The trouble with Dunedin

I’ve been living in Dunedin, New Zealand for the past four months having moved from Canada at the end of March to pursue my PhD, and I have been generally enjoying the experience.  The city is, with the exception of some sections, quite lovely; the surrounding countryside is beautiful; and the few trips to the mountains that I have been able to make have been excellent.  Furthermore, the research that I came here to do has been going well, and the University of Otago so far seems to be a good choice for graduate level research, as long as you don’t mind being at the very ends of the Earth.  All that being said, I would be very, very hesitant to recommend to anyone that they should come to Dunedin to study; in fact, I might even recommend against it.  And the reason is the truly appalling rental housing situation in Dunedin.

The trouble is this: in a temperate climate, and one which commonly experiences temperatures cold enough to snow (like it did a few days ago), one would presumably construct a house to be well-heated and well-insulated, especially if the cost of energy is high.  Such is not the case in Dunedin.  In a bizarre case of mass stupidity or greed, houses in Dunedin (and from what I gather, much of NZ) typically lack sufficient heating and/or insulation appropriate to the climate.  An unheated house quickly reaches the ambient outside temperature, and as a result the houses are very cold in the middle of winter.  Cold, as in I woke up in this morning and it was 3°C in my bedroom, and currently it is no more than 12°C in my living room.

Now, I am Canadian, and I’m used to dealing with the cold.  I expect winter temperatures well below freezing.  For me, the winter temperatures here, which have not dropped below 0°C, are warmer even than those that I experienced in Vancouver.  But I am also used to having warm houses, because in Canada if you did not insulate and heat your home, your water pipes would freeze and rupture and you’d have an even bigger problem on your hands than just a cold house.  But here they don’t have the same worries.  Because it almost never freezes, there is no absolute need for insulation and constant heating.  And I don’t care if houses aren’t constant heated; the only time it needs to be warm inside is if I’m there.  I don’t necessarily require it to be a sauna inside, but I also don’t expect to need to be wearing multiple sweaters inside either.  And perhaps that’s why it bothers me as much as it does – I expect to be warm inside.  I’ve almost always taken that for granted.  The fact that it isn’t warm drives me crazy.

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re from a developed and wealthy nation, and you decide to move to another, ostensibly wealthy and developed, nation to pursue your studies or to work.  Imagine further, that upon arriving and trying to find a place to rent, that this new country does not have flush toilets in the residential homes.  Instead, people use chamber pots inside during the night and an outhouse during the day.  Of course, it’s not like you’re a stranger to outhouses, but they are something that you use when out camping or at a roadside pit-stop.  They’re not something you would expect as the norm in a wealthy nation.  And let us further imagine that, because everyone has an outhouse, ground-water contamination is a big deal, so that people or the city has to remove the waste at significant expense.  Given that the houses already have running water, and therefore some sort of sewage connection, would it not be much more cost-effective to install flush toilets in the houses?

And so it is here in Dunedin.  I’m no stranger to waking up in the cold in the morning, having done my fair share of camping, but that’s when I expect it to happen – when camping.  Nor do I expect to be concerned as to whether or not my hands and nose are cold.  Again, that’s something I only expect when camping.  When it becomes a daily concern in your own house, it’s a problem.

Now, that’s not to say that you can’t heat your home.  I do have a heat pump here; a device that has been elevated to a somewhat undeserved pedestal here in NZ.  It can keep it warmer than ambient temperature in here, but I have to pay through the nose to do so.  My last power bill was nearly $200, for essentially a one bedroom apartment, and let me tell you it was not that warm in here.  Depending on how warm you like it, power bills can only go up.  And it’s not like rent is cheap here, either; at least it’s not if you want your own place.  Apartment complexes are nearly unheard of, and given the large student population there is a lot of demand for rental accommodation.  Many students flat together which reduces costs significantly, but if you want a “decent” place here for yourself, the rent is around $780-$880/month.  That sounds like a reasonable deal, but throw a $200 power bill on there every month and it’s suddenly looking a lot more expensive.  And keep in mind that that $200 will only keep you from freezing – it will not keep you comfortable.  What I find so irritating is that the total cost of renting here – rent + power + internet – is significantly higher than what I found in Calgary, and Calgary has a very overvalued renting market because it is driven by the high salaries of the oil industry.  And even though you might freeze when going outside in Calgary, you’re always going to be warm inside.

To be fair, however, it’s not just the renters who live in such squalor, although they bear the brunt of it.  A famous survey here in Dunedin found that it was colder in some students’ flats then it was in their fridges.  Many of the houses here are, to my mind and the minds of people from – dare I say it – civilized places, substandard.  My landlords, for instance, who live literally next door, do not live in a much better insulated place than me.  I mean, double-glazed windows are a new thing here, when places like Canada are moving onto triple-glazed.  The problem really is that the houses in central Dunedin are old – like a century old.  When they were built, people didn’t really insulate their houses, but what they did have was multiple open-pit fire places in the house.  The old houses still have those fireplaces, but it is illegal to use them and they have all been boarded off.  In many of the rental houses, once those sources of heating were closed off they weren’t replaced with anything else.  And, of course, no one ever fixed the problem of the lack of insulation.  Likely this is because of a lack of capital with which to invest in these properties.  People simply cannot afford to fix the problems with the properties, so they just buy a heat pump and ignore the issue.  Those that can afford to fix the problem have moved out of the inner city to the farther suburbs and live in newer houses that are built to a better standard, and they rent the crappy houses in the inner city and have no interest in fixing them up.  And why would they?  They don’t live there!

So to anyone who is thinking about moving to NZ for a study term abroad or to do graduate work, or even to work, keep this in mind: unless you can afford a house built within the last twenty years, you will be cold and uncomfortable during the winter.  And if you’re used to being warm inside even if it is cold outside, it will drive you absolutely mad.

 

Should adults feel embarrassed about reading YA books?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Seriously, no.

I just read an opinion piece from Slate by Ruth Graham that adults should be embarrassed to be reading young adult (YA) fiction.  That’s right – if you’re an adult and reading books that are meant for “children” then you should be appropriately ashamed, and should instead go and read some other, more literary book.  Graham lambasts the entire YA genre as being too simplistic, lacking moral ambiguity and always having tidy little endings.  Unlike more adult books that have unresolved stories and characters with whom one cannot empathize.  This, she argues, is what a truly adult reading experience delivers: the complexity of the real word which YA book slack.

Except that this narrow minded statement is in stark contrast to the real world.  Thankfully, in the real world there are people with whom I can empathize.  In fact, most people are those with whom I can empathize, and that’s a good thing because otherwise all I would feel for them would be contempt; the same kind of contempt that shines through Graham’s opinion.  Not all situations in the real world are morally ambiguous, and great literature does not necessarily need moral ambiguity to be great.  The main plot of To Kill a Mockingbird is quite absolute from the modern point of view, and yet it is on lists of classic American novels.  Why?  Because defining the excellence of a story (which we must remember is what novels are) simply by its moral narrative is a poor choice.  What matters is how the story is told and what questions it makes us ask.  If I read only stories that had ethical/moral questions at their heats then I would be a much more impoverished reader as a result.

Graham’s cantankerousness is mostly directed towards John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, the movie adaption of which was just released this past week.  It is an excellent book, and I do highly recommend that people read it.  Perhaps you don’t like it – maybe you don’t cry near the end.  That doesn’t make you heartless, but crying while reading the book (or watching the movie) doesn’t make you less than an adult either, as Graham might attest.  Certainly, there are some eye-rolling moments in the book – Augustus Waters is an over-the-top egotist and someone whom I find difficult to “like” (as an aside, since I don’t find one of the main characters likeable, does that make the book an “adult” book instead of a YA book?).  There are plenty of books that make me roll my eyes: Lord of the Flies is a notable example of such an insipid novel that somehow has the status of a classic.  But The Fault in Our Stars is built on empathy, about trying to understand a situation that one hopes one will never be in.  It’s not necessarily a book about young love – it’s a book about dying, and watching someone else die, and searching for the possible futile answer to what happens after death.  Increase the age of the protagonists, write in more flowery and less accessible language, throw in some really obscure literary metaphors, and add a dash of Biblical comparisons and I’m sure that Graham would be raving about the “adultness” of The Fault in Our Stars, even though the story and the questions posed would not have changed.

Perhaps what really irritates me the most about Graham’s opinion is that it smacks of elitism.  She essentially stands on a high pedestal and looks down, snootily, on books in the YA genre as being unworthy of serious consideration.  “That stuff?” she sniffs in a pompous accent, “that’s not really art, is it?  It’s just the trash that children read.  It’s not serious art.  Now this, this is high art.”  And yes, she really does refer to some recent YA novels as trash.  She’s one of those that presume to be the gatekeepers to the world of high art, and that enjoying anything less than high art is shameful.  Such a belief would make force us to abandon Shakespeare, whose plays certainly did not fit the mold of high art at the time, or to abandon musical genres such as jazz or rock and roll.  They’re for kids, and adults should only listen to appropriately sophisticated music.

Perhaps, though, the question that one should really be asking is what it actually means to be an adult.  Is being an adult being ashamed of what you do with your time?  Is it being judgemental regarding how others spend theirs?  If I made the statement that anyone who spends their time not working in the mathematical sciences is wasting their time, people would be appropriately outraged.  Graham seems to take affront at the idea that adults might want to spend their time on things she considers childish, like reading YA books.  Perhaps she lumps into that category playing video games or making models out of LEGO.  But does it really matter what we, as adults, do with our time?  Adulthood isn’t (entirely) about doing adult activities like paying taxes or arranging client meetings or dropping your kids off at the pool or talking endlessly about real estate.  It’s about dispensing with the irresponsibility and thoughtlessness of childhood.  I find it ironic that, in an opinion piece about adults behaving as children, the author displays a stunning thoughtlessness that could only be expected from a child.

And let’s face it: anyone who aspires to be a columnist for an online news site should be ashamed of themselves.

Quitting…

So…I quit my job last week.

It wasn’t the easiest decision to make, nor was it the easiest to follow through, but it had been brewing for a long time.  In the time between deciding to quit my job and actually following through with it, I’ve accepted a PhD position in Dunedin, New Zealand with an atomic physics group.  Now, obviously many people have quit their jobs and there wasn’t much that they wanted to say about it, but I want to explain my circumstances in case there is anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation.  Let them know what they may be getting themselves into and let them correct any preconceptions.

I started my MSc in physics in 2010, and it took two years to write my thesis and finish my degree.  For much of the time that I spent there I did not enjoy my work.  If not for some of the people that I met there, and who later became my friends, I may have quit before finishing my thesis.  A number of things contributed to my unhappiness regarding my work and my research.  One was my advisor, who at times acted like the most outrageous combination of parodies of professors and Russians combined.  His philosophy on how to motivate his students was to embarrass and humiliate them, usually in front of his other students; a policy, I might add, that ceased to function once his students realized the scheme.  He offered little support on the projects that I worked on, as they were not even in his field of expertise.  His interest especially faltered when it became clear that the initial project that I worked on (quantum memory) would not be as simple and clear-cut as he thought it should be.  His research goal was so narrowly focussed – storing quantum light at high efficiencies – that he was blind to other possibilities.  There was little encouragement to explore these other opportunities, and all our focus was to be on achieving the holy grail of high efficiency storage and retrieval.  Despite the lofty goal, we had to work on what felt like a shoestring budget.  We never had enough components, and it took forever to get him to approve significant expenses.  Cheap solutions were always preferred even when they clearly wouldn’t work.  It’s no wonder to me why the quantum memory project never went anywhere.

Another problem was the person with whom I was working; a PhD student who was, ostensibly, the senior member of the team.  I pretty much had to take over the project because we weren’t getting anywhere.  I think what had happened was that the negative atmosphere that was generated by our advisor had essentially crushed his motivation.  Suffice to say that it was not particularly pleasant working in the lab with someone who was depressed over the thought of getting his experiment to work and of ever finishing his thesis.

My advisor’s personality, my co-worker’s lassitude, and the difficulty of working with limited supplies all contributed to my distaste.  But what really made me dislike my research and made it hard to get up in the morning was the unceasing optimization of the experiment in order to get a certain number higher than a certain other number.  There wasn’t really any science behind it.  Sure, there was some thought and even some ingenuity, but most of the days were spent mindlessly tweaking knobs in the lab in order to boost the memory efficiency.  To put it simply I was bored.  Very bored.  I had hoped in my MSc that I would be able to actually do some science, but for the most part I was an underpaid technician who did a job that a computer could have done if we had more than a heuristic algorithm.  Near the beginning of my second year I had pretty much decided never to pursue a PhD, and I secured a job with the company I just left last week, CGG – a geophysics company.

By chance, however, a new project came up due to (what I like to imagine was) a late night drinking binge between my advisor and another professor at a conference.  The project was about investigating the optical Goos-Hanchen effect in atomic gases when they were driven coherently.  We were attempting to achieve a massive beam translation, and while that could have easily turned into yet another number that we would painfully try to optimize it didn’t.  Instead, we got sidetracked by other interesting effects as we should have been with the quantum memory project.  That is what happens in real science: you see an interesting effect that you can’t explain and then you try to explain it.  And so it was here.  I spent at least half my time on this project, not in the lab, but in my office trying to come up with a theory that would explain what we saw and would also predict the magnitude of the beam shift that we expected.  While the project wasn’t exactly wildly successful (we never saw our gigantic beam shift, and there were aspects that I couldn’t explain to my satisfaction) we did manage to get a publication out on one aspect of the research.  It didn’t really matter.  I enjoyed what I was doing, and when I finished my degree I had started to revise my position on doing a PhD.

What was the difference between the first project that I worked on and the second?  It’s pretty simple: the second was essentially a creative project while the first was not.  The quantum memory project was all about optimizing a single number; I have one particular memory of trying to tell my advisor about the myriad problems in the lab and he only wanted to hear about the efficiency.  Often I felt like I didn’t actually have to think about what I was doing: I just had to tweak knobs.  That was probably one of the reasons that that project never went anywhere.  In contrast, I had much more control over my thesis project, and I could stop to investigate interesting phenomena and such investigations were more encouraged by my advisor.  I had to piece together the literature on the subject and then derive my own theory about the experiment which I eventually polished into a formal argument.  That took creative thought.  I had to design and then implement the experiment.  That took creative thought.  The difference, then, was that in one instance I was actually creating something novel, whereas in the other I was just doing what others had done many times before and doing it worse.

However, I had a job to start and I was looking forward to it.  And for the first couple of months I did enjoy it because I was constantly learning about seismic exploration and seismic data processing.  That learning stagnated, unfortunately, after about 6 months.  After that I was mostly bored with brief periods of interest.  For those of you who don’t know how seismic data processing works, it’s very simple.  During exploration a series of “shots” are fired – often dynamite but sometimes vibrating trucks – and the acoustic signal that is reflected back to the surface is recorded.  The processor’s job is to take that raw data and turn it into a representation of the subsurface structure.  While there is some licence for creativity, especially for noise attenuation, it is very formulaic.  Very algorithmic.  My friend, who actually is doing a MSc in geophysics, described the job very succinctly as “It’s like you’re a human computer.  If the algorithm wasn’t so heuristic you could get a computer to do it all.”

Let me tell you that I finally comprehended, on a very deep level, what the phrase “bored to death” implies.  It means having so little intellectual stimuli during the majority of your day that you don’t feel like doing anything during the evening.  I felt tired and depressed because I couldn’t muster the energy or enthusiasm to work on any of my other pet projects at home.  The tiredness surprised me because I worked far less intensely and for far fewer hours at CGG than I did when I was a grad student: compare nominal 37.5 hour weeks to 55 hour weeks.  The amount that I actually worked at CGG was much less, and yet you can get a glimpse of how easy it all was because all my managers absolutely loved me.  But that boredom persisted, and I felt like I was dying because my brain was dying.  I honestly feel stupider now than I did when I started working in the so-called “real world.”

The only times that I truly felt engaged and enthusiastic about my job were the few times when I got to write some shell scripts.  Those instances required me to create something that did not exist to solve a problem that hadn’t been encountered before.  Or at least a problem without an efficient, automated solution.  They required some form of creative thinking that I was being denied in my position as a processor.

I can clearly see now the similarities between my “real” job and my first project in my MSc.  Both of them were very algorithmic with little need for creative thought.  They engaged only the meanest, most basic parts of my brain.  As such, my brain searched for a lot of distractions.  I once joked to a friend that my job at CGG entailed listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and watching BBC Horizon documentaries on YouTube.  I didn’t need quite the same number of distractions with the quantum memory project, but it still had that same mind-destroying boredom associated with it.

Now, I don’t want to denigrate the intellectual abilities of anyone working at CGG or in similar kinds of jobs.  The people that I got to work with were all very intelligent people, and they had to be because they were working for the leading geophysical service provider in the world.  In addition, they were all wonderful and supportive people to work with and work for.  The two managers that I had at CGG were among the best that I have ever had, and they provided me with lots of opportunities that others in the company might not have received.  And while I’m at it, I should also mention that the company atmosphere was excellent.  I was paid very, very well (especially considering that I had no experience in the field), I had generous benefits, and there were lots of fun social events and workshops.  As long as you know what you’re getting into, and what your job requires in specific terms, I would whole-heartedly suggest that anyone interested in geophysics take a look at their job offerings.

I don’t know if my experience in industry is typical or not, but I sincerely hope it isn’t.  Even though I’m going back to academia to do a PhD I maintain a sense of realism about my long-term job prospects in regards to doing academic research for a living.  The odds are weighted against me.  I hope that there are interesting jobs waiting for me in academia.  I just feel like I need to do more with my life than work as a human computer – I need to create.

“Do what you love; love what you do” is a dream, not a value judgement

I came across article the other day in Slate (http://dft.ba/-7ZiZ) about the mantra of “do what you love; love what you do.”  The article attacks the idea by arguing that it is bad for workers and devalues the work that most people do which is not the kind of work that people would “love.”  Factory line workers, baristas, retail workers, housekeepers – they all do work that they probably wouldn’t do if they didn’t have to work to live.  There will be exceptions, of course, but most people in those professions would not claim to “love” their job.  However, the article’s logic is flawed, if there was any logic at all in the first part of the article’s argument at all.  The author’s assertions are not backed up by any reasoned argument and lead me to exclaim many, many, times “What?!”  Nevertheless, I wish to present my view and my defense of the “Do what you love” mantra.

The idea of doing something that you love in exchange for a livelihood isn’t some kind of value judgement – we don’t think less of people who don’t have the opportunity to turn their passions into profitable careers.  Most people can’t.  “Do what you love” should be interpreted more as a dream than a goal, and I think that a lot of people would agree that it’s their dream to be paid to do something that they are passionate about.  But it is a dream, and more often than not dreams don’t materialize.  Maybe your passion really isn’t something that can be monetized – such as if you loved building model train sets.  Or maybe you don’t have the opportunity to pursue your dream because you have to work to support yourself and there is no way you can go to school and pay for an education to get into your dream career.  Maybe you have dependents for whom you have to care, and that precludes pursuing the dream of doing what you love for money.  In any event the dream is still there, but it doesn’t diminish the value of doing honest work that needs to be done anymore than my dream to climb Mount Waddington is a value judgement against those who would rather not, or the dream of someone to have children is a value judgement against those who would rather remain childless.  My dream does not render valueless the labour of those who make it possible for me to pursue it.

People should pursue their dreams when practical, but it should always be remembered that it isn’t always practical to do so.  Being able to pursue your dreams is an indicator of being in the elite – if you can actually set your goal to be “doing what you love” then you are very lucky.  I was very lucky to be able to pursue a Master’s degree in physics and get paid well to do so.  I’m lucky that the thing that I’m good at and passionate about is something that society deems to have value, and that I can reasonably expect to have a profitable career pursuing my passion.  But I know that not everyone is as lucky, and I’m certainly not looking down on them.  There is value in doing work that needs doing, and sadly enough one could easily argue that what I want to do with my life does not need to be done and hence has no value.

So I don’t think that the idea of doing what you love is actually devaluing the work that most people do every day.  I do, however, agree with the second half of the article’s argument that this mantra is devaluing the work that people do in fields where people are typically passionate like academia, fashion, or the arts.  People should be paid fairly for their work – the opportunity to do something you love does not put food on the table.  If I wanted to apply for a job as an assistant professor in physics, I have a good idea of what kind of salary to expect and I better damn well get it.  Whether or not I love my job is beside the point.  The same goes for the people who end up in adjunct positions – if a university can’t give people a wage and job security commensurate with the value that they add to the university then they shouldn’t be offering the job at all.  And similarly for unpaid internships.  I find the whole idea of unpaid internships absolutely abhorrent.  Here we have profitable companies who exploit the desires of young people like sexual predators in order to get free or even less than free labour.  How is this even legal?  I can understand non-profits having volunteers because they have a different mandate and they simply don’t have the money to pay people, but a for-profit company is in the business of making money.  That is it.  If someone adds value to your company then you should – no, you must – pay them a wage commensurate with that value.  If you can’t do so, then don’t hire them.  Don’t even have such a position available.  It unfairly distorts the dream of being able to do what you love for a living towards those who can afford to work for nothing – i.e., those that are already rich – at the expense of those who must support themselves through their labour.

Having the dream that you want to get paid for doing something about which you are passionate is a worthwhile dream.  But not having that dream, or not being able to pursue it, should not in any way cast judgement on the necessary work that people do to keeps the world turning, and allows some people to actually pursue their dreams.  Maybe us lucky few need to admit just how lucky we are.

Immorality and Absolute Morality in Fiction

I want you to consider Philippa Foot’s trolley problem: there is an out-of-control trolley running down a set of railway tracks towards five immobile people.  If the trolley hits them they will all surely be killed.  There is another track, however, where there is only one immobile person.  Again, if the trolley went down this track then this single person will be killed.  You can activate a switch that re-directs the trolley from the track with five people to the track with one person.  Given these two choices and only these two choices the question is: what should you do?

                I think that it is safe to say that most people will choose to divert the trolley to the track with only one person.  We believe that, given no large disparities between the five people and the one – such as one group being very old or young – that five lives are of more value than a single life.  It is a reflection of our rationalization that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”  This experiment is a concocted scenario where the moral dilemma and the possible choices are very clear cut, so it is easy to apply the Vulcan maxim.  In real life, where the situation is more nebulous, we are less inclined to live rationally.  Take, for example, our unwillingness to donate the majority of our income to those in extreme poverty in an effort to improve their lives when it would have little effect on our own survival. 

                Now I want you to consider an interesting variant on the trolley problem.  Instead of there being a secondary track with a single person on it, there is now instead a single and very fat man whom you could push onto the track and derail the trolley, thereby saving the lives of the five potential victims.  Again, you have only the two options: do nothing, and let five people die, or push the man onto the track and kill him, but save five people. 

                From my point of view, as a non-professional ethicist/philosopher, this situation is exactly equivalent to the original problem.  While the act of pushing the fat man in front of the trolley seems as though you are actively killing him it is no different from switching the tracks.  Someone is still going to be killed by the trolley, and it will be a result of your action.  Of course, in real life one would very likely find it much more difficult to push a man to his death as opposed to flipping a switch.  It would be the difference between choosing to gas someone to death rather than strangle them with your bare hands.  The end result is still the same, but somehow it feels different.  Some argue that there really is a difference between the active and passive acts, and that the active one is less justifiable. 

                Alright: last variation and then I’ll get to my point.  This variation is the same as the fat man variation except in this case the fat man engineered the situation.  He immobilized the five people on the track and set the trolley in motion.  Now what should you do? 

                Well…but why did he do it?  Does that matter?  If you believe that the active and passive decisions are equivalent then your answer hasn’t changed because the situation hasn’t really changed.  If you believe that the active decision is less justifiable let me make it easier for you: he set this situation in motion out of sheer malice and the desire to do harm.  Now is it easier? 

                “Well…I suppose,” I hear you say.  But are you morally obligated to push him in front of the trolley? 

                “Well…” I hear again.  Let me make it really easy for you, then.  If you do not push him in front of the trolley and kill him, and thereby let five people die, then the fat man will do it again.  He will set up the situation again, and if you make the same decision then five more people will die.  Now are you morally obligated to kill the fat man? 

                I think the answer should be a resounding yes by now.  So why is it that fictional protagonists never do this?  Why is it that when we construct heroes to whom we can look up to as moral characters we always choose to have them act in this irrational and ultimately immoral manner? 

                The best example of this phenomenon that I have come across, and likely the most well known too, is Bruce Wayne’s decisions in The Dark Knight.  The integrity of the Batman persona that Bruce built up is based on his decision not to kill criminals.  For the most part, this is the moral path to take because he doesn’t know the entire background that led to criminality in the first place nor can he reliably extrapolate future crimes.  However, in The Dark Knight Batman meets a man who can accurately be compared to the fat man of the last trolley scenario.  The Joker is someone who again and again demonstrates a callous disregard for human life, a willingness to kill without remorse, and the capability to outwit and outmaneuver both the police and Batman.  Even when he is locked up the Joker still manages to effect a violent and deadly escape.  He clearly demonstrates that he is both a) insane, and b) a deadly threat to other people.  And yet as opportunities to kill the Joker present themselves Batman refuses to do so.  He presumes that he is taking the moral high ground, but his decisions lead to the deaths of more innocent people.  Since the Joker has demonstrated that he will stay the course of violence and death the only moral action would be to exterminate him.  Putting down a rabid dog might seem like murder, but it is the only course of action to protect innocents when presented with unassailable evidence of danger. 

                Or how about that paragon of virtue and morality, the Doctor?  His is a classic example of how thinking that mercy is the morally superior option can in fact lead to immoral choices.  In the season three two-part episode Human Nature/Family of Blood, the Doctor chooses to conceal himself among humans in order to avoid the pursuit of dedicated hunters intent on his death.  His decision, of course, leads to the deaths of several innocent people.  And what is his rationale?  He was being merciful towards his hunters, as they had a very limited lifespan and would have died within a few months.  But what mercy was shown to the innocent victims?  His decision to hide directly led to their deaths.  The moral decision, which would have prevented innocent lives from being lost, would have been to deal with the hunters from the very beginning.  It’s not that he couldn’t have done so; it is made explicitly clear that he had that power.  Yet he chooses to make the irrational and immoral decision to preserve the lives of murderers at the expense of the innocent.

                Perhaps one could argue that these kinds of decisions are what real people would make, and thus they give a sense of humanity to fiction.  However, that’s not really the case because these protagonists are constructed to be paragons of virtue.  Most people don’t have the nearly immovable moral compass that many fictional heroes have.  Most of us would succumb to anger and a desire for vengeance, to the pleasure of exercising power, to the desire to do anything to protect those we love from harm.  The real world has a more complex moral landscape that is infinitely harder to navigate, and it makes decisions about morality and immorality impossible to decide.  In fiction, however, most moral landscapes are absolute, and the morality of decisions is easy to judge.  Statements like Terry Goodkind’s “pity to the guilty is treason to the innocent” are valid philosophies in an absolutist fictional world, but in the gray morality of the real world such a philosophy is sheer insanity.

                Ultimately, moral absolutism can make fiction both frustrating, because the characters act so irrationally, and boring because it has no reflection of the real world.  Humanity is lacking because characters don’t act from complex motives that drive most of our decisions, and these decisions may be moral or immoral.  Absolute good and evil rarely exist in the real world, so why should they exist in fiction?  Give me a complex moral narrative any day.

                A particularly good example of a complex moral narrative that might have escaped others’ knowledge is the Tears of Artamon trilogy by Sarah Ash.  It makes for a very interesting read as one’s opinions on who is right and who is wrong changes as the series progresses.

The peacock, the beetle, and the electronic band theory of solids

Question: what do peacock feathers and beetle carapaces have in common with oil films and soap bubbles?  Answer: their colours are caused by wave interference!  And what do those colours have in common with the electronic band structure of solids – the theory that explains why some materials conduct electricity and others don’t?  Okay, that was a trick question – both are also caused by wave interference.

That’s right: I’m going to explain band theory by way of soap bubbles.  But before I attempt that feat, I have to describe wave interference and the wonderful phenomena which it causes.

The vast majority of waves are disturbances in some medium that transmit energy through space with no transport of the medium along with the disturbance.  In order to generate a wave, we need a medium whose constituent parts have both inertia – they stay moving in the absence of a force – and those parts are acted upon by a restoring force that attempts to bring the parts back to some equilibrium.  Everyone has an intuitive feeling for what a wave is because we’ve all seen them.  Water waves, of course, are disturbances in the surface of the water.  The medium is the water, the restoring force is gravity and since water has mass its constituent parts have inertia.  The same goes for acoustic waves in gases, liquids or solids where the restoring force is due to the material’s natural reluctance to be deformed.

These kinds of waves are mechanical waves: they require a medium in which to propagate.  Some waves do not have this restriction.  Electromagnetic waves – running the gamut from radio waves to visible light to gamma waves – were long thought to require a medium, but it was the great achievement of the Michelson-Morley experiment in that it showed that this is simply not true.  Light can propagate in a perfect vacuum.  Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “But wait!  What provides the restoring force and the inertia to keep the wave going?”  As it turns out, electromagnetic radiation is comprised of co-propagating electric and magnetic waves, and the oscillation of one generates the other.  It’s a self-sustaining system.

Waves, as concepts go, are fairly simple to describe.  The simplest wave usually has a sinusoidal shape and is characterized by an amplitude, a wavelength, a wave speed, and an overall phase.  The amplitude is simply the maximum deviation of the medium/EM field from equilibrium.

Characteristics of simple waves.

The wavelength (denoted λ) is the distance between adjacent peaks or troughs in the wave; more generally, it is the distance between adjacent points of the same phase.  The phase is just a fancy way of talking about what point the wave is in its cycle – is it at the peak, the trough, halfway between peak and trough and moving towards the trough or vice versa?  The overall phase is phase of the wave at the time and place where we set the origin of our coordinates in time and space.  Finally, the wave speed (v) is how fast the wave propagates in space; it is how fast a peak in the wave moves in space.  The wave speed is also the parameter that relates the frequency f of the wave – how fast it oscillates – to the wavelength through the relationship .

Unlike particles waves can exist one on top of the other and can pass through each other, and the total wave is simply the sum of the individual waves.  This is what gives them the potential to interfere with each other.  Let’s say you have two waves occurring in the same location and they have the same amplitude and frequency.  Suppose that the overall phase between the two waves is the same so that the relative phase is zero;

Waves summing in phase.

then the sum of the two waves is just one wave with double the amplitude.  This is known as constructive interference.  Now suppose that the overall phase of one wave is 0° and the other is 180° so that the relative phase is 180°.  This means that one wave oscillates in the opposite direction to the other.  When you sum those together, you get zero; this is known as destructive interference.

Waves summing out of phase.

The vast majority of waves aren’t as simple as that, but it turns out that one can describe complicated waves as a sum – a superposition – of simple waves all with different amplitudes, frequencies and phases.  The interference of all these simple waves gives rise to more complicated waves.

Now that we understand the concept of interference, we can talk about peacock feathers, beetle carapaces, oil films and soap bubbles.  All of these examples exhibit the phenomenon of iridescence where the colour of light reflected from the surface of the object changes depending on the viewing angle.  Iridescence is a manifestation of wave interference of light from reflections from multiple surfaces.  So to understand iridescence let’s imagine a pair of partially reflecting mirrors that are set up parallel to each other and separated by a small distance.  Let’s shine a light beam onto those mirrors so that the beam is perpendicular to the surface of the mirror.  Some of the light will be reflected off of the first mirror, and some will be transmitted to the second mirror where, likewise, some of that light will be reflected back.

Light reflected from two partially reflecting mirrors.

Some of that reflected light will be transmitted back through the first mirror and will interfere with the light that was first reflected.  But will it be constructive or destructive?  The crucial thing to realize is that the transmitted light, in the process of travelling the inter-mirror separation twice, will accumulate a phase difference relative to the light that was reflected off of the first mirror.  The phase shift that it accumulates relative to the light that was reflected off of the first mirror will be 360° times twice the ratio of the separation distance to the wavelength: i.e., the number of wavelengths that the light had to travel.  If the two-way distance is half of a wavelength, then the relative phase will be 180 degrees and the reflected waves will destructively interfere with each other.  If the two-way distance is a multiple of a wavelength, then the reflected waves will constructively interfere with each other.  Thus, certain colours will be reflected much more strongly than others, giving the mirrors a particular hue.  The reflectivity of the twin mirror system looks something like this:

Amount of light reflected based on wavelength of incoming light. Note the sharp features where there is almost no reflected light.

Now imagine that we send in our light beam at an angle to the mirrors, so that it isn’t perpendicular anymore.  The path that the light between the mirrors has to travel is slightly longer than it was before, which means that the wavelengths required for destructive and constructive interference have to be longer as well.  Thus, as you change the angle of your light beam, the reflected light will be comprised of some colours more than others, and thus as you change your viewing angle the colour of the mirror surface will appear to change.

Light reflecting from two mirrors at an angle. The path length is longer now.

In peacock feathers and beetle carapaces, the interference is termed thin-film interference.  Light is reflected from thin, layered structures on the animal’s body and the colours that we see are determined by the interference pattern of the light.  Oil films and soap bubbles are also examples of thin-film interference – in those cases the interfaces at which reflection occurs are the air-oil/oil-water interfaces and air-soap/soap-air interfaces, respectively.  And if you are wearing glasses with anti-reflective coatings on them, take them off and look at the lenses from an angle: you’ll likely see a coloured tint to the lenses that you don’t see when they are on your face.  The anti-reflection coating uses the principles of thin-film interference with a few embellishments; namely, they have more than one layer that makes destructive interference possible for nearly all wavelengths in the visible spectrum.  Destructive interference for the reflected wave implies constructive interference for the wave transmitted through the lens.

What does all this have to do with the band theory of solids?  Well, remember how…

“Wait, wait, wait,” I hear you say, “Just what is band theory?”  Band theory is the description of how the electronic energy states in a solid are distributed.  In many systems, like atoms, the energy levels are distributed more-or-less evenly across the entire spectrum of energy with perhaps one hard cut-off.  In solids, by contrast, there are large and repeated gaps in the energy spectrum where there are no allowed energy states for electrons to occupy.

A generic example of band structure. Large regions of allowed particle/wave energies are separated by forbidden energies.

These gaps are then surrounded by a near-continuum of allowed energy levels.  Why is this?  That’s what I was getting to…

So remember that I said that some waves aren’t mechanical – they don’t need a medium through which to travel?  One of those types of waves is the EM wave; the other is quantum mechanical particle waves.  In the case of particle waves, nothing physical is doing the “waving”: what is oscillating is the probability of measuring a particular attribute of the particle, like its position or momentum.  Weird, yes, but we don’t have to dwell on the philosophical repercussions here.  Suffice it to say that the wave nature of particles is an established fact.  These waves exhibit the same phenomena as their more concrete and understandable cousins; namely, the ability to interfere with each other.

Now, the physical situation in solids is this: we take a bunch of atoms and stick them together in a crystal.  The bonding of atoms to each other liberates some of the outermost electrons of each atom, and these are free to drift aimlessly throughout the crystal.  The critical points are these: the electrons interact with the ions – they can be reflected off of them – and the ions – by virtue of being in a crystal – are arranged in a periodic pattern.  If there were only two ions, we would have the same situation as the light with the two mirrors: the reflected (and also transmitted) electron waves interfere with each other and depending on the wavelength and ion separation they either interfere constructively or destructively with each other.

The difference with this system is that it isn’t just two reflectors that we have to consider: there are an enormous number of them arranged in a three-dimensional periodic pattern.

Electrons travelling through crystals experience multiple reflections between different ions, and this leads to both allowed and forbidden wavelengths/energies.

The multitude of different paths that an electron can take as it is being reflected leads to a broadening of the regions where there is constructive and destructive interference.  And since the electrons can’t actually leave the crystal, the wavelengths where there is destructive interference means the electrons don’t get transmitted out of the crystal: those electron waves simply can’t exist in the crystal.  Since wavelength is inversely related to frequency, and hence energy, there appear energy gaps in the allowed energies of the electrons in the crystal.

It is the band gaps between allowed energies of the electrons in crystals that gives rise to the enormous range of electrical and thermal conductivities of solids.

Insulators, on the left, are filled to the top of an energy band so the electrons can’t be promoted to higher states where they can move around easily. Conductors, on the other hand, already have electrons in a nearly empty energy band and these electrons can move around easily.

In insulators – materials that don’t conduct heat or electricity well – the electrons fill up the allowed energy levels below a band gap, but they can’t get enough energy to jump over the gap to open states that allow them to move more freely in the crystal and thus conduct electricity.  Conductors, on the other hand, already have electrons in an energy band above a band gap, but since there is room to spare in that allowed energy band it is easy to make the electrons move by promoting them to higher energy states.  Electrons that can move easily can conduct charge easily, and these materials thus conduct heat and electricity very easily.

So there you have it: the conductivity of solids is just a jazzed-up version of thin-film interference: the same thing that makes peacocks, beetles, and butterflies so interesting to look at.

Universities, Liberal Arts, Science, and the Coffee House: The Conspiracy of Coffee in Europe

Ah, coffee.  That bitter, fragrant, and delicious brown liquid that wipes away weariness.  Truly, it is the keystone of the modern industrial world, for without coffee we would be unable to sustain our hectic lifestyles of work and socializing, and instead we would have to devote more time to that criminal waste of time, sleep.  But I daresay that very few of you have really stopped to consider, as you stumble blearily into your favourite coffee shop for your next latté or espresso, the true history of coffee.  And for those few that have, I suspect that you have been fed the usual story: that coffee was brought to Europe from Mocha, Yemen via the Arabs and the Ottoman Empire.  The creators of this story would have you believe that the single most important drug in the history of humanity gained widespread use because of random trade, and thus it came to Europe simply by accident.  Is it plausible that such a momentous event could have occurred spontaneously?  Of course not; there were hidden players behind the scenes.  Here I shall tell you the true history of coffee in the West and of the sinister puppeteers behind it all.

The story of coffee starts, not with Sufi monasteries in Yemen as others would have you believe, but with the formation of the first universities in Europe.  The first university was the University of Bologna in 1088, followed by universities in Paris, Oxford, Palencia, Cambridge and others in the next hundred and fifty or so years.  Those who went to university studied grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music and so on.  Then, as is now, these studies were called the “liberal arts,” and thus those who graduated from these early universities would today be called liberal arts majors.  When universities first started training young men in the liberal arts all those centuries ago, there were very few people with liberal arts degrees, and thus those who graduated could usually find a position where they could work.  But that changed over time…

As more young men went to university to obtain the coveted liberal arts degree, the value of the degree went down.  The same phenomenon of youth unemployment that we see today is a result of that early devaluation.  All the positions that a liberal arts graduate could have hoped to have acquired were already taken, and thus the continent was flooded with a glut of young men who had no skills other than to argue about esoteric subjects.  What useful work could they possibly do?  Now, to enlightened economic thought it would appear obvious that as the value of the liberal arts degree decreased the number of people who undertook the journey to get a degree would also decrease, and eventually the system would reach equilibrium between those who obtained a degree and the number of potential job openings.  Those who ran the universities were smart enough to see the problem, and they knew that as the value of the liberal arts education decreased so too would their revenues.  They had to keep people believing that the degree that they obtained would have value.  How they gnashed their teeth and wrung their hands as they tried to find a solution to their decreasing revenues!  And then one day, they found it.

We will never know who it was or with what university he was affiliated, but we do know that his revelation came in the early fifteenth century.  His revelation was diabolical in its simplicity.  What they needed was to manufacture – out of thin air – an industry that could never die and would take as employees pretentious fools who had no skills other than that of arguing.  His idea was to get the whole world hooked on a powerful drug, which had only been hinted at by the great Arab commentator Rhazes, and then to employ the graduates of the universities as the lowly merchants – nay, not even merchants, but simple clerks – who would sell the drug to the wealthy.  It would provide employment for the liberal arts graduates and thus revitalize the value of the degree and keep the universities’ revenues stable.

A cadre of dedicated monks was assembled, and off they travelled to the far-flung reaches of the world where they eventually landed in Yemen.  There, they found the legendary bunchum written of by Rhazes, and they convinced the Sufi monasteries in Mocha to start brewing the plant seeds.  Thus began the drink known as coffee.

Long did these monks labour in the Arab world.  They formed a secret society that spanned centuries to ensure that their goal – the spread of coffee throughout the world and to Europe in particular – would be accomplished.  Eventually, nigh two hundred years later, after coffee had spread throughout the Arab world, the first coffee house was opened in Venice in 1645.  Coffee houses in all the major population centres in Europe soon followed.  The problem of the unemployable liberal arts majors had been solved.

Or had it?  For in the intervening two hundred years between the nameless chancellor’s brilliant idea and the arrival of coffee in Europe the numbers of university attendees had grown exponentially.  There simply weren’t enough wealthy people in European cities to sustain a large enough coffee shop industry to employ all the liberal arts majors.  The value of the liberal arts degree was threatened yet again, and with it the revenue of the universities.  What could be done?

Again, we do not know his name, for the puppeteers of universities are secretive and seldom acknowledge their power.  But we do know that his idea was even more cunning than that of his ancient predecessor.  He said, “We must manufacture wealth from nothing, create it where it did not exist before.  Observe!  The natural world is the progenitor of all our wealth; let us encourage the empirical study of the natural world, for it shall create immeasurable wealth shared amongst innumerable men.  And these men shall be able to afford coffee.”  And lo!  Science was born.

The puppeteer’s plan came in two parts.  First, training of scientists would naturally occur at universities, so the universities would collect more revenue from both the liberal arts and the science students.  It might appear at first that the liberal arts students would all go into science eventually because of the much better prospects for employment, but then, as is now, there are always those who would rather spend their days idly contemplating the metaphorical implications of this or that rather than trying to truly understand the natural world.  The second part of the plan was that science would drive economic growth in the world and increase the levels of general wealth.  Thus would more people be able to afford coffee, and the need for coffee shops would grow.  Employment for liberal arts graduates in coffee shops would be guaranteed.

And look now at how successful that plan has been!  Economic growth exploded during the industrial revolution, and we now live in the wealthiest time in human history.  There are many, many universities, each one producing both scientists and liberal arts majors to continue the centuries old plan to keep increasing university revenues.  The number of coffee shops is almost uncountable.  Not only do we have a coffee shop on every corner, but we often have multiple coffee shops on a single corner!  Think about the cultural stereotype of the liberal arts major: where does everyone suppose they will end up working?  As a barista at Starbucks.  This stereotype isn’t an accident; it has been planned through the centuries.

Next time you wander into a coffee shop to get your life-giving venti latté from the bored-looking barista, think on this history.  Think on how the entire modern world is simply a by-product of the need to retain the value of a liberal arts degree by employing those same graduates in coffee shops.  And think, too, on how your own life might be shaped by invisible puppeteers.

 

The culture of masculinity at the World English Sporting Clays Championship

    I recently participated in the 2013 World English Sporting Clays Championship in Cambridge, Ontario.  I say participated, not competed, because I’m not good enough to compete on the world stage.  But I still participated, as did a large number of shooters from all over Canada, the US, England, Wales, Ireland, and Sweden.  For those who are unfamiliar with sporting clays the concept is pretty simple.  Shooters walk around a course which consists of a number of distinct stations.  Several clay targets are thrown at every station, and each shooter attempts to shoot the targets using a shotgun.  The presentation of the clay targets and the landscape varies between each station, and the competitor who hits the largest number of targets over the entire course wins.

Setting up a sporting clays course requires a large capital investment and a great deal of work to maintain and run.  Shotgun cartridges, while not as expensive as high-caliber rifle cartridges, are not cheap either.  The typical cost for a 200 target course ranges from $220-$300, and that’s just for one day’s worth of shooting.  Shotguns that are designed for target shooting are not cheap either because they have to be able to withstand many tens of thousands of rounds passing through them, so they cost upwards of $2000.  All this is to say that sporting clays is a very expensive activity, and it typically attracts two casts of characters.  The first group is wealthy, older men who own their own business, are higher-ups in someone else’s business, or are retired.  The second group is younger men who typically work in high-paying, blue-collar careers – usually skilled trades associated with resource extraction.

Both groups are male: women make up a very small minority in the sporting clays community.  And it’s not just that both groups are comprised solely of men, but that they are comprised of a particular cross-section of men: those whom I would describe as, for lack of a better word, “rednecks.”  To be clear, when I say redneck the image that comes to my mind isn’t that of a perpetually drunk, un- or underemployed, illiterate layabout living with five bastard children and his equally illiterate wife, surrounded by the rusted carcasses of all the cars he has ever owned and the faint twanging of the neighbour’s banjo.  When I think of a redneck I think of someone who lives or would prefer to live in a small town or on an acreage, drives a pickup truck and wouldn’t want to drive anything else, hunts and/or fishes, and owns several firearms.  I am not thinking “stupid.”

As you might imagine, when you have a group of people who share a similar culture or similar values, and furthermore they believe/know that others share their values, the biases and prejudices associated with that particular culture will be voiced.  Add the fact that rednecks are generally outspoken people, and it is nearly a certainty that opinions and comments will be aired that, taken together, will provide an overview of the entire culture.  At the World English, it wasn’t just one culture that was presented, but two.  The first was the aforementioned culture of the redneck, and the second was the culture of masculinity.

And neither was flattering.

As an example of the culture of the redneck, let me describe a particular comment at the competition.  I was standing around with a bunch of other people who were competing, and they were all drinking as is generally done as a social event after shooting, and we were hanging around the parking lot.  One of the men there noticed that one of the nearby cars was a Kia hybrid car, and he made a disparaging comment about it.  This was picked up by another whom then pointed at his crotch and said, referring to the unknown owner of the car, “I’ve got a tree for you to hug,” to which everyone laughed as though it were funny.

I do not find this funny.  I find it very puzzling.  Purchasing a hybrid car makes financial sense if you drive a lot in the city, and it’s most likely better for the environment (and hence it’s good for humanity as a whole) than purchasing an efficient, all-gasoline car.[1]  It’s certainly a better option for most people than a pickup truck, as rednecks are wont to drive.  Given, as I said before, that rednecks aren’t stupid, it’s likely they weren’t criticizing the financial decision.  I’ve considered that it is more of a criticism of the owner of the hybrid purchasing an imported car (as some of the people involved in the conversation were from Michigan), but from the context of the conversation that also didn’t seem likely.  I have only two theories.  The first is that hybrid vehicles are a sign of society’s increasing concern for the environment, and this concern generally translates into people being more in favour of stricter environmental regulations.  More regulation can mean higher costs for gasoline and thus personal/commercial transportation, and it also means less job security due to lower profit margins for those employed in resource extraction.  Thus, the disparaging comment can be traced ultimately to a type of selfishness.  The second reason is that, given the preference of rednecks to own pickup trucks, a small sedan is seen as unworthy of a real man.

I don’t find the first reason to be that big of a problem; it’s a defensible viewpoint, and I can understand where it comes from even if I don’t agree with it.  It’s the second potential reason that disturbs me, and it brings me to what I really want to discuss in this post, and that’s not the redneck culture.  It’s the overarching theme of the redneck culture: the culture of masculinity.  To highlight the problem with this culture, I’m going to give two examples.

So again, we were standing around the trunk of a vehicle and most of the people there were drinking, and we were discussing the ability of some of the shooters at the event.  Sporting clays is pretty open in regards to age, so there are a few younger (12-ish) boys and several teenage boys who shoot.  Some of these teenagers have shot more than I have or probably ever will, so they’re really good.  In referring to one of these teenagers, a person in the group I was with made the remark that “He’s good now, but once he discovers pussy he’ll go to shit.”  Notice the choice of words: it wasn’t “once he discovers girls,” or “once he gets a girlfriend,” or even “once he discovers sex.”  It was about pussy, pure and simple, as though a woman’s entire worth as a human being is derived entirely from a hole between her legs.

The next example is not something that I have seen exclusively at sporting clays events, but it was brought up there.  I could relate the anecdote, but I think a more succinct explanation is provided by the “hurt feelings report” that was brought up in the conversation:

This report was sent to me by my brother who works as a foreman at a coal mine – the embodiment of the culture of masculinity.  Note that the very idea that one might be upset regarding verbal abuse calls into question one’s masculinity, and further note that the derogatory tone which this “report” takes towards anyone who does not fulfill the cultural ideal of “being a man.”

Who is this “ideal man?”  There are several good talks on the internet regarding the cultural expectation of masculinity[2], but the culture ultimately comes down to a single syllogism: emotions evidence weakness; men are strong; therefore, men show no emotions.  Now, some will tell me that it is advantageous to not show emotions, and that it is very desirable to have control over one’s emotions.  And I will wholeheartedly agree with them.  But it’s not about recognizing the power of emotions, accepting them as part of who you are, and yet maintaining inward and outward calm and serenity in the face of adversity because you recognize that sometimes emotions can get in the way.  The culture of masculinity is about denying emotion and about feeling no emotions, or at least no negative emotions.  As with any rule, though, there is always an exception, and in the case of the culture of masculinity the exception is anger.  It is culturally acceptable for a man to be angry and to show his anger.  It’s even encouraged, to an extent, because showing one’s anger establishes dominance and makes one appear more masculine to other men.  It is evidence towards one’s masculinity.  Verbal and physical abuse of others, even of other men, is a direct product of this need to prove that you are a “real man.”  And for those men that are being abused, to show that you are also a “real man” you have to take the abuse stoically.  As a man, you are allowed to describe in detail why you’re angry at a co-worker or subordinate and how you were justified in verbally abusing them, but you are not allowed to say that the verbal abuse that you suffer makes you upset and sad.

Aside from the embrace of anger as the primary expressible emotion, I can understand the allure of the culture of masculinity.  I’ve had my share of battles with my emotions, and they often threaten to overwhelm me.  Many days I think my life would be a lot simpler and easier to handle if I didn’t have this emotional baggage to lug around.  But I continue to not just carry my emotions around inside of me, but also to express my emotions – negative as well as positive – for two very, very good reasons:

First: If you aren’t allowed to feel or to describe how you feel then you lose the ability to imagine how others feel.  The lack of empathy that the ideal man will inevitably accrue towards other people will lead to him seeing another person as simply Other: someone you do not need to care about in the slightest.  Almost subhuman they become, without the complex webs of desires and experiences that make each of us unique.  It leads, as the author John Green would put it, “to a failure to imagine other people complexly.”  This lack of empathy leads to disparaging comments about hybrid owners.  They don’t have both rational and irrational reasons for buying a hybrid vehicle; they must be tree-hugging pinko liberal commies (or some such).  It leads to the objectification of women.  They aren’t complex human beings; they are simply “pussy.”  Their sole use is that of pleasing a man either physically or as a boost to the ego.  And as women are generally more comfortable showing their emotions, they are viewed as being in opposition to men rather than as being complementary.

Second: The only reason that anyone does anything of worth in this world is because they care.  Passion drives people onwards; it starts them on their journey; it sustains them; and it picks them up when they stumble and fall.  If people didn’t feel that deep, burning desire then we as a species would be no different from the lowest of animals.  But when you accept the good – the intense love of your cause or the passion you feel for a goal – you have to accept the bad.  If you aren’t upset by failure, then you obviously didn’t care in the first place.  You can’t have one without the other.

The cultural ideal of masculinity is at times unconscious, but it is highly pervasive in society.  It is enforced by the negative attitudes of men towards other men who are more effeminate than the cultural ideal.  It is reinforced by advertising and popular music whether it is rap – notorious for its degradation of women – or rock and roll which, from some of the music I have heard on the radio, is almost as bad.  It is also reinforced, surprisingly, by some women.  I have seen this in my own experience, and in a follow-up talk to her TED talk on the power of vulnerability, Brené Brown related the anecdote of a man who said, referring to his wife and daughters, that “…they would rather me die on top of my white horse than see me fall off of it.”  Men cannot show weakness – ever – and so they end up trapped by their own shame into accepting the cultural ideal; the “man box” as Tony Porter put it.

And yet, the hallmarks of a “real man” – a denial of emotions, a lack of empathy, and an embrace of anger, aggression and violence – are not a signature of masculinity.  They are a signature of immaturity; the signs of having never grown up from a stupid little boy.

You can ask “who is the ideal man?” and I would say that you are asking the wrong question.  At its heart, it isn’t about masculinity but about maturity.  What defines maturity?  I can’t answer that because it’s a personal journey that everyone will have to undertake and answer for themselves[3].  And I do mean everyone, because maturity isn’t about being a man or a woman.  But as this essay is about masculinity, here is what I think it means to be a man:

A man is not ashamed of his emotions.  He embraces their power, and recognizes that passion is the only reason anyone does anything.  He is not afraid to display his emotions, because authenticity is to be embraced and not shied away from.  I, personally, have cried in front of my friends, and I feel absolutely no shame over it.

A man strives to be in control of himself, not because he denies or is ashamed of his feelings, but because he recognizes their power.  He limits their exposure when doing so would be counterproductive.

A man keeps a tight rein on his anger and almost never shows it.  He only shows his anger in limited amounts and only when doing so will get something done.  For me, anger is the one emotion that of which I am ashamed when I display it because it stems from a lack of self-control and showing anger often leads to it spiralling even more out of control.

A man is thoughtful and embraces rationality.  He makes his decisions based on evidence and not on cultural pressures or blind, unthinking ideologies.

A man is empathetic.  He makes an honest effort to imagine other people complexly.  He treats others with respect by default and assesses the level of respect to give to another person on an individual basis.

A man strives to be a paragon of integrity.

A man is introspective and contemplative.  He recognizes his imperfection and struggles always to be a better man.  He considers his actions within the framework of his own ideals and adjusts his present and future actions accordingly.

I reject the cultural construction of the “ideal man.”   I know who my ideal man is, and I strive everyday to become him.

 

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[1] If you drive mostly on the highway it may not make as much sense.  A fuel efficient car will probably cost you less over the likely lifetime of the vehicle.  Furthermore, hybrid vehicles require a lot of expensive and semi-rare materials in their construction – I’m looking at you lithium – so the total environmental footprint may be larger for a hybrid.  I haven’t crunched the numbers.

[2] Tony Porter’s “A Call to Men” and Joe Ehrmann’s “Be a Man” are good examples.

[3] I can, however, link to a delightfully hircine comic regarding the subject found here: http://www.viruscomix.com/page532.html

A new project: The Prisoner Under the Mountain

So, I’ve decided to try and write a story.  Not a short story, but a story the length of a novel, or more likely, a novella.  I’ve tried to do this before but I’ve never been able to get very far, and I think that’s for two reasons.  The first is that I’ve always written from the heart, and while it’s easy to do when emotions and fresh and upfront, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue when those emotions dissipate.  The second reason is that there was never any real motivation to continue or to finish writing.  In the end, I always knew that I would be the only person who would read it, so what was the point in writing?

The first reason for never finishing doesn’t apply here, because I am not writing from the heart this time, which has allowed me to actually finish a chapter!  And I am publishing it on this blog in order to try and obviate the second reason.  While I don’t imagine that many people will read it, a small number will.  I hoope this gives me the motivation to continue because I can imagine that someone else is looking forward to the next chapter, and, unlike me, they cannot read my mind to find out what happens next.  Putting it out there in a public place also encourages me to write and edit well, because I really don’t like putting poor quality work up for public view.

As this project is supposed to be coherent, I’ve placed it on its own page away from the main blog stream.  Plus, I’d like to keep this blog relatively PG and I can’t guarantee that my story will adhere to that standard.  The link is at the top of the page under The Prisoner Under the Mountain, or you can navigate directly to the first chapter using this link.

I won’t pretend to be any good at writing, so constructive criticism is welcome in the comments of the relevant page.  Needless to say, non-constructive criticism, mean-spirited or downright malicious comments will be summarily deleted.

Star Trek Into Darkness – a great movie that wasn’t

Warning: spoilers ahead

I thought that J.J. Abrams did an admirable job in creating a reboot of classic Star Trek in his 2009 film.  While I have problems with a frustrating lack of details and consistency, he did develop a compelling method of actually carrying out the reboot that allowed him nearly free reign in creating an entirely new universe.  And by incorporating elements directly from the original series, such as Leonard Nimoy portraying the elder Spock, he kept a strong connection to all that had gone before.  In Into Darkness, Abrams has done a similar thing: he has drawn specific elements from the original Star Trek movies and television series and tried to weld them into something new.

Unfortunately, he did less well with Into Darkness than he did with Star Trek.

That isn’t to say that the movie wasn’t entertaining: it most certainly was.  With its budget, it is almost a guarantee that it will be.  As you would expect from a sci-fi action movie, the CGI is beautifully rendered; the action sequences are spectacular; the wry and witty comments are well-placed and well-executed.  But I expect that from a big-budget action flick.  There are hints of something more in the film, but in the end there isn’t a whole lot about Into Darkness that sets it apart from any other action movie.

Let’s start with the plot.  An act of terrorism leads to the revelation that the head of Starfleet is in fact a paranoid, war-mongering villain.  He believes so fervently that war is coming with either the Klingons or some other unknown force that he is willing to throw all rules and morality to the side to develop advanced weapons and keep them secret and under his control.  To me, this is an overused and boring plot device that has already seen its day in several other places in Star Trek.  There is no real depth to Admiral Marcus’s actions – he’s just crazy.  His actions were more of a backdrop in front of which the other major characters could be placed.  I felt, however, that the backdrop was a little too active in the movie, and it overwhelmed some of the other characters’ interactions.

Of much more potential interest were the actions of Khan – or John Harrison.  Khan is a genetically-engineered superman from a bygone era, and Admiral Marcus used Khan’s advanced intelligence and innate savagery to design weapons for him.  The only reason that Khan played along with Admiral Marcus was that Khan’s cryogenically frozen crew was held hostage to ensure his cooperation.  This is the main theme of the entire movie: what people will do for those they care about.  Or at least, that is ostensibly what the theme is, with Kirk and Khan serving as champions on either side of a moral boundary.

The movie starts by Kirk breaking the Prime Directive to save Spock’s life – an act that causes him to lose command of the Enterprise.  This is followed by Khan’s act of terrorism, which is in fact perpetrated by a nameless Starfleet officer who agrees to conduct Khan’s suicide bombing in exchange for the use of Khan’s blood to save his daughter’s life.  Kirk demands to go after Khan after Admiral Pike – his mentor and father figure, since Kirk’s father died before Kirk knew him – is killed, and Khan willingly surrenders to Kirk when it becomes clear that the Enterprise contains all of his frozen comrades inside of torpedo housings.  Khan then allies himself with Kirk to defeat Admiral Marcus and take over the USS Vengeance before holding the Enterprise hostage in exchange for his crew.

It is at this point that there appears to be a divergence between Kirk and Khan in what they are willing to do for their respective crews.  Khan reneges on his part of the exchange deal and attempts to destroy the Enterprise and is only thwarted because Spock managed to beam torpedoes onto his ship instead of the cryogenic tubes that hold Khan’s crew.  As is explained in the dialogue, Khan breaks his word because he desires to continue the war of extermination that resulted in him being imprisoned in cryogenic capsules to begin with – a war to exterminate all life that is inferior to himself and his kin.  This explanation is intended to unequivocally paint Khan as being morally inferior to his antithesis, Kirk, and it takes what could have been a much more complex motivation and reduces it to a bland black-and-white conflict.  Instead, consider that Khan’s crew has been held hostage by Starfleet; that he has been essentially enslaved by Starfleet to design weapons; and that he has been hunted down by Starfleet.  In attempting to destroy the Enterprise, it is plausible that Khan could be trying to still safeguard his crew by removing the only people who actually know of their existence.  He could then escape from living a life as a fugitive.  If Kirk and his crew had been placed in a similar position, it is not clear that Kirk would not do something similar.

Of course, Khan is not really developed as a character to the point where such an explanation would be feasible in the movie, despite being a major character in the film.  I think that this lack of development is due in part to the overwhelming presence of the actions and motivations of Admiral Marcus in the storyline instead of the motivations of Khan.  Khan is thus rendered to be more two-dimensional than the story might permit.  The only characters that have any kind of meaningful interaction are Kirk and Spock, and as in Abrams’ previous Star Trek, the movie is centered on the development of their relationship.  We see, just as in any deep relationship, how character traits from one are picked up by the other.  Kirk gives way to reason and compassion rather than acting solely on mad revenge when he chooses to capture Khan alive rather than destroying him from orbit, whereas Spock throws aside reason for mad vengeance when he pursues Khan on foot in the final scenes of the film.  The most obvious scene where this character swapping is shown is where Kirk is dying of radiation poisoning after getting the warp core started.  Kirk asks Spock how he can feel nothing (the implication being that Kirk wants to feel nothing as he dies) where as Spock is at a loss for words as his own emotions overtake him.  This scene is designed to be the most poignant of the film, and it certainly accomplishes that task.

Unfortunately, whereas the relationship between Kirk and Spock is reasonably well developed, the interactions between them and other characters – as well as the personalities of other characters – are far less nuanced.  Spock’s romantic relationship with Uhura is only treated at a superficial level, and Kirk’s interaction with other people – even his crew – just shows him to be a douche¹.  And Carol Marcus serves solely as an underwear model.  I recognize that in a two hour movie, it’s very hard – if not impossible – to develop complex interactions between more than just two characters, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing when it isn’t done.

Perhaps my view of the movie is just coloured by my disappointment with the overall plot.  Abrams essentially transplanted the whole Khan storyline from the original Star Trek into this new universe.  He did an excellent job of rebooting the franchise with the alternate timeline plot of his first movie, and he could have taken that and gone anywhere with it.  And he didn’t.  Of course, judging a film based solely on your expectations is never fair – just because I expected Abrams to take the second movie in a new direction doesn’t necessarily mean that his story is invalid.  On the contrary, I think his story actually had a lot of merit to it – it’s just unfortunate that he didn’t develop it to its full potential as a nuanced and cerebral story in keeping with the spirit of Star Trek over the years.

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¹ A more interesting way to view this is that Kirk is not meant to be a role model – the audience is supposed to dislike him.  His current incarnation is that of a prolonged, fanciful adolescence and what we, as the audience, want is for Kirk to grow up.