Transparency Good and Bad (Some Semi-Scholarly Dystopian Kvetching)

 Transparent: adjective

1. having the property of transmitting rays of light through its substance so that

bodies situated beyond or behind can be distinctly seen. [***].

4. easily seen through, recognized, or detected […]

5. manifest; obvious […] || 6. open; frank; candid […]

7. Computers. (of a process or software)

operating in such a way as to not be perceived by users.

[…N]owhere is there any license to waste time, […] to evade work —

no wine shop, no alehouse, no brothel anywhere, no opportunity

for corruption […] no secret meeting place. On the contrary,

being under the eyes of all, people are bound either to be performing

the usual labor or to be enjoying their leisure in a fashion

not without decency. — Utopia, quoted by Harold Bloom, who added the

emphasis and a note referencing Zamyatin's We and Orwell's 1984.

Secrets are Lies. / Caring Is Sharing. / Privacy Is Theft.

— Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013)

            Some four centuries and more before we seriously got around to open-meetings laws in the American Republic, Sir Thomas More of emphatically unrepublican, undemocratic Tudor England imagined a Utopia where any "question affecting the general public" must be discussed by officials in public and with plenty of time for at least some of the public to observe the proceedings. Highly important matters go to an assembly of representatives — called District Controllers in modern Utopian — who go back to their Districts and explain the issues to their households before any action is taken. Relevant here: "It's a capital crime" — one of the relatively few in Utopia — "to discuss such questions anywhere except in the Council or the Assembly" (Turner trans. 74; early in Bk. 2).

            Now, death is a harsh penalty for private meetings, but Utopos the conqueror of what became Utopia, and his more democratic successors, were on the right track and instituted a highly positive form of transparency: public business done in public, with no literal or figurative walls concealing that work; only the transparent air stands between the Utopians and their officials.

            There is another side to Utopian transparency, though, as Harold Bloom recognized. The Utopians have plenty of everything they need or think to desire, plus admirable leisure time because all Utopians work: indeed, "[…] wherever you are, you always have to work," in part because there are no distractions of boozing or sex, and in larger part from social and what amounts to police pressure: there's nowhere to hide from work or Utopian norms, "no secret meeting places" and "Everyone has his eye on you" (Turner 84).

            Utopia is a total society, and in many of its aspects totalitarian. "The personal is the political" in a very literal sense there, and society claims the right to regulate all things political; so "transparency" is a figure of speech with several meanings, not all of which are good, and certainly not eutopian.

            Most citizens want to know what officials of our various governments are up to; we're less keen that those officials know what we're up to — or that our bosses know or the neighbors or the general public or, sometimes, our parents or spouses. We don't want Big Brother spying on us, or, sometimes, even "little brother": some kid with a smart phone, some punk hacker.

            Indeed, "transparency" is made literal and horrific in dystopias stressing surveillance, most especially in what is arguably the first of the great dystopian novels of the 20^th century, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921/24). Zamyatin is very direct: in the One State of We, apartment buildings are made of glass: transparent glass with coverings that can be used only during regulated sexual hours (any privacy for toilet functions is less clear). In addition to the "Guardians" — the secret police — "Everyone has his eye on you," or might have his, or her, eye on you, just by looking.

            In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are the ever-present telescreens, and they are the main reason "You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." Still, however much the protagonist, Winston Smith, dismisses all powers in his world except the Though Police, we do perceive through him another potential threat: "In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away […]. It was the Police Patrol snooping into people's windows" (6-7; I.1). In the 1984 film version, a helicopter snooping at Winston Smith's window makes for a powerful image of the danger of that sort of windowpane transparency.

            In the science-fictional, Pomo world of the 21^st century, there is still the threat of fascistic "ethno-nationalism" of the Donald Trumpian variety, but in terms of surveillance, government action is only one threat.

            In the United States, we still have to negotiate fitting cops up with body cameras in such a way as to avoid dangerous precedents of on-the-job surveillance, plus renegotiate surveillance deals of the past and try to anticipate applying high-tech innovations in the future.

            I want cops filmed going into armed confrontations, especially armed confrontations where they might shoot young males of color. And I want some guarantee that cops don't shackle someone and put him in the back of a van with no seat belt and then take him for a deadly ride. On the other hand, I don't want cops surveilled every minute they're on duty: for practical reasons of data overload and expense, but also because of the precedent. If cops have to put up with constant surveillance, why shouldn't ___________ also? (Fill in the blank, possibly with people working at your job.)

            There is also here the sense of "transparent" as a process "operating in such a way as to not be perceived." This can refer to people getting so used to invasions of privacy that as a practical, political matter they're invisible.

            Legacies of "The War on Drugs" should come to mind immediately here, as in your Little-Brother employer insisting that you urinate into a cup for testing to ensure you're not zonked on the job. Well, if you're zonked on the job and some supervisor doesn't notice, there's a problem right there, to say nothing of the problem of people having to work at jobs so mindless they can be done while zonked. Or when the doctrine of "Extraordinary measures to meet extraordinary dangers" justifies checkpoints at airports and such — and then the results of extraordinary searches (as in examining everybody's luggage) are used to arrest and prosecute such ordinary criminals as drug smugglers.

            "Do you want to fly next to drug smugglers or a murderer?!" Actually, yeah, probably; there's a good chance they'll remain sober and quiet and not draw attention to themselves. And looking just for weapons and explosives and ignoring a couple kilos of whatever should speed up the TSA lines.

            For the very-near future, there's the Silicon-Valley style gentle totalitarianism warned against in Dave Eggers's The Circle. It will soon be possible to produce relatively cheaply something like "SeeChange," which the Wikipedia entry on The Circle correctly describes as "light, portable cameras that can provide real-time video with minimal efforts. Eventually, SeeChange cameras are worn all day long by politicians wishing to be 'transparent', allowing the public to see what they are seeing at all times." And if that degree of "transparency" seems extreme, check out the TV commercials and on-line ads for electronic devices allowing parents to track their teens' (or others') mobile phones, and their teens' (or others') actions: figurative "helicopter parents" replacing the helicopters of Orwell's Police Patrols.

            There may be a kind of Karmic justice in the use of mobile phones to spy on young people. Much good has come from using the cameras on smart phones to get out to the public instances of police brutality and other crimes that until recently would have gone unreported and unpunished, however much police criminality still goes unpunished. But "kids with cameras" — camera phones — and older people who should know better have contributed to making surveillance transparent in that sense of not being really perceived, not being thought about, until, not long from now, people in high-tech societies will "live, from habit that became instinct […] in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

==========================================

Works Mentioned Without Citation or Link in Text

More, Sir Thomas. Utopia (initial publ. 1516). Trans. and introd. Paul Turner. London, UK: Penguin, 1965.

Orwell, George (pseud. for Eric Blair). Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Rpt. 1984. New York: Signet, 1961. 

       I give citations to this edition followed by section number in Roman and subsection in Arabic 

       numerals (Signet uses Roman for both).

Conspiracies of the 1%: Vast and Deep and Old

Quotation of the Day:

In fact, when I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can't, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill-gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible. Once the rich have decided that these tricks and dodges shall be officially recognized by society [...,] they acquire the force of law. Thus an unscrupulous minority is led by its insatiable greed to monopolize what would have been enough to supply the needs of the whole population.

The speaker here is Raphael Hythloday in Sir Thomas More's — St. Thomas More's, if you're Catholic — Utopia, published in Latin in 1516, here in the translation by Paul Turner in the Penguin edition of 1965.

Utopia has been available in English since 1551 and can be picked up cheaply on Amazon.com. So English-reading grownups have no excuse not to know that there can be "a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests" without meetings of The Elders of Plutocracy or a whole lot of explicit plotting among "the 1%" and their minions and somewhat less obscenely rich associates. The superrich quietly play the game, after rigging it. In More's day the game was more open and, where visible, conspicuous: "privilege and the class system" constituted the ruling ideology. In our day, however, we have incessant media coverage of the lives of the less prudent rich, so we're back to no excuses.

Sir Thomas both was and was not modern here; for sure, Saint Thomas knew the competing and complementary teachings of the Latin Church, Radix malorum superbia est, and, as Chaucer's thoroughly corrupt but here doctrinally correct Pardoner puts it, "[...] my theme is yet, and ever was, / Radix malorum est Cupiditas. That is, the root of all evils is either Pride or Greed, or, frequently, a combination. Such an idea may be overstatement and oversimplification, but it's still legitimate and crucial. Pride and greed are constants, and they are threats in the hands of the powerful. Which is why, more often than it gets done, society needs to be shaken up and the "conspiracy of the rich," for a while, at least a bit, rolled back.

Learning from the "War on Men" — and Stephen Colbert v. Fox News (30 November 2012)

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            In the "The Word" segment of The Colbert Report for Wednesday, 28 November 2012, many of us who do not watch much TV news beyond Colbert and The Daily Show could learn that Fox News is reporting a War on Men, part of which has resulted in American men not wanting to get married.

            I overstate and oversimplify here — and my scholarship is, let's say, casual — but all that’s pretty decorous given Fox reporting, and not just Fox.

            (I gave up on TV news after a drug warrior told Jim Lehrer that the major problem he encountered in the war on drugs was the large number of people who used cocaine without serious problems. Lehrer didn't ask a "WTF??!!" follow-up question. This occurred at the time PBS funding was under attack in Congress, though that may've been a coincidence. But as so often, I digress.)

            Anyway, in the beginning of this males-and-marriage brouhaha, as it came through on the Report, was a survey on attitudes on the importance of marriage wherein was found that among young women — or probably, at most, young American women — 28% thought marriage important in 1997 and 37% thought it important in 2010/2011. My arithmetic has that coming out to an increase of 9 percentage points. Among young men, 35% thought marriage very important in 1997, vs. 29% in 2010/2011, for a decrease of 6 percentage points, and putting young men in 2010-11 finding marriage more or less as important as young women did a dozen or so years earlier. (But don't trust my arithmetic; I tend to screw up "percentage" vs. "percentage points"; the point, though, still holds.)

            On the Fox News website, on 26 November 2012, Suzanne Venker took these data seriously and concluded in Colbert's paraphrase that "Sisters Are Doing It to Themselves" in this declining male interest in marriage in that, in Venker's words, "Women aren't women anymore" but angry and defensive.

            And the cause of decline in femininity was the sexual revolution, which I think means feminism here since the sexual revolution in terms of sex was in the 1970s, and its effects would've been felt long before 1997.

            For a nice evisceration of this analysis, listen to Colbert: the "The Word" segment is about ten minutes into the broadcast. My problems with the Venkerian conclusion start with her taking way too seriously any survey about attitudes. If you want to find out what people really believe, yeah, just ask them — but then check out in detail what they do.

            Still, The Daoist teach that we should listen carefully even to people we know are lying, and they have a point. Sometimes it may seem like picking out the peanuts from the elephant dung, but we should listen to one another and profit from what we hear as best we can.

            So consider this.

            Writing from a thoroughly sexist and patriarchal point of view (though enlightened and progressive ca. 1516), Sir Thomas More has his non-Christian Utopians very strict about sex outside of marriage. Not just adultery — which can get you a sentence of penal servitude for a first offense and death caught twice — but "Any boy or girl convicted of premarital intercourse is severely punished, and permanently disqualified from marrying" unless pardoned on the no-marriage part, and the adult couple in charge of the offending household is "publicly disgraced for not doing their jobs properly. The Utopians are particularly strict about that kind of thing because they think very few people would want to get married — which means spending one's life with the same person, and putting up with all that inconveniences that this involves — if they weren't carefully prevented from having any sexual intercourse otherwise" (Book II, Paul Turner's translation, 1965: 103-04 [punctuation Americanized]).

            Now the stripping down of the family to its nucleus has been fairly recent, and big-family-man More would have been a little shocked by the isolation of contemporary Americans, and his Utopians were downright communal and communistic: More's Utopia is like one huge monastery. More presented a society where one could get companionship and intimacy in the general course of life; if you could also get sex, he asks provocatively, why marry?

            With the sexual revolution, it did become easier in the US to get sex outside of marriage, but alienation elsewhere increased, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if women in 2010 — if indeed this is the case — were more interested in marriage than in 1997. Women are increasingly in the workforce, and, as Colbert hints, more non-poor women now perform the alienating shit-work of a lot of jobs, and this may have more hungering for the companionship, intimacy, and relative stability of marriage: that shelter from the outside world for the Victorian father of the family.

            What about those young men, though, whose declining interest — and this may well be the case — needs some explanation?

            The major explanation may be economic, and indirectly educational. Guys haven't been doing all that well of late, and marriage would make most sense to us economically if we were to "marry up": as Colbert hints even more strongly, guys might want to marry a woman who could support them as househusbands.

            Gals, though, may be reluctant to marry down, and most of what's going on here may be that women place greater importance on marriage because it has become more of an issue for them because of a lack of marriageable men — but "No marriageable men around" may often mean no men it would be economically and socially advantageous to marry.

            So guys may find marriage less important because they feel less likely to marry. Aesop's fable on "sour grapes" points to the human tendency to assert, sometimes, we don't really want that which we are unlikely to get.

            More women want equality in marriage, and to a large extent are getting it, and that is all to the good.

            But, arguably, it's all to the good more for women than for men.

            Patriarchal marriage had a lot of advantages for men, especially for men who figured out that one of the most important things a human being has is time.

            Now a cousin of mine just sent me the latest viral video of a Rube-Goldberg device where, with much ado, a humongous chain reaction leads to some guys getting doused with paint. Etc. — check out Facebook and YouTube, to say nothing of XTube! So, obviously, a lot of people have a lot of free time on their hands. Still, one of the most important things we have is time, and traditional patriarchal marriage was very good to men in terms of time and labor: women did most of the work at home.

            An equal marriage nowadays is much less advantageous for men.

            Middle-class standards of housekeeping are very high in today's America, and few people can afford servants. Under strong traditional pressure, often from other women, women's standards for household neatness tend to be higher than men's — tend to be; clearly some men are neat and some women are slobs — and equitable division of labor in a married household probably means the husband spends significantly more time on housework then he did or would as a bachelor. When children come along the time constraints and other pressures on both parents nowadays are tremendous, and women want men to share that load.

            A "night club" when I was growing up meant a place my parents went. I had good, conscientious parents — who didn't think they had to come out to watch me swim or play football, much less coach a team. (By high school, we had "SACs," social-athletic clubs and fraternities, and we ran our own athletics.) And, of course, even middle-class and well-to-do kids until recently could be sent out to play on their own and were expected to walk most places or take public transportation.

            When kids come along, contemporary US parents are under tremendous strain — poor people probably more than the middle class and rich (though in different ways) — and significant numbers of women will work very hard to get men to share the burden.

            Much of that "burden" is self-imposed and a good deal enjoyable, but much is not.

            If a guy finds love and a "soul mate" — and that's an additional issue: the newish idea that every couple seeking marriage has to be Romeo and Juliet and powerfully in love, and working on the relationship — if a guy finds love and a soul mate and he can bring some wealth and skills to the marriage … well, yeah, he'll want to marry and probably will marry. But that may not happen.

            So, if young guys nowadays say marriage is less important to them than guys said in 1997, it could be sensible on their part: sensible if they're less likely to get married and if they are lucky enough to get companionship, some sex, and maybe even intimacy outside of marriage.

            There's no war on men, but there has been reduction in male privilege, and guys may be responding to that reduction in socially and economically rational ways.

            The nuclear family is a relatively new invention, and it's a bad idea. We're in an awkward period moving on to other possibilities. Get over it, conservatives, and start acting like real conservatives: working to increase community, and social supports.

This Country Needs a Higher Level Of Mediocrity (12 Dec. 2013)

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. "The better is the enemy of the good."

La Bégueule (1772) 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Other versions: 

                                                                                                                                             The perfect is the enemy of the good.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The best is the enemy of the good.

      
         
   If I pull it off, this essay will bring together the truism "The perfect is the enemy of the good" — maybe even "The best is the enemy of the better" — and the related idea that "Good enough is good enough"; I'll throw in some other truisms, however, and get to my insistence that "This country," the USA in my case, "needs a higher level of mediocrity."

            For students of utopias, which I've been for much of my life, it's clear that seriously striving for perfection is a problem; it's certainly a problem when we get utopianism in real-world politics. "Utopia," as we utopists frequently point out, was Sir Thomas More's 1516 New-Latin coinage from eutopos (Good Place) and outopos (No Place). His Utopia is "The Good Place that Is No Place," or no place except on his pages, as a thought experiment. It is The or A Good Place, not a perfect place and maybe not even the best. Certainly not for More: Sir Thomas More is also Saint Thomas, if you're a Roman Catholic, or a variety of martyr if you're Anglican, and in any event a committed Christian. The perfect place is the highest Heaven, where the blessed can groove on the experience of God; and the best available place short of heaven is Paradise. To believe anything else is heresy, and Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, suppressed heresy and burned heretical books — and a handful of heretics.

            The historical Sir Thomas More had no illusions about any perfection in the actually-existing Roman Catholic Church; the Church Mystical, however, the Bride of Christ: that was a different matter. "The perfect is the enemy of the good" blatantly and often bloodily when you have idealistic fanatics preserving a status quo and far bloodier when you have idealists striving for not just a eutopian good place but for the perfection of a society: Mao Zedong's "Cultural Revolution" or Pol Pot's prelapsarian peasants' paradise or Adolf Hitler's pure-Aryan Thousand-Year Reich, for some of the higher-body-count examples.

            But the idea holds in more mundane, far less horrendous contexts.

            You know this if you've ever tried to get some nut-and-bolt-ish thing tightened just right, and one more little 1/8^th turn will have it just perfect — until the porcelain cracks. Or if you're an artist or scholar or inventor and need one more revision to get your masterwork perfect: flawless, airtight, with not one thing in it a sane critic can complain about. Probably, you'll never finish. If you do finish, you may have a work without imperfection but also without much soul: the scholarly or artistic or whatever equivalent of cream of wheat: unobjectionable but bland.

            Indeed, one major scholar in one of my fields once said to me in conversation at a conference, "You know, Rich, I've never heard you say something I thought stupid; you need to take more risks."

            The perfect is a problem as well in terms of simple time and energy. Those perfecting "finishing touches" can take more time than any other part of the project, and cause a lot more frustration and heartache.

            So it is often a good idea to say, "Good enough is good enough," and not just because that's what the words mean.

            The problem is that too many people too much of the time find, "good enough" stuff that's nowhere near good enough.

            For a recent, personal example, but one that's grated on me, consider that I just paid a fair amount of money to have a carpenter install new hardware into a very handsome dresser I bought when I moved into my new place in 2007. It hadn't occurred to me to check out the runners for the drawers when I bought the piece because it was from a fancy-schmancy furniture store in the upscale part of Oxnard, CA, bordering or perhaps even in, snootier Ventura, and the exterior was really beautifully made. It just didn't cross my mind that within three years two of the six drawers would be barely working. For what? — maybe fifty bucks more, they could have installed decent runners that would last twenty years. "Good enough" for them was good enough to sell a pricey piece of furniture to a sucker like me, but not good enough by a long shot.

            Okay, my dresser is something personal and therefore, in the larger scheme of things, trivial; and as long as we're throwing truisms around, you might throw back at me, "You get what you pay for … if you're lucky." Indeed, but shoddiness is a more general problem and not trivial.

            It's always been the case, to throw in another truism, that "If you got money, you can save money." I learned this when I moved into a house with an old freezer in the garage and was finally earning enough money that I could on occasion buy meat in quantity — I was still eating mammal meat back then — and on sale. I had enough money to share with my bank ownership of a house and a garage and a freezer from the 1950s (still working when I left the house in 2006), and I could save money on food.

            The point on having/saving money was driven home when I bought myself the present of an old-fashioned shaving system: shaving brush and shaving-mug-like soap dish, with a high-quality safety razor (I'm not coordinated enough for a straight razor). Caswell Massey Apothecary (no shit: Apothecaries "since 1752") also sold soap for the soap dish, for $12 a pop at the time, currently $16. All right; $12 is absurd for what is basically — what is — a round bar of soap; but I was treating myself, so I included the shaving soap into my present for me and also bought a couple bars of bath soap. And I didn't have to buy any more soap for my body for nearly a year.

            Ivory Soap: It Floats! Yeah, because it's got a lot of air in it. Upscale soap, I learned, is heavier, and it can last a long time. Ivory, though, was "good enough," and an appropriate purchase during my years of genteel poverty between graduating high school and my first tenure-track teaching job. High quality may be be better in the long run, but most of the time good enough is good enough — allowing that "good enough" doesn't include shoddy; you and I and even non-genteelly poor people should be able to purchase products that are inexpensive but serviceable, decently made.

            Maybe even "Made in the USA" — but that will get us into other issues.

            One thing we do make in the US of A, a lot of, is entertainment materials, and I work on the fringes of one of the entertainment businesses: movies. I look at scripts, many script, and I'll repeat that "good enough" includes, thank you, at least running the bloody SpellCheck and getting someone literate to proofread. The good scripts circulating are often quite good; and the really bad scripts I get are relatively rare. Generally, though, what we need for scripts and movies and much else is that higher level of mediocrity.

            Most important — most central — we need a higher level of mediocrity in American education.

            Our best students and schools continue to do well, and we've at least recognized the problem of helping the least able and most disadvantaged. What we need far more work on is the group in the middle: by definition, the mediocre.

            The news this morning — hell, the Colbert Report! — carried yet another story of American teens doing poorly on international tests, and a very quick Google search turned up the 2012 results of the Program for International Student Assessment, which has US teens below international averages in math, reading, and science.

            Those teens very soon become US adults: workers, citizens, your neighbors — and voters. And these adult workers, citizens, neighbors, and voters become more experienced but don’t often become better informed or more intelligent than they were as kids.

            Good enough to get through American high schools is not good enough in terms of international competition; and if you think such rankings have, in the words of a former colleague, "all the intellectual respectability of a pecker contest" — and I agree with that assessment — even then there's a problem. Whatever our comparative ranking, the absolute quality required for American Mediocre is too damn low.

            We don't have American public education because Thomas Jefferson et al. were all that concerned about individual self-fulfillment or even US commercial advantage. Individual betterment and robust American commerce were and are good things, but the main justification of American education is preservation of the American Republic.

            To rule effectively, the Sovereign must be educated: critical thinking and some knowledge and all that. If the People are to rule themselves, more or less — we're a republic, not a democracy — the People (generally) have to be educated: the standard-issue pendejo on the street, the modal mediocre American, has got to have some competence in thinking and enough information to think effectively with.


            We in American need not be the best country on the planet, and God knows we shouldn't try to be perfect or even exceptional. But we do need to do better. Mostly, we need a far higher standard, a far higher standard, for "Eh, mediocre": good enough should indeed be good enough to do fairly well.