Archive for the ‘ Family ’ Category

The Digital Revolution

Sometimes a name can make a big difference, it gives us something to talk about and refer to. I now want to describe a new name, or label. I will explain it with some personal history.

When I graduated as an Electrical Engineer from the University of Illinois in 1959, Electronics was just becoming established, although radio communications and radar had been a big part of  WWII. The schools could not distinguish yet between electricity and electronics.

Electronics at that time involved vacuum tubes, and I became an expert in that technology. But the transistor came out at that time and made the vacuum tube obsolete. (One exception was the magnetron, a vacuum tube that generated microwave power, which is still in every microwave oven.)

But this was nothing compared to the digital computer, which made almost all previous technology obsolete. Our engineering department was scared of the things and did not offer a course on them. I was late to it myself, and worked for the next twenty years in the analog world.

Eventually, to make a long story short, I went to work in what we called high-tech in California in 1980. This was the combination of computers (digital of course) and software. Later the Internet made it all-important. But people remained ignorant of the whole thing.

They couldn’t understand this all-powerful new force – so they did the easy thing and pretended it didn’t exist, or that it wasn’t important. This was not smart.

They did not realize the profound difference between the analog world, which had been the world for over two hundred years, and the digital world, which was making it obsolete. They were sleep-walking into a new world that was going to make their own selves obsolete. And insisting that nothing bad was going on.

They would soon become new creatures, part human and part machine, and participate in their own destruction.

We are watching fascinating history, like nothing the world has ever seen before. But I only want to make one point in this posting – something new has happened to us – the Digital Revolution. And we need to start talking about it.

2012
02/04
CATEGORY
Family
Philosophy
Technology
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Why Were the Marines in Haiti?

My father became a Marine, because of the Depression. He served from 1930 to 1934, most of that time in Haiti. I have always wondered what the Marines were doing there – and assumed it was to protect American business interests, but could find nothing to substantiate this.

I just bought Haiti: the Aftershock of History by Larent Dubois. I was mainly interested in the American occupation, which lasted for twenty years, from1915 to 1935. It’s main purpose was to support what we now call agrobusiness – but at the time it was just an extension of the plantation system, producing the same crop: sugar. This is almost a drug, and one the world can never get enough of – but also one with a huge supply, so prices are always low – exactly what consumers want.

My father told us what he was told say – that America was there to help Haiti. And this was partly true – roads were built which benefited everyone – but were intended mostly to help the large plantations that were acquired (by various means) from the natives.

My father was not a typical Marine – he took advantage of his time there to learn French – and to develop a romantic relationship with his French teacher’s daughter (much to the horror of his family back in Iowa). I was surprised to learn from the book that the majority of Haitians speak Kreyòl, and only a small minority could read or understand French.

No wonder the family Dad became involved with considered themselves superior – also because of their light skin, which they took care to shade from the sun. To my eternal distress, Dad abandoned his Haitian girlfriend, who loved him – and married my mother who do not. Dad lived under a lot of stress and didn’t even make it to sixty. After he died, we discovered that Dad and his Haitian girlfriend had carried on a passionate correspondence, in French – while Dad was married, and which only ended when I was born in 1936.

To Dad’s credit, he enjoyed living in an poor country – because it was more personal, I think. Which was strange, because he was not a social person. I am the same way – I retired in Costa Rica because its people were friendly – even though I am an not a social person either.

But I want to return to the effect of America on Haiti – which was not beneficial, obviously. The same was true of our effect on the Philippines. The President at the time actually got down on his knees and prayed about it. And received the assurance that America should bless the Filipinos with our presence. The effect there has been similar – they will probably never recover from being a colony of ours.

The same could be said of any colonial power – British, French, German, Holland (in Indonesia), even Belgium (in the Belgium Congo).  The effect was always baleful – often horribly so.

I hardly need add America’s influence on Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan.

2012
02/04
CATEGORY
Family
History
Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan
Political comment
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The Narrowly-Focused Mind

My mother used to tell me “You have a one-track mind.” And she was right. I still do, and that is one of my problems.

But it also a problem of many other people. They are well-versed in certain areas, but ignorant of most others. McGilchrist would say their left-hemisphere (with its tendency towards specialization) has become dominant. This was probably what I was writing about in my posting Stupid Friends. People get obsessed with (focus on) fixed ideas and make stupid mistakes as a result.

It’s not hard to see they are behaving stupidly, but it is harder to see what is making them behave so stupidly – because these motivations are almost always unconscious – as I said in another posting Most of What is Going on is Unconscious.

Consider how I left my family’s religion. When I went to the University, all of a sudden I realized that our tiny church was not important – compared to all the other things going on in the world. This was the result of my having a more broadly focused mind. How I got that, when I am so narrowly-focused in many other ways, is one of my life’s mysteries. But to this day, on one else in our extended family has had this insight. I regard them as strange people, and they regard me as a strange person – for being so different.

I have learned to regard this difference as an advantage, keeping carefully in mind that for most it is an acute disadvantage.

2011
12/08
CATEGORY
Family
Philosophy
Religion
TAGS

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My Mother was a Madonna

Since this was the case, you know who I was – and you know what my life’s biggest problem has been.

We even had a large colored photograph, taken by my father, of mother and me (as a baby) modeled on the Italian Renaissance Madonna paintings, proudly displayed on our living-room wall. Eventually this became embarrassing to the rest of our Protestant family, and it was taken down – over my mother’s loud protest that “Her mother had one just like it.” And if it was good for her mother (a domineering matriarch if ever there was one) that meant it was approved of by God himself.

How on earth does a boy survive such a childhood? He doesn’t – just just goes out and marries another one. Beth didn’t want to treat me badly – but she did, to the point that she had to leave me in order to protect me. That was her way of showing love, the only way she knew how. It took me many years to understand this.

Her subsequent suicide made it clear she could not love herself either. Her mother was even worse than mine – and she was considered better than a Madonna, nearly god herself.

2011
09/17
CATEGORY
Family
Religion
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Co-Dependency

This physic discovery swept California in the Eighties like a bonfire. Tom Wolf’s novel was also published during the same period. When I lived in San Diego, you could attend a different CODA (Co-Dependency Anonymous) meeting every night of the week, and some nights had two meetings in different parts of town. When I moved to coastal Orange County, large open-air meetings were held in special scenic spots overlooking the ocean. Everyone wanted to tell everyone how co-dependent they had been.

The idea is still as applicable as ever. We grew up in families, and an entire culture, where love was virtually unknown. We had a word for this: dysfunctional families. In group therapy (and CODA meetings were a kind of therapy) we discovered we all came from similar families – and would not believe our therapists when they assured us that functional families did actually exist.

I will illustrate with examples from my own life. I never forgave my father for marrying my mother – and when I got married, I wrote a letter telling him so. When my father died, my mother opened his strong-box – and that letter was in it, along with the last letter he got from his Haitian sweetheart – who had loved him dearly. Mother certainly did not. They did not marry for love – no one did, but married to become more respectable.

I got a clear message from my parents not to mess around with the girls. So I didn’t, and did no dating during my first year at a religious college. This embarrassed my parents: their boy was not normal. At a church youth camp that summer, they made it clear that I had to find a girlfriend. At that that camp there was a young woman who had similar orders from her family. We got together and went for a long walk in the moonlight. She took that opportunity to rave at her father, who she hated. I found nothing unusual about that – after all, I felt the same way about my mother.

Of course, we did not tell our parents about this – and they happily spread the news that we were friends. The romance never went anywhere, because there was nothing behind it. I went back to college, and she didn’t – her family were not the college-going type. If we had been more compatible that way, perhaps more would have come of it. She was a fairly cute girl.

Much later, I did get married – and once again this was a family affair – although we didn’t realize it at the time. Both families were from the same small church – a church we both had rebelled against. But this hardly mattered, they were both dysfunctional families – where love was unknown. Beth’s family were so bad she could never recover from it. She left me and then killed herself.

At the time, I thought I loved Beth: what else could I say? But now looking back at it from a distance, I realize it was not a matter of love. Both of us had to get married, and we were the best we could do.

2011
05/29
CATEGORY
Family
Psychology
Religion
Sociology
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My Problem With People

This problem has been residing at some lower level in my psyche, and has now decided to surface – whether I want it to or not. Now that I have written this sentence, I am analyzing it – and realizing that the “I” I used so glibly is really a bunch of things, must of them unconscious. They can easily get out of hand and wreck you.

I have had personal experience with mental illness. My ex-wife succumbed to schizophrenia in her early twenties – and never recovered. The last time I saw her she looked like a ghost – and shortly thereafter killed herself.

I am better off than she was: I know I am in trouble. She never realized that – and as I observe the gringos around me down here, I see many of them are not either. They tried to leave their problems behind them, but they came right along with them.

As I have mentioned before, I am listening to the book 1861: the Civil War Awakening – and it is effecting me strongly. This was a whole nation, my nation, with something terribly wrong with it – that it never really solved either. I just listened to a chapter about Ohio, where James Garfield was a young man. He was a Campbellite, and a really amazing guy. From Wikipedia:

Campbellite refers to any of the religious groups historically descended from the Restoration Movement, a religious reform movement in the early 19th century in the United States. The major groups are:

Some (though not all) members of these groups consider the term “Campbellite” derogatory, saying that they are followers of Jesus, not Campbell. They draw parallels with Martin Luther‘s protest of the name “Lutherans.” Others deem it a neutral tribute to the origins of their churches in the work of Thomas Campbell and Alexander Campbell (among others). These groups were originally called “reformed Baptist”, but were not related to the Reformed Baptist tradition.

Other prominent individuals in the early movement included Sidney Rigdon and Parley P. Pratt, who, along with more than 3,000 of their adherents converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or “Mormonism” in the 1830s in Ohio.

This is where my family comes in: they were Mormons, albeit Missouri Mormons (a very complicated story in itself). As I read about the period now, I am amazed that the Mormons were not concerned with the burning issue of their time: slavery – as was the rest of the Restoration Movement.

They were not interested an anyone but themselves: they were God’s people, and no one else was important. They succeeded in antagonizing their neighbors (something very easy to do) in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. This ended with the death of their leader at the hands of a mob.

Perhaps I could solve my problems by starting my own church. But there is so much of that going on I would have to be extra-crazy to get any attention. My brother is a disciple of Glenn Beck (also a Mormon) and it would be hard to get any crazier than that guy.

2011
04/14
CATEGORY
Family
History
Missouri Mormons
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Attention Changes Who We Are

This will be brief, but to the point: paying too much attention to our things has made us like them – like machines.

I am reading The Master and His Emissary, a new book about the brain – and on its effects on us. The author, Ian McGilchrist, starts off ruthlessly, cutting down all the preconceptions we have heard about right-brain left-brain stuff. He insists on beginning with a firm foundation – even if that means clarifying some of our language. From page 28:

Our knowledge of neurobiology (for example, of mirror neurones) and of neuropsychology (for example, association-priming) shows that by attending to someone else performing an action, and even about thinking about them doing so – even, in fact, by thinking about certain sorts of people at all – we become objectively, measurable, more like them, in how we behave, think, and feel.

Through the direction and nature of our attention, we prove ourselves to be partners in creation, both of the world and of ourselves.

Martin Heidegger made much the same point in his book The Question Concerning Technology: we are our technology – and it behooves us to be aware of this. And Nietzsche before him.

My mother, when I was a small boy, could always tell who I had been playing with – because I would be acting like them.

This is one of my social skills, and I have used it in Business Process Modeling (BPM) – because I could see how things were actually being done. Most cannot; they simply adopt other’s belief’s about what is going on.

2011
03/29
CATEGORY
Business
Family
Psychology
Sociology
TAGS
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Loyalists in the Revolutionary War

NY Review – Good Losers

I regret you have to be a subscriber to read this – or head for your library instead. It is in the March 10, issue – which I just got down here in Costa Rica. It’s a review of Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Kasanoff.

Some of my ancestors were loyalists who immigrated to Nova Scotia – and then, about a century later, came back to Boston, married into the Bostonian aristocracy – and my mother’s father ended up working for them. My mother’s mother’s second husband was also a Canadian – so we had plenty of them in our family. The main thing in any case was that they be loyal members of the RLDS church: Missouri Mormons. The Church for them was everything. But let me return to history:

The loyalists were the losers in what was clearly a civil war. Americans have been generally reluctant to admit it was bloody fratricidal conflict. At least a fifth and maybe as many as a third of the two and a half million British colonists in 1776 opposed the break from Great Britain. They suffered greatly for their loyalty to the king—their property was confiscated and they were intimidated by mobs, tarred and feathered, and assaulted and brutalized to a degree not often described by American historians. At least 19,000 of them joined provincial regiments to fight their fellow Americans in the long and bloody war.

She makes it clear that the war affected Britain as much as it did America – and resulted in reforming it, and in making it the greatest empire in the world up to that time.

2011
03/27
CATEGORY
Family
History
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Reliving My Childhood

At first glance Orosi, Costa Rica and Nauvoo, Illinois are not very similar – but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.

I didn’t even know I was trying to do this. It only became clear to me this morning, as I meditated on the wreckage of my so-called life. It’s been a long trip, and I’m not sure I would want to do it again. Fortunately, I don’t have that choice – all I have to do is finish the rest of it in reasonably good condition – at least mentally, if not physically.

Have I been able to turn back the clock? Yes, moving to a relatively backward country is like going back in time. I first noticed this when I lived for awhile in Sri Lanka – which is like Costa Rica in many ways. Both, at least in the rural areas, are agricultural – tea in Sri Lanka and coffee in Costa Rica. As I sit here and enjoy my morning Latte, I can remember having tea sweetened with the native sugar (from the Sugar Palm) in Samson’s house in Sri Lanka. The effect was similar: a mild caffeine boost in a world that was in no hurry to get anywhere.

In my childhood, either drink would have been unthinkable. We were Missouri Mormons and drinks of this nature were forbidden. But we did live in a fruit-growing area, where small farms, especially vineyards, were all over the place. And of course you know what grapes are used for: something else the Mormons forbid.

Overall, these prohibitions against various kinds of substance abuse protected us from the effects of alcohol and tobacco - no small advantage. Unfortunately, it did not protect us from food abuse, which is rampant in my immediate family.

As I set here, reflecting on the history of my home town, where agriculture has died out completely, I can see the same thing happening here. There is no money in coffee anymore, and the coffee farmers are just barely hanging on. This is a pity, because the difference between what the farmers get, and what consumers pay in the developed world is huge. The middle men get all the profits, and there does not seem to be any way to prevent this.

Starbucks does have a program for coffee farmers who meet its standards – its Coffee Practices, which include fair treatment of employees, and protection for the environment – but consumers in America will have none of this. They have no interest in the plight of coffee farmers – they only want cheap coffee. When I was last in America, living with my cousin and his wife in the DC area, there was a Starbucks nearby. I was eager to go there and taste their latest blend, which I had read about on their Web site.

But my cousin was not interested, and bought his coffee at a nearby McDonalds – where the price was lower and he didn’t even have to get out of his truck, because it was a drive-through. Americans want it fast and they want it easy – and they don’t care about anything else. And they don’t want anything different. They will eat bananas by the bucket – but not papayas, which grow down here easily, and don’t require any agricultural chemicals. Bananas require a lot of them – and treat their workers badly.

History is repeating itself, and agricultural Costa Rica is doomed. Other countries, which pay their workers less and are not worried about the environment, are flooding the market. Everyone is flocking to the cities, in search of jobs – which are scarce.

When I graduated from High School, the situation was the same – we could see no future on the farms and looked elsewhere. The world of our parents and grandparents was gone, and could not be retrieved.

2011
03/21
CATEGORY
Family
History
Life in Central America
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The Times Explains America

Paul Krugman on the banks

Ohio Town Sees Public Job as Only Route to Middle Class

U.S. Is Urged to Raise Teachers’ Status

No one understands America – most of all, Americans themselves. This seems to be a deliberate attempt to avoid reality – a sure-fire way to court disaster.

The solution is simple, and Americans have known it for years: read the New York Times – which now, with the Internet, is easier than ever. Its foreign coverage is not so good, but its domestic coverage is excellent.

When I suggest this to my American friends – back in the States and also down here – I always get a variation on this theme: I’m too busy.

Their lives, and the life of America, is not working. And they are absolutely determined to keep it that way.

2011
03/16
CATEGORY
Economy
Education
Family
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