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What Is To Be Done? part one
Nov. 2nd, 2008 12:24 pmConditioned Origination: Every Day You See One More Card
When Paul Krugman, who recently won the Nobel Prize for economics, wrote that he hadn’t foreseen the global dimensions of the economic crisis, I thought, puzzled, “But I thought you did. Five years ago.”
Krugman is presumably focusing on the specifics. But even the specifics seem clear in retrospect. (20-20 hindsight; it is fortunate that driving is not like living in general, or rear-view mirrors would always be clearer than windshields.)
A front-page story in the November 2, 2008 New York Times focused it all for me: it tells how the New York subway system has been handicapped by the same failing bank in Ireland that has wreaked havoc in the funding of the school system in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin (previously known mostly as the town the ship failed to reach when the gales of November came early, in Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”). The same Irish bank has destabilized the entire German credit market to the tune of a multibillion-euro bailout.
And I suddenly thought of everything from children’s nursery rhymes (where Western cultures sometimes encode intelligent things) to folktales of how the first tent was made in China.
After that I thought of the endlessly boring repetitions of the texts in Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations, known to an older generation from a footnote in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The Buddhist texts are immensely long recitations of chains of causation, which I found almost intolerable to read at age twenty-two even with Warren’s helpful ellipses signifying “repeat all the previous phrases yet another time.” And so I shall get over the stile, and home tonight.
But the teaching stories of the unfashionable traditions are more nuanced than the nursery rhymes, and contain as many cautionary tales of the ones who did not recognize chains of conditioned origination when they saw them, or who failed to understand that “indications from signs” are more than just notes letting you know that God is trying to tell you something.
Just as the only way to make the first tent in China is to apprentice with a ropemaker in one country, learn to weave cloth in another, and whack branches off tree trunks for a logging business in a third locale before being shipwrecked in China (a sequence that requires the minimum amount of the business world’s beloved “thinking outside the box”), the difference between success and failure in other folktales is the capacity to recognize that what ants think are rocks blocking their progress may be the gold the seeker has been looking for, or that, given a choice of beginning with the easy or the hard question, the overconfident braggart picks the hard one, then learns that the hard one can be answered only after you have answered the easy one. And so on, and so on, setting forth obvious truths regarding the limits of human perception, and the brain’s tendency to jump to wrong conclusions or to run automated programs inculcated by past experience.
Of course, the problem with memorable tales is that they also give you the opportunity to get it exactly backwards (as folktales tell us all the time).
As has been noted often recently, the idea that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can eventually be the causative factor of a hurricane is not a mystical assertion of the transcendental unity of all things (I think the culprit here is the metaphor, which stirs a vague memory of the tale of Chuang Tzu not knowing if he was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu).
Still less is it an assertion that we can now know all the chains of causation; in fact, the point of using a butterfly was to provide a memorable illustration of the idea that there are so many small variables going into complex systems that we cannot predict them with complete assurance.
But we can have the vague disquiet that we have seen something like this before, in the books. And perhaps we can take steps to protect ourselves just in case something happens like what we think could happen. (Which does not mean we will succeed in protecting ourselves, but at least we can say we knew it was all coming.)
But apparently the logic-driven Masters Of The Universe And The Hedge Funds did not grow up reading and thinking about fairy tales. Too bad. For those who do not grow up on the right fairy tales, or read their grown-up equivalents in the right way, are doomed to make up their own.
When Paul Krugman, who recently won the Nobel Prize for economics, wrote that he hadn’t foreseen the global dimensions of the economic crisis, I thought, puzzled, “But I thought you did. Five years ago.”
Krugman is presumably focusing on the specifics. But even the specifics seem clear in retrospect. (20-20 hindsight; it is fortunate that driving is not like living in general, or rear-view mirrors would always be clearer than windshields.)
A front-page story in the November 2, 2008 New York Times focused it all for me: it tells how the New York subway system has been handicapped by the same failing bank in Ireland that has wreaked havoc in the funding of the school system in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin (previously known mostly as the town the ship failed to reach when the gales of November came early, in Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”). The same Irish bank has destabilized the entire German credit market to the tune of a multibillion-euro bailout.
And I suddenly thought of everything from children’s nursery rhymes (where Western cultures sometimes encode intelligent things) to folktales of how the first tent was made in China.
After that I thought of the endlessly boring repetitions of the texts in Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations, known to an older generation from a footnote in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The Buddhist texts are immensely long recitations of chains of causation, which I found almost intolerable to read at age twenty-two even with Warren’s helpful ellipses signifying “repeat all the previous phrases yet another time.” And so I shall get over the stile, and home tonight.
But the teaching stories of the unfashionable traditions are more nuanced than the nursery rhymes, and contain as many cautionary tales of the ones who did not recognize chains of conditioned origination when they saw them, or who failed to understand that “indications from signs” are more than just notes letting you know that God is trying to tell you something.
Just as the only way to make the first tent in China is to apprentice with a ropemaker in one country, learn to weave cloth in another, and whack branches off tree trunks for a logging business in a third locale before being shipwrecked in China (a sequence that requires the minimum amount of the business world’s beloved “thinking outside the box”), the difference between success and failure in other folktales is the capacity to recognize that what ants think are rocks blocking their progress may be the gold the seeker has been looking for, or that, given a choice of beginning with the easy or the hard question, the overconfident braggart picks the hard one, then learns that the hard one can be answered only after you have answered the easy one. And so on, and so on, setting forth obvious truths regarding the limits of human perception, and the brain’s tendency to jump to wrong conclusions or to run automated programs inculcated by past experience.
Of course, the problem with memorable tales is that they also give you the opportunity to get it exactly backwards (as folktales tell us all the time).
As has been noted often recently, the idea that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can eventually be the causative factor of a hurricane is not a mystical assertion of the transcendental unity of all things (I think the culprit here is the metaphor, which stirs a vague memory of the tale of Chuang Tzu not knowing if he was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu).
Still less is it an assertion that we can now know all the chains of causation; in fact, the point of using a butterfly was to provide a memorable illustration of the idea that there are so many small variables going into complex systems that we cannot predict them with complete assurance.
But we can have the vague disquiet that we have seen something like this before, in the books. And perhaps we can take steps to protect ourselves just in case something happens like what we think could happen. (Which does not mean we will succeed in protecting ourselves, but at least we can say we knew it was all coming.)
But apparently the logic-driven Masters Of The Universe And The Hedge Funds did not grow up reading and thinking about fairy tales. Too bad. For those who do not grow up on the right fairy tales, or read their grown-up equivalents in the right way, are doomed to make up their own.
