the three. It is projection toward the future, comportment toward the possibilities that present themselves, potentiality for being. Our understanding seizes upon projects, projecting itself on various possibilities. In its thrownness, Dasein always finds itself in a certain spiritual and material, historically conditioned environment that limits the space of those possibilities. As fallenness, Dasein finds itself among other beings, some of which are also Dasein and some of which (e.g., rocks) are not Dasein, and it has, generally respectively, “being-with” them or “being alongside” them, and these help to define what possibilities there are.  “Our sort of being (Dasein) is being for which being is an issue.” Why is it an issue? Well, we are finite. We know that we are going to die. This is the undercurrent that informs our essential being, which is care, concern. We are projections toward the future because undertaking these projects is an attempt, however quixotic, to distract ourselves from or even to cheat death. We care about our projects because, at some level, we care about not dying, having this projection toward the future for which we are living.

Sartre: The world is divided into two kinds of being: being-for-itself (the kind of being that you and I have) and being-in-itself (the kind of being that a rock or a refrigerator has). Let’s think a bit about our kind of being. Take away your perceptions, your body, your thoughts. Strip everything away, and you still have pure being, the being of the being-for-itself, but it is a being that is also nothing. (The Buddha thought this, too). Being-for-itself has intentional objects, but itself is no object (there’s no there there) and so is nothing, a nothingness. Time is like being in that respect. It consists entirely of the past (which doesn’t exist) and the future (which doesn’t exist) and the present (which is infinitesimally small and so doesn’t exist). So time, like being, is a nothingness. This being-for-itself is not just nothingness, however; it has some other bizarre, contradictory characteristics: Its being, though nothing, allows a world to be manifest (how this is so is unclear), a world that includes all this stuff, including others, for example, who want to objectify the being-for-itself, to make it into a something, a thing, a being-in-itself, like a rock. (“Oh, I know you. I’m wise to you. You’re . . . .” whatever.) The being-for-itself also has a present past (in Husserl’s sense) and is subject to certain conditions of material construction (the body) and material conditions (in an environment of things), and all these givens—the body, the environment, one’s own past, and other people seen from the outside in their thinginess—make up the being-for-itself’s facticity. The being-for-itself wants to be SOMETHING, and so lies to itself. It acts in bad faith, playing various roles (playing at being a waiter, for example) and creating for itself an ego (via self-deceptive, magical thinking). But in fact, being in reality nothing, being-for-itself (each of us) knows that that’s all a lie. We transcend our facticity and can be anything whatsoever, act in any way whatsoever. In other words, we are absolutely free and therefore absolutely responsible. This responsibility is absurd, because there is no reason for being/doing any particular thing. “Man is a meaningless passion.” But the absolute freedom that derives from our essential nothingness also allows for action to be truly authentic (as opposed to the play-acting) in addition to being responsible. Only in death does the being-for-itself succeed in becoming a being-in-itself, a completed thing, and then only if and in the manner in which he or she is remembered by others. A person who is not remembered never existed. Death is a time stamp or, if we are not remembered, an expiration date.

The Eternal Return and the Weight of Being

“341. The Greatest Weight. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’

“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

–Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), The Gay Science

The Fleeting One-Offness of Everything and the Resulting Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But Nietzsche’s demon is, of course, wrong. There is no eternal return. Where does that leave us? Isn’t life ALWAYS a matter of I should have’s and I would have’s and if I had only knowns? “[W]hat happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. . . .

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

–Milan Kundera (1929­–     ), contra Nietzsche, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Copyright 2010, Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved.

Dog Conspiracy Theories

Teacher Evaluation Session Stream of Consciousness Rant

Reprising this piece about the godawful evaluation schemes foisted on our schools by the Education Deformer Standards-and-Testing regime.

OK, you are sitting in your year-end evaluation session, the freaking EIGHTH such session you’ve had this year, as though you had nothing better to do, and you’ve heard from every other teacher in your school that his or her scores were a full level lower this year than last, and so you know that the district office has leaned on the principal to give fewer exemplary ratings even though your school actually doesn’t have a problem with its test scores and people are doing what they did last year but a bit better, of course, because one grows each year as a teacher–one refines what one did before, and one never stops learning.

But you know that this ritual doesn’t have anything, really, to do with improvement. It has to do with everyone, all along the line, covering his or her tushy and playing the game and doing exactly what he or she is told, going all the way back to Bill Gates, who, being a God, evaluates but is not evaluated, who did stack ranking at Microsoft because, admit it, he was probably on the spectrum and didn’t know better and, since behaving in this appalling way made him incredibly wealthy, it must be right, huh? And, at any rate, everyone except the politicians and those paid to think otherwise knows that the tests in ELA are not actually valid or reliable and that’s not really the issue at your school because, the scores are pretty good because this is a suburban school with affluent parents, and the kids always, year after year, do quite well.

So whether the kids are learning isn’t really the issue. The issue is that by means of the latest magic formula pushed by the district and some InstaEduPundit, each cohort of kids is supposed to perform better than the last–significantly better–on the tests, though they come into your classes in exactly the same shape they’ve always come into them in because, you know, they are kids and they are just learning and teaching ISN’T magic. It’s a lot of hard work. It’s magical, sometimes, but its’ not magic.

So, the stuff you’ve been told to do in your “trainings” (“Bark. Roll over. Sit. Good Boy”) is pretty transparently teaching-to-the-test because some people, astonishingly, continue to believe, after years of evidence to the contrary, that that’s a way that one might actually meet the insane demand that each cohort will be magically superior to the last, but you feel in your heart of hearts that caving to this idiocy, this crowd madness, would be JUST WRONG, that it would short-change your students to start teaching InstaWriting-for-the Test, Grade 5, instead of, say, teaching writing. And despite all the demeaning crap you are subjected to, you still give a damn.

And you sit there and you actually feel sorry for this principal because she, too, is squirming like a fly in treacle in the muck that is Education Deform, and she knows she has fantastic teachers who knock it out of the park year after year, but her life has become a living hell of accountability reports and data chats to the point that she doesn’t have time for anything else anymore (she has said this many times), and now she has to sit there and tell her amazing veteran teachers who have worked so hard all these years and who care so much and give so much and know so freaking much that they are just satisfactory, and she feels like hell doing this and is wondering when she can retire.
And the fact that you BOTH know this hangs there in the room–the big, ugly, unspoken thing. And the politicians and the plutocrats and the mendacious twits at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and that smarmy know-nothing David Coleman and the Secretary of the Department for the Privatization of Education, formerly the USDE, and the Vichy education guru collaborators with these people barrel ahead, like so many drunks in a car plowing through a crowd of pedestrians.

Ten Reasons to Hire the “Old” Person | Bob Shepherd

This I wrote many years ago. As true today as it was then.

The recession doubtless hit older workers hardest. Hundreds of thousands have seen their savings and equity disappear. So much for retirement. Their only choice? Jump back into the water and swim hard. Unfortunately, there is toxic pollution in that water: systemic age discrimination.

Officially, of course, age discrimination is illegal, but everyone knows that people hire those who are like themselves. A manager in his or her 30s or 40s often simply assumes that the job applicant in his or her 50s or 60s or 70s will have less-than-current skills, will lack energy and drive, will suffer from ill health, won’t take a job at lower pay, and won’t take direction from a younger manager. Nonsense. Each of these assumptions is dangerously false.

Here are ten good reasons why you should give that older applicant an equal shot. You won’t find these in your company’s Human Resources guidelines, but if you keep these in mind when hiring, you will be glad you did.

Reason 10: Older workers aren’t as old as they used to be.
Fifty is the new forty. 60-year-olds of today will now live into their late 80s, on average, and will be productive for most of that time. That 55-year-old applicant has at least 10 of his or her best work years left and will be adding value when most of your younger workers are gone.

Reason 9: Older workers are highly motivated to succeed.

If someone 50 or older is applying for a job with you, it’s because he or she needs it enough to take it seriously. A younger worker can chuck it all and move along to the next thing. The older worker is more likely to think, “There’s no time to mess around here. I have to make this work.”

Reason 8: Older workers can and will mentor others.

Older workers love sharing what they know, and as they do that, the level of knowledge and ability in your company will show increases that no training program can buy.

Reason 7: Older workers have broad skill sets.

No resume or job interview comes remotely close to capturing all the older worker knows. The little things he or she has learned about your industry over the years and the consequent instincts and rules of thumb he or she has acquired—will often make the difference in whether an initiative succeeds or fails.

Reason 6: Older workers don’t need complicated support systems.

Because of his or her broad skill set, the older worker is often able to pick up the slack from others and get the job done on time and under budget. In this age of specialization, having someone around who can do the job soup to nuts often makes the difference in whether the job gets done at all.

Reason 5: Older workers have fewer personal distractions.

You know.

Reason 4: Older workers have a sense of humor.

They’ve seen it before, have learned to take it in stride, and can laugh about it. They’re not going to run off to HR the first time you forget to fawn over their precious report.

Reason 3: Older workers have a strong work ethic.

They didn’t grow up with video game systems that appeared in their rooms as if by magic, and they don’t have the game-induced attention spans of methamphetamine addicts.

Reason 2: Older workers understand what makes others tick.

Companies and markets are made up of people, remember? People are complicated. Understanding them takes a lot of “in and outdoor schooling,” as Robert Frost put it. Older workers have that second kind of schooling. They’re less self-absorbed and self-obsessed and so better able to find that “win-win.”

Reason 1: Older workers are a mirror.

Look across that desk. That’s you in 15 years.

#End#

Selected Poems | Bob Shepherd

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The Unintended Consequences of Education “Reform”

Years ago, I was a member of a loose affiliation of business consultants concerned about new technologies, The Sociotechnical Systems Design Group. The driving force behind the work of this group of brilliant consultants was recognition that new technologies often bring with them a lot of unforeseen, unintended, negative consequences. Consider, as an example, Customer Resource Management (CRM) programs. These are software packages that keep tabs on salespeople’s interactions with and knowledge gathered about customers. The software makes this information available to senior managers. Here’s an unintended problem with that: for a long, long time, salespeople have kept a little black book containing their notes about customers—names, titles, number of children, children’s names and ages, wife’s name, hobbies, interests, pet peeves, hot buttons, comments about products, wishes, ambitions, and so on. Over time, this annotated list of contacts would become the salesperson’s most valuable possession—the distillation of his or her life’s work—and, importantly, WHAT MADE THE SALESPERSON VALUABLE. And the last thing a salesperson wanted to do was TO GIVE THAT AWAY. And so, salespeople resisted CRM, often withheld information from these systems, and often put in bad information, which led to garbage in, garbage out. Here’s another example: years ago, I was managing a large team of editors, designers, and freelancers in an educational publishing house. My projects, and I typically had several of them going at once, were complex, with lots of parts. I learned about GANTT and PERT charts—project management software—which promised to keep minute track of these parts and to help me identify and address slippages and bottlenecks and keep track of project component costs and, importantly, budget overruns.  And these programs WORKED BEAUTIFULLY. I soon found, however, that I was spending so much time working on my charts that I was missing important stuff going on with my staff—and a business is, of course, its people. So, I put the project management software away and went back to what folks in business call “Management by Walking Around.” Unintended consequences, aka, the unknown unknowns.

The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] (CC$$) were first announced in June of 2009. They were common only in the sense of being vulgar. They did not spell out the core of English language arts, which is knowledge, but rather were an almost completely content-free skills list. They were not developed by the states but by a group of individuals whose work was funded by Bill Gates, who saw the Core as a single set of national standards to which educational software products could be correlated and then “sold at scale.” At scale. You know, monopolistically. Because in ELA the CC$$ are simply a skills list and in Math they contain a lot of developmentally inappropriate stuff in the early grades and are no improvement on the preceding standards from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, one cannot with a straight face, I think, call these “standards,” which implies high goals one might seek to achieve.

The new “standards” were announced with much fanfare (and a lot of financial pressure to adopt them), and part of the initial messaging, incorporated into notes attached to the “standards” and into a series of speeches given by self-styled Common Core “architect” David Coleman, whom Gates had appointed the decider for the rest of us, was a call for a “return” to reading classic, substantive works of literature from the canons of American and world literatures, including plays by Shakespeare, excerpts from the Bible, and foundational works in American history like the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. Coleman was PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT of K-12 education in the United States. He didn’t seem to know that ALMOST EVERY SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY, with very, very few exceptions, was using a hardbound literature anthology at each grade level, such as McDougal, Littell Literature or Prentice Hall Literature or The EMC Masterpiece Series, that contained—guess what?— classic, substantive works of literature from the canons of American and world literatures, including plays by Shakespeare, excerpts from the Bible, and foundational works in American history like the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. What an incompetent idiot! (For this idiocy and incompetence, Coleman was awarded the presidency of the College Board.) Furthermore, Coleman had no clue that throughout the U.S., in almost every high school, foundational works of American literature were taught in an 11-grade American Literature survey course that ran concurrently and was often taught in conjunction with an 11^th-grade American History course. The 12^th grade was usually reserved for a British literature survey course (though some schools chose to do a world literature course at this level, instead). No, Coleman, ignorant of the domain he was placed in charge of by Billy Gates, put into his “standards” a call for foundational works of American literature AT BOTH GRADES 11 and 12, which resulted in a weird phenomenon—publishers adding a smattering of American literature to their British literature anthologies. Weird.

Here’s an important thing about the Gates/Coleman “standards” bullet list: though it has tacked onto it this call for reading substantive literary works, the bullet list itself consists ALMOST ENTIRELY of very broad, very vague skills items—e.g., the student will make inferences based on texts. In other words, the list is almost entirely knowledge-and-content free, even though mastery in the English language arts involves acquiring an enormous amount of domain knowledge!!!!

How did that happen? Well, Coleman and crew, being incompetent, mostly just copied existing egregious state “standards” that had the same problem and tweaked those. HOWEVER, and here’s the HUGE ISSUE that these “standards” created: now that they were national, they did have the effect that Bill Gates was aiming for of leading to products based on the standards that were sold “at scale,” including a lot of online instructional products so bad that students would prefer having all the hair on their bodies plucked out by tweezers to having to do the next lesson in these. And because students in every state had to take high-stakes tests based on these national “standards,” being able to answer these skills questions on the standards became all important.

And that’s where the unintended consequences come in: these almost entirely content and knowledge free “standards” have led, in ELA, to a vast devolution of ELA curricula and pedagogy into random exercises on random “standards” from the Gates/Coleman bullet list. Where before, a publisher would put together coherent units of study of substantive work—units on the Elements of the Short Story or on Transcendentalist Literature, for example—now, even if such names of units are retained—the actual content becomes random exercises on random skills from the list. I call this the “Monty Python “And Now for Something Completely Different” Approach to ELA Instruction.” The actual consequence of the Gates/Coleman bullet list has been the end of coherent, cumulative, substantive ELA curricula and pedagogy.

And so an entire generation of students has been ROBBED of coherent, cumulative, substantive knowledge-based instruction in ELA.

Unintended consequences.

Copyright 2024. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved. This essay may be reprinted and shared freely as long as this copyright notice is retained. Please do reprint and share it. Thanks.

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NB: The opening call by Coleman for reading “substantive works of literature from the canon” led E.D. Hirsch, Jr., author of Cultural Literacy and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, to embrace the Core INITIALLY. He soon, however, repented of this when he recognized that the Common Core was basically a list of vague, untestable skills like the egregious state standards that preceded it. This was confirmed to me in private correspondence with Hirsch, and he then wrote about his disenchantment with the Core in various places. So, if you read somewhere that Hirsch was a fan of the Coring of American education, bear this in mind.

For more on Education “Reform,” go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/

Whence Witches: a Brief Backgrounder

I have a friend whose father is an earnest, conservative Catholic. She tells me that if her father saw a Wicca artifact or symbol in her house, he would disown her because Wicca is Satanism. It’s not. His opinion is based on—nothing. On airy nothing. But like many opinions with no warrant whatsoever, this one is held strongly. LOL.

So, if I were to try to explain the contemporary witchcraft phenomenon to him, I would have to back up quite a bit. But even then, even if I could hold his attention, explaining this to him would be almost impossible because the explanations would, for him, need explanation, and he would be predisposed not to accept much of what I would say. Nonetheless, here is the outline of a response to him:

People who live in a time of Door Dash and supermarkets and electric lights typically don’t grok that for almost all of human history, we were intimately tied to the land and to the cycles of the seasons because we fed ourselves via foraging and hunting and then via hunting, cultivation of crops, and animal husbandry (herding or the keeping of domesticated stock). Hunting wasn’t, for most people, a primary source of sustenance. Modern studies of hunter gatherers have shown that typically not much of their calorie intake comes from that source, and hunting consumes almost as many calories as it produces. So, foraging, crop cultivation, and animal husbandry were the biggies. All are dependent upon seasonal cycles.

I recently started growing tomatoes and peppers in containers (grow bags) on my patio. As I am writing this, I have about fifty seedlings in cups in trays. Here’s how weather works in Florida in the Summer: the prevailing winds are East to West. Ocean water, heated by the sun, evaporates, and wind drives it West, where it cools and then drops as torrential but brief late afternoon rain. I have to make sure that I get those seedlings inside before one of those brief-but-heavy storms, or they will be destroyed. So, I’ve started having to pay close attention to the weather. For most of human history, this “having to pay close attention” to nature was literally a matter of life or death. If you planted before the last killing frost or failed to give your field proper drainage before the rainy season started, then you and those you cared about would starve to death. The prospect of dying is highly motivating. LOL.

At the same time, if you were a farmer during those thousands and thousands of years before the modern era (almost everyone was), you were pretty ignorant about how the world worked. And so you made up explanatory stories (pourquoi stories, they are called). Almost every ancient culture worldwide had a central mythology that involved an Earth goddess (often associated with the moon because of the 28-day lunar cycle) and a fertility god (often associated with the Sun). And in this mythology, the life cycles of these gods were associated with the changing seasons, from their union at the Spring Equinox to the death and rebirth of the goddess’s consort at the Winter Solstice. And almost every culture had festivals related to that seasonal cycle. A great introduction to these ancient pagan fertility religions can be found in Sir James George Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Highly, highly recommended. Endlessly fascinating.

In 325, the newly converted Emperor Constantine made Christianity one of the official religions of the Roman Empire (along with the worship of Sol Invictus), and because he was tired of the warring Christian factions in the streets, he called a synod to establish an official doctrine for his new Church. In the centuries that followed, this early Church ruthlessly hunted down heretics (followers of competing brands of Christianity, and there were literally hundreds of these) and pagans (followers of those almost universal seasonal cycles-based religions). And where they found them, they killed them or forced them to convert. And, as part of its campaign against other religions, the Church portrayed those pagan seasonal fertility cycle religions as devil worshipping. In Europe, the male fertility god of the pagans (Cernunnos would be an example) was commonly pictured with antlers. This portrayal one sees, for example, on the ancient Danish Gundestrup Cauldron. These antlers became, in the Christian retelling, the horns of the Devil, and the male fertility god became the Devil himself. The ancient Scandinavian Earth goddess Nerthus became, in the Christian retelling, the beastly mother of the beastly Grendel, descended from Cain. On May 4^th, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a bull, Inter caetera, giving Christian conquerors the right to seize land belonging to pagans, who were styled “savages.” The Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas, in his book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indes, tells how the Spanish entirely wiped out the Arawak people of the West Indies, including an account of how, to celebrate Easter, they hanged Indians alive and upside down by their feet and then tortured them by flaying—thirteen of them in all on this occasion, one for Christ and twelve more for each of the disciples. The Massachusetts Bay Colony clergyman Cotton Mather, in his Wonders of the Invisible World, describes the New World as populated by savage Satan worshippers and the plague of witchcraft in the colonies as due to Satan being furious at the colony for trying to establish Christianity in his territories.

Long before the invention of Christianity, ancient peoples had medicine men or women, aka shamans, who communed with and called upon spirits and practiced herbal and spiritual cures. This was witchcraft in its original sense and as it is sometimes practiced in remote parts of the world yet today. In its war against paganism, the official Christian Church, established by Constantine, REDEFINED these traditional practices, traditional witchcraft, as Satanism. In other words, traditional seasonal-religion-based shamanistic practice was renamed “witchcraft” and redefined as activity in service of the Evil One. And ironically, as part of its propaganda against pagan practices, the Church adopted in its legal charges against practitioners of pagan religion THE EXACT LANGUAGE once used, in ancient Roman legal documents, to persecute Christians—accusing them of holding naked rituals in the forest, of eating babies, of fornicating with evil spirits, of riding through the air, and so on. All this is documented in a fascinating book by historian Norman Cohn entitled Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt.  Highly recommended.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a great time for experiments in New Religions in both Great Britain and the United States. Many, many were the fascinating religious experiments from the period. I’ll do a post on these one day. Among these, there were several folks (among them Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, and Aleister Crowley) who rediscovered (but barely understood) ancient pagan, pre-Christian religious practices and implemented these in New Religions claiming to be the Old (pagan/pre-Christian) Religion—Wicca and Thelema. Wicca, like ancient European pagan seasonal-fertility-based religion, celebrates the relations of an Earth mother and her consort over a cycle of seasonal festivals. It’s all about stewardship of the Earth and gratitude for her bounty. It has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Satanism.

Respect your mother. JAI MA!

Now, here’s the thing: If you don’t read, you won’t know the backstory of anything. And by read, I DO NOT MEAN surfing random articles on the Internet. I mean, if you don’t read substantive books about substantive topics ROUTINELY, throughout your life. Only by doing that will you know the backstories and so understand what and how things are and how they got to be that way. In other words, if you don’t read, you will have opinions, but they will be based on NOTHING MUCH. They will be profoundly ignorant, uninformed opinions.

But here’s the thing about such opinions, as Donald Trump so clearly exemplifies: you don’t know what you don’t know; so, profoundly ignorant people tend to be extremely certain about their uninformed, ignorant opinions. And, it’s very difficult to persuade them otherwise, because the only way to do that is to try to give them, in a short compass, the backstories that they would have gotten had they been readers, and usually, being nonreaders, they haven’t the patience for that, just as they haven’t the patience (or self-discipline) for reading.

This saddens me greatly. And it has been a source of sadness for me for most of my life. I’m a reader, and so much of what I say goes—whoosh—over the heads of those who are not themselves readers. And often they think that they know more than I do about x because they once saw a comment about this topic by some random person on Quora or Discord or TikTok or whatever.

I have been making some dents in my ignorance, but it is still, alas, vast.

Readings this post was based on:

Pope Alexander VI. Inter caeterna.

de las Casas, Bartolome. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indes.

Cohn, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough.

Mather, Cotton. Wonders of the Invisible World.

For further reading: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/charge-of-the-goddess-for-beltane/

The Best Tea for Cold Brews

I generally try to avoid superlatives, but . . .

Baihao Yinzhen, pronounced BAI how yen tzen, aka White Silver Needle, is a white tea grown in China’s Fujian Province. This highly sought-after tea is the costliest of the white teas because only the top buds of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) are used to produce it.

To my taste, it makes the best cold brew iced tea of the many hundreds of varieties of tea that I have tried. I try to keep a bottle of cold brew White Silver Needle in the fridge at all times. It is quite delicate and immensely flavorful and delicious, without any of the astringency or bitterness that one sometimes gets with tea, and it has this beautiful green color, as you can see in the photo.

The name of the tea comes from the fact that it is plucked after the first growth of tea buds, while the tea leaves still have the tiny, tiny, tiny white hairs that give them their silvery color and the tea its name. The tea looks needle-shaped because the leaves are rolled by hand (between the palms) and then dried. A superb fermented pu-erh is also made from this tea, which I order from China in tea cakes and drink after having prepared it with less than boiling water, a short infusion time, and multiple infusions of the same leaves.

Tools: Part 1 | Bob Shepherd

My daughter says that my apartment looks like a hoarder’s. It is, emphatically, not as bad as that. There are no piles of garbage. LOL. But there is a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. I think of it as my tiny home. Available space is maximized, and everything is in its proper place.

This is a secret I learned long ago. If you put your keys down in the same place every time you enter your house, then they will never be lost.

It’s shocking, really, how much stuff I have managed to arrange neatly, comfortably, and accessibly in a small space. My female companion at any given time throughout my life would look at the trunk of the car that she was helping pack for a weekend trip and say, “No more will go in.” And I would rearrange things, and a lot more would go in. I was always good at this.

So, why so much stuff in my place? Well, I moved from a full-scale house to an apartment, and I took a lot of stuff with me. And for good reason. First, many of the things I have are precious to me—the artwork and books I have collected over the years, for example, and personal and family mementos. Second, I keep things that I use. My books, for reference and study. My tools, for crafting things.

Young people today often don’t have a lot of kitchen gadgets and other tools because they don’t make things from scratch. They don’t make guitars and doll houses for the grandchildren, so they don’t have a micrometer and a Japanese saw and a dead blow hammer. They don’t make sauerkraut from scratch, so they don’t have fermentation jars and a muddler. This is a great pity. Some things that are important are almost lost because of people’s tendency, now, to go store-boughten instead of DIY. Quality, for example, and a lot of personal satisfaction at having done a job well. Almost lost, I said, but only almost. I am pleased to say that whatever your crafts (if you don’t some, get them), there are thriving communities devoted to them online, and some of those communards are young. May all the gods bless them and their endeavors.

I continually bug my younger friends about this. “Don’t freaking spend eight dollars for a quart of mediocre yogurt,” I say. “For that price, make a gallon and a half of far more delicious yogurt yourself. ALL IT TAKES IS TO BOTHER LEARNING, and once you do, that learning IS YOURS TO KEEP FOREVER.” This is an important life lesson—one of the most important I know. And these days, there’s no excuse. You want to learn how to make phyllo dough for spanakopita? How to make pâte à choux and turn this into eclairs? There is some Greek or French grandmother or grandfather on YouTube who will show you exactly how it’s done. How it was traditionally done. Sometimes, traditions are best, having been honed for centuries. My spanakopita and eclairs are to die for, and here’s why: they are made fresh by me from good ingredients and using the right tools: a Danish dough whisk, parchment paper, a piping bag.

So, I have a lot of tools and gadgets that I have collected over the years, and my daughter is wrong about my having “too much” stuff. These are not the things of a hoarder. These are the tools of an artist and artisan. Let me share an example from recent days. I recently prepared tomato and pepper seeds for germination and then planting in containers on my porch. Both like hot weather, and I live in Southern Florida. So, what did I use to do this job?

Well, first I set out some disposable cups. I used an awl to poke holes in the bottoms of half of them. Then I put decorative marbles I happened to have around in the bottom of the other half of the cups and placed the cups with the holes inside those cups. This arrangement would provide proper drainage and allow me to keep the seedlings watered but not water-logged. Then, I filled a bucket with warm water and placed a brick of coco coir into it. The coco coir was soon loose and hydrated and would provide my seed-starting medium. Then, I used a canning funnel and a canning ladle to fill the cups with the coco coir, and I tamped this down lightly with a wooden muddler. Next, I emptied my seed packets one at a time onto a dilute hydrogen peroxide solution to kill any contaminants on them, such as funguses or molds, and to soften the hulls to make germination easier; drained them using a small strainer; and dumped the seeds into spring water to wash off the peroxide. Then, I used a different strainer to strain off the water and used wooden tea tweezers to place the seeds onto a bamboo tea shovel, which was the perfect tool for holding and moving the tiny seeds. Next, using a chopstick, I poked two holes about an eighth of an inch deep in the top of the soil in each pair of cups and used the tweezers again to move two seeds to the holes. Finally, I filled the holes with my fingers and covered them with a thin layer of growing medium and watered them with a little gooseneck watering vessel I have.

So, disposable cups, an awl, marbles, a bucket, a canning funnel, a canning ladle, a wooden muddler, two strainers, wooden tea tweezers, a bamboo tea shovel, a chopstick, and a gooseneck watering vessel. And all these tools I had, and here’s the thing: each was perfect for its job. The awl made perfect little round holes in the bottoms of the cups without cutting huge fissures. The tea tweezers allowed me to move the seeds without harming them as metal tweezers might. The bamboo tea shovel made it easy to move them without losing any. The chopstick made the perfect-sized hole for the seeds. The gooseneck watering vessel allowed me to control precisely the amount of watering.

Some advice: over time, spend the money to purchase the right tools for the jobs you do (and for those you have not yet anticipated). You will end up with quite a nice little collection, and these will make you happy. Again, I learned this lesson long ago: It was Christmastime, and I had bought a big, red toy fire engine for my son at his request. The thing made sounds and had flashing lights and needed batteries. The battery compartment was closed with four Phillips-head screws. I didn’t have a Phillips-head screwdriver handy, so I stood there trying to turn those little screws with a butter knife from the kitchen. Dumb.

Over the years I have accumulated a lot of “the right tools” for a lot of jobs, and that stuff makes doing tasks a breeze. One can save a lot of time and effort and produce higher-quality work if one has the right tools. If you want to make your own sauerkraut or kimchee, I highly recommend getting some Mason jars, a wooden muddler, a kitchen scale (for measuring water and salt for a brine), and some pickle pipe fermentation lids. Having these proper tools will save you a LOT of grief. I rarely kayak anymore, and my daughter tried to get me to throw out my paddles. But I have been doing a lot of container gardening on my porch, and I fill a large trashcan with tap water, mix in a small amount of Vitamin C powder, and this removes the chloramine from the water, which might harm my plants. And the kayak paddle is the perfect tool for mixing the powder into the water.

Why do the proper tools work so well? Well, they have the right affordances. In other words, their design is perfect to effect the desired result. I learned the term from the late, great expert on human interface design Donald Norman. Norman—head of the computer science department at MIT—hated, hated, hated bad design in everyday life—the blue page of doom on DOS, then Windows computers; doors that scream by their design “push me” when they have to be pulled or vice versa. Engineers tend to like very neat, very orderly designs—everything all lined up in a row. Perhaps it’s a mild autism spectrum thing that one finds in engineers. In his superb book The Design of Everyday Things, Norman gives the example of a bunch of identical levers on a control panel in a nuclear power facility. This one means raise the fuel rods. This one means lower them. They look precisely identical, but misreading the tiny labels in an emergency and choosing the wrong lever could mean a freaking nuclear meltdown. The workers at the nuke plant had solved this issue by procuring some beer taps and placing them over the levers. Grolsch means lower the rods. Bud means raise them. LOL.

Recently, I ordered a teapot from a fancy modern design company called Kinto, and in their fanciness, these folks had designed away the knob traditionally at the top of the pot in Asian designs. Such arrogance is typically its own punishment. In this case, the lack of the knob makes it impossible to add a braided lid keeper, which makes keeping the lid on when pouring multiple infusions difficult. When pouring, you have to place a finger on the hot top of the teapot. Ouch. If, in the crucible of the ages, a design has emerged unscathed, THERE IS TYPICALLY A REASON. The design serves a function. (For more on stuff for tea and its uses, see this: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2024/01/23/how-to-drink-tea-a-brief-guide-bob-shepherd/. For instructions on making a beautiful traditional braided lid keeper for a teapot, see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81yA_zvbq-4).

When a tool has the right affordances, then it will work smoothly. Consider, for example, a hammer. Novices hold a hammer tightly and force it down against the nail, aiming for the nail’s head. But that’s not how the hammer is supposed to work. A skilled user of a hammer holds it loosely and creates an arc that allows the weight of the hammer head to fall on its own accord. Let me repeat that: on its own accord. That’s what having the right affordances means. The design accomplishes the task almost by itself, with hardly any conscious effort. People have to learn this same truth when chopping wood. Don’t shove the axe down. Arc the thing and allow the head to fall naturally and do the job for you. And don’t try to hit the surface of the wood. Don’t make the top of the wood what you are aiming at. Allow the hammer or axe head to fall as though it were going to strike THROUGH the nail or the wood. Let the proper tool do its job.

When you let the tool do the job, after a short while, the conscious use of the tool completely disappears. You don’t think about what you are doing. You simply let the tool work.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger called tools like this “the ready to hand.” They are there for the hand to take up and then let the tool work with almost no conscious thought at all. To a skilled user, the tool becomes an object of consciousness ONLY WHEN IT STOPS WORKING, WHEN IT IS BROKEN—if, for example, the head of the hammer or the axe has become loose at the end of the handle.

All that is prelude to Part 2 of this essay, in which I will take up three astonishing topics:

types of consciousness,

the coming internalization on the part of the few of common tools, and

the vastly different creatures, for good and ill, we shall be when that happens.

Where Did Frank Herbert Get the Idea for the Spice Worms of Dune? | Bob Shepherd

Recently I was reading an obscure text called 3 Baruch, a piece of Christian pseudographia from perhaps the second century CE that describes a vision of five heavens on the part of the titular character. In this book I discovered where Frank Herbert got his idea for giant worms that excrete spice, which he describes as looking and tasting like cinnamon, but, unlike cinnamon, having powerful, psyche-expanding, psychotropic, entheogenic, psychedelic properties. (NB: Psyche is a Greek word meaning both “mind” and “soul.”) Here’s the relevant text, from 3 Baruch, 6: 3-12:

And I said to the angel, “What is this bird?”

And he said to me, “This is the guardian of the earth.”

And I said, “Lord, how is he the guardian of the earth? Teach me.”

And the angel said to me, “This bird flies alongside of the sun, and expanding his wings receives its fiery rays. For if he were not receiving them, the human race would not be preserved, nor any other living creature. But God appointed this bird thereto.”

And he expanded his wings, and I saw on his right wing very large letters, as large as the space of a threshing-floor, the size of about four thousand modii; and the letters were of gold. And the angel said to me, “Read them.” And I read and they ran thus: “Neither earth nor heaven bring me forth, but wings of fire bring me forth.

And I said, “Lord, what is this bird, and what is his name?”

And the angel said to me, His name is called Phoenix.

(And I said), And what does he eat?

And he said to me, The manna of heaven and the dew of earth.

And I said, Does the bird excrete?

And he said to me, He excretes a worm, and the excrement of the worm is cinnamon, which kings and princes use.

Herbert was a great student of ancient religions, as readers of the Dune series (and watchers of the recent Dune films) will know. So, my contribution to Herbert scholarship. You’re welcome.

NB: Copyright 2014, Robert D. Shepherd. This post may be freely distributed IF this copyright notice is retained.

Getting Clear about the Difference between Sex and Gender

Much of current debate about sex and gender is utterly confused, and the confusion comes from not recognizing the crucial distinction between sex and gender. A lot of unnecessary problems could be avoided by keeping this straight.

–from the article

The brilliant French novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir gave Jean-Paul Sartre, her long-term lover, most of his best ideas, the ones that became the philosophical system known as Existentialism. However, this isn’t her only claim to fame. She also, in her seminal 1949 work Le deuxième sex (The Second Sex) introduced into general circulation the crucial distinction between sex and gender. It’s astonishing how many people, 75 years later, still don’t understand this distinction, so let me try to clarify it. First, what Beauvoir wrote:

On ne naît pas femme, on le deviant [One is not born a woman; one becomes one].

She was not, of course, saying that one isn’t (typically) born with either male or female genitals. This is true for all but a small percentage of kids (About 1.7 percent of kids are born intersex–with partially male and partially female sexual organs). What Beauvoir meant was that the characteristics associated with womanhood—what roles one plays, how one dresses, what accessories one wears, who one’s friends are, how one sits and walks, and so on—are culturally, not biologically, occasioned and acquired. They are a matter of gender.

In English, we are fortunate enough to have two distinct words that can be appropriated for the following distinct purposes:

We can (and should) use female and male to refer to the biological inheritance—to the biological sexual characteristics that we are born with and that we develop over time based on our genetic programming. These characteristics comprise our sex.

We can (and should) use woman and man to refer to the acquired, acculturated characteristics traditionally ascribed to and associated with particular sexes (to ones taught us by our culture)—to matters like roles, dress, and learned sex-specific behaviors. These characteristics comprise our gender.

So, to update Beauvoir, one is born female or male (i.e., someone with a particular sex) and becomes a woman or a man or some combination thereof (i.e., someone with certain non-necessary, acquired gender characteristics).

Sex is given (in most cases). Gender is not. The genders that people typically acquire vary depending on time and place. Among the Masai, for example, MEN wear elaborate jewelry and brightly colored clothing; engage in small handicrafts; and spend a lot of time in groups, gossiping—precisely the characteristics widely considered in the 1950s appropriate to American WOMEN. No one teaches a person to have a penis or a clitoris, a scrotum or labia majora. These are simply givens (in most cases). Of course, no one typically sits American boys down and tells them not to wear dresses, either. This behavioral propensity is acquired rather than learned based on behavioral models in the ambient environment. Gender is acquired. Sex is not.

By default, gender comes about by what the French Marxist critic Louis Althusser called “interpellation”–unconscious acquisition of cultural norms. But this is not necessarily so. Because it is acquired, gender is open to being modified with some ease. I used to teach the kids in my acting classes how to walk and sit like people of the opposite gender. This was eye-opening for them. In today’s repressive era of the Moms for the Liberty to Constrain Your Liberty, aka the Minivan Taliban and the Ku Klux Karens, I would probably be fired for these exercises, which my students found fascinating and illuminating.

Much of current debate about sex and gender is utterly confused, and the confusion comes from not recognizing the crucial distinction between sex and gender. A lot of problems could easily be avoided by keeping this straight.

For example, it’s important for young people to recognize that they can experiment with gender change or (even better, to my mind) fluidity WITHOUT THIS HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH THEIR BIOLGOICAL SEX. Consider, for example, this fact: Studies have shown that people speak much more nicely to female clerks than to male ones. They use slower and sweeter voices. Well, wouldn’t it be a good idea to speak nicely to male clerks, too? And if boys want to wear makeup, why the hell not? Why is this exclusively for girls? Certainly, male movie stars and politicians do so all the time. My mother took a lot of grief back in the 1960s for wearing pants. Why should young men take grief for wearing skirts or dresses? See, for example, the Islamic thobe, the African dashiki suit, the Sumerian kaunake, the ancient Greek chiton, the Christian priestly cassock or soutane, the Greek funstanella, the ancient Roman and Medieval European tunic, the Sikh baana or chola, the Samoan lavalava, the Japanese hakama, the Palestinian qumbaz, the Southeast Asian sarong, the Indian dhoti or veshti or lungi, the Scottish kilt, and many others.

Recognizing the distinction between sex and gender can lead to a NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM—to people being able to explore freely gender-related options formerly closed to them—roles, ways of acting and speaking, choice of adornments and activities and partners and friends, and so on. And recognizing that gender and sex ARE DIFFERENT THINGS can lead people not to make decisions about medical treatments and changes to their bodies that they might later regret. People can have the freedom to explore alternate gender expressions without going to such extremes until they are old enough and certain enough to do so. They can also explore various sexual orientations without regard to sex OR gender, of course, and have a right to do so.