An Unoriginal Post about Originality

Two posts in two days?

Boredom strikes. Well, not boredom: instead the certain malaise that settles over me when I've finished one paper but the deadline for the second is still so far away. It's when I try to finish as much creative or personal writing as possible, until guilt wrenches me back to my work.

Today I turn to the great myth of originality.

It's a hoax. Or rather, an absurdity.

No great idea is ever wholly original. We do more than stand on the shoulders of giants; we are entangled in a web of shared culture and experience. Their mingling creates the conditions for similar thoughts within individuals. These thoughts are born not through lightning from a blue sky, not by our own peerless ingenuity; instead they slowly evolve in our minds, through our society, bubbling up in moments that only seem like revelations.

An example: Darwin's concept of natural selection and evolution did not spring forth in a vacuum. The fundamental concepts informing his theory had been stewing for decades, even centuries; Thomas Malthus or Adam Smith were only the latest in a long line of thinkers propounding ideas of invisible hands or selecting forces. Others, like Charles Wells, developed very similar ideas to Darwin's theory several decades before Darwin published, and Alfred Wallace independently conceived of the full principle of natural selection, albeit in less developed form. Yet Darwin remains a shining example of scientific genius; his work the definition of blinding creativity. He was, of course, a spectacular talent, but his name survives because he was a meticulous researcher, a major name, and he had the connections. Beyond that, and for a myriad of complex reasons, the time was ripe for natural selection.

I remain a bit of an optimist. I believe individuals are capable of unique ideas - but only to a limited degree, and only with limited utility. In the sciences – and by this I include all methods of inspecting our world and ourselves - the foaming crest of something different always travels on a deeper wave. In art originality is especially elusive. It is practically impossible to imagine something completely unique, something totally outside the realm of experience; we can conceive only composites of what we have already seen. There are only so many pieces, and thousands, millions of people have already arranged them in different ways. And again, what is remembered is often less original than it is especially well done. You can always puzzle something together that might seem special, but will it be worthwhile?

That is a critical point. I feel originality is progressively more possible as ideas grow less useful. I can imagine a history of the sociological impact of cactus needles; I can imagine writing a book and sprinkling its sentences at random across the pages. Such groping toward the immortality a truly original thought supposedly brings is perhaps most unbearable in music. Listening to Arnold Schoenberg's experiments in atonality is mind numbing at best, but are the soothing sounds of Indy rock clones much better? Are we doomed to struggle towards originality - to fail spectacularly, or to decay into comfortable mediocrity?

Perhaps, but this is not to despair. Rather, the foolish quest for absolute originality is merely a function of our own egos wrestling with the impossible. On a personal level originality ought to be an ideal, not a goal. Ultimately, what matters is the struggle – our struggle, as a society, a species, to develop new, hopefully more productive ways of thinking and doing. If we do this together, are we worse for it?

Lamentations

One of the fun things about a blog is that you can occasionally look back at a previous post and consider how the world changed since then. When I last wrote the financial crisis was still in its infancy; since then it's expanded into a deepening economic recession. From China to Europe to North America, there's no end in sight. Maybe the stimulus packages will have some impact; perhaps they won't. Here in Canada we don't have to worry about such things. Our sagacious conservative regime has its head firmly in the sand, its focus squarely upon agitating the opposition parties into a political crisis.

Either way things are bad, trending towards disastrous, and there's no end in sight. Meanwhile, I'm on strike. Yes, strike. Every few years at my university students and staff swap books and classes for rusty barrels. It has resulted in pretty decent contracts when compared with the rest of Canada, though we'll see what we get this time 'round.

Our demands are pretty simple. The union represents both graduate students and contract professors, many of whom must reapply for the same job every term, even if they’ve worked at York University for decades (as some have). Meanwhile, though our graduate student membership has grown by nearly a third since 2001, a shared pot of money has not increased at all. We need that money to fund our research; ultimately we must research to eventually earn jobs. We want our professors to have a little job security, and we want our shared funds to reflect an increase in membership.

In a sane world these issues would have been resolved quietly some months ago. However, university administrations across Ontario are standing firm this year, apparently because of a decrease in endowment funds they gambled on the stock markets. Never mind that endowments are used primarily to award undergraduate scholarships; never mind that our university is currently sitting on $150 million raised through fundraisers to improve the quality of York's education. The union has responded by picketing the seven gates to the university and withdrawing its members' labour, to which the university's senate reacted by closing the entire university. 50,000 undergraduates are out of school; 4000 contract staff and graduate students are out in the cold.

With characteristic slowness, I'm working my way towards the point - or, in this case, the grievance.

Ignorance. We live in a culture where people are so swept up by the minutiae of their daily lives that they won't - or can't - consider larger, more abstract issues. A culture where undergraduate students hate their former teachers for locking them out of their classes because they have absolutely no idea how graduate school works, how contract professors live, or how a university is run. A culture where drivers seeking to cross a picket line would rather attempt to ram through strikers than consider the fellow humanity - and legitimate grievances - of those on the other side of the gate. A culture, more fundamentally, where Canadians reward a blundering, Machiavellian Prime Minister with increased support after his dangerous partisanship derails the government in a time of economic crisis. A culture where the majority of Americans (and Canadians) resist a bailout of "corporate fat cats" because they can't be bothered to learn the fundamentals of how their economy works. A culture and civilization ultimately governed by the few because the many don't deserve democracy.

On that note, it seems grim indeed that the economic and political model increasingly gaining currency around the world is that of China. This, too, is born partially from ignorance: China’s growth rates are absolutely necessary to avoid social chaos, and they are in part a mirage founded upon unsustainable environmental degradation. Still, one worries for the future of a supposedly democratic West where the demos can’t be bothered.

The running of the bulls

Apologies for any grammatical gaffes; I write with frantic urgency tonight.

Because this is bad. Actually, bad doesn't begin to describe it.

Greenspan calls it the worst economy in a century. Robert Peston of BBC News? "Meltdown Monday." The Associated Press summed it up in a word: "stunning."

That it is.

I'm a young guy. I've got some vague memories from the old Bush Administration rattling around in my mind; as a doctoral student in history I know my Americana.

But I was a Clinton kid. I entered and just about left my teenage years while Bubba ran things. I remember "it's the economy, stupid" (and my outrage over Clinton mocking an old man). I remember the late great Peter Jennings wondering whether computers had banished recession to the trashbin of history. I remember members of Clinton's administration lecturing the Japanese about their economic failings. And yes, I watched Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, when the biggest news week in, week out was just how high the stockmarket had climbed. I didn't know what it meant back then - but I did know it was good. The economic crises I learned about in those boring highschool classes? Ah, the folly of the ancients. The future was bright, the west ascendent . . . BORING!

What a difference a little George W. makes. Okay, it's not all his fault. It would be simplistic to assume that even a President has absolute control over the vast machinery of our global economy. So let's look at the past eight years from an entirely economic perspective, leaving politics aside for now.

The picture is pretty bleak.

Instability in the Middle East; skyrocketing fuel prices. Failing airlines; a teetering industrial sector (although, how's Halliburton doing these days?). The export not only of low-level manufacturing jobs to the third world but, increasingly, of high-level technical and scientific positions to Europe and Asia. Booming unemployment; plummeting consumer confidence.

The camel was overburdened, but it wasn't a straw that broke its back. Instead, a ten-ton boulder: the credit crisis or, more accurately, the subprime mortgage crisis. Essentially the U.S. housing bubble burst: risk was undervalued, loans given too easily. It's the sort of thing that could stagger a robust economy, let alone that dead man walking Bush had called promising (okay, I can't help incorporating some politics - especially when this is happening).

Is this a good time to mention that one academic who foresaw the crisis years in advance is called Toby Daglish? No?

In the last week things got worse. Credit is kind of important to a modern economy; among other things, it's what drives major purchases and powers the market. And Wall Street bankers discovered they had made their share of bad loans. On September 7 the Federal Housing Finance Agency formally took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, two firms that owned or guaranteed about $12 trillion dollars in the mortgage market.

And then today, for Wall Street "the most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s." Merril Lynch, a financial services and insurance firm, swallowed by the Bank of America. Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, announcing bankruptcy. That's $700 billion . . . gone. And insurance giant AIG, teetering on the precipice of disaster. Oh, by the way: a nosedive in stock markets around the world not seen since September 11.

Through it all home values keep falling, and the subprime mortgage crisis continues, intensifies, a fire that can perhaps only end with the destruction of the forest.

Remember when pundits and party hacks bickered about whether we were really in a recession? The question now is just how bad things can get. Just like I had a certain fascination in seeing how high the markets could go when I turned to PBS in the Clinton years, now I feel a morbid, sinister sort of curiosity when Wolf Blitzer's bearded mug flickers across my TV. How many billions lost today? What news from the front? And could this be the beginning of the end for America's economic hegemony?

I'm no economic expert - not even close. Actually, the most I know about these things concerns the pre-war state of the Nazi economy. So beyond this vague, nightmarish outline and my own surging worry I can't sketch a clearer picture.

But at least the politicians are keeping up to date on things. Right?

Quoth New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine: “I do not understand how we got into this situation."

Just what we need to hear.

Climate and Human History

My thoughts tonight turn to climate change, as often they do. My doctoral dissertation will examine the impact of the Little Ice Age on Dutch society, discerning whether the sudden, prolonged cooling of our planet around 1300 had any part to play in the simultaneous rise to power of Holland in the low countries - and eventually the world. The bigger questions are obvious: how do humans respond to climate change? How does - and did - such changeimpact history? What lessons can we draw - if any?

On a smaller level the questions are just as interesting . . . and significantly more innovative. Did the Little Ice Age have a greater - or, at least, more negative - impact on societies competing with Holland for regional dominance? Did lower sea levels facillitate efforts at land reclamation in the Netherlands? Did they improve access to peat, the driving energy source behind the Dutch Golden Age (and capitalist economy) of the 17th Century? Did increasingly ferocious storms - and the combined response they necessitated - serve as catalyst for the uniquely egalitarian nature of contemporary Dutch society?

Such a pronounced impact would not be unusual given the impact of the Little Ice Age elsewhere in Europe. After all, the Vikings were virtually extinguished as a major European power by the onset of climatological cooling. Greenland was obviously a lost cause (and the suffering there was truly apalling - "chilling," as an unfortunate, unpleasant former colleague would awkwardly announce). Iceland was surrounded by pack ice from the arctic, isolated from the rest of the Viking world. Of course, Viking colonization attempts further to the West were scarcely realistic now. More importantly, Sweden and Norway lost half their population - Denmark a third.

But the consequences were as pronounced a bit farther to the south. In the wake of period of great prosperity Scotland was particularly affected when cold winds first blew from the North; harvests failed beginning in the fourteenth century, farms in higher elevations were simply abandoned, and before long unrest swept across the country. In a cold, dry climate Scotland was increasingly eclipsed by England, which, while gripped by a climate so frigid that the Thames froze over during winter, nonetheless escaped devastation on the same scale. A union of the Scottish and English parliaments was arguably rendered inevitable . . . and it is no coincidence that it followed in the wake of the coldest period in the history of the Little Ice Age.

What consequences, then, across the channel? Strangely, little has been written about the cooling climate's impact on the Low Countries, a region undergoing tremendous change and uniquely sensitive to climatological fluctuations.

Here's another interesting caveat: during the "Little Ice Age" - the most significant cooling event to afflict our planet in 10,000 years - the world's average temperature dipped by 1-2 Celsius.

In 2007 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized the belief of more than 2500 scientists from 150 countries: the Earth’s average temperature will rise by at least 1 Celsius by 2100. Scientists described in vivid terms the catastrophic and apparently inevitable results of such a deceptively small increase, warning of flooding, drought and intensified storms.

Perched on a rollercoaster just beginning its descent, that's what we worry about today - sweeping changes in the shape and nature of our planet driven by a rise of just one or two celsius. But it's happened before, with an impact lessened only by the diminished scale of humanity's presence on Earth . . . and, of course, the absence of a risk for runaway, out of control warming through the greenhouse effect.

Still, the point is simple: what is to come has happened before. That's what makes this project so interesting. If the world is undergoing potentially catastrophic climate change, shouldn't we examine those who thrived when it happened the last time? Thrived, it must be said, by creating an expansive, capitalist economy nearly two centuries before the Industrial Revolution?

It should be interesting. At least . . . as interesting as such research can be.

Farewell to good writing

Well, for one reason or another I decided to start blogging.

Truth be told, I was inspired by my friend Brett. Granted, I've written several abortive semi-blogs; my old website, for example, those annoying notes on Facebook - even an NBA blog mostly in praise of Lebron James.

But I suppose this is different. This is more direct, more open, and hopefully more regular. And, again, in part inspired by gentle Brett. Brett, whose blogs condemning the proletariat or Larry King significantly raised my spirits after a night of heavy drinking. Brett, who revealed the significance of everyday, ordinary thoughts.

My thanks, Brett.

On to other things.

I've been thinking of Alcibiades lately. Beware: I have no clue where this line of thought will lead, so if I stumble across something moronic . . . hang in there.

Alcibiades was a wily Greek who eloquently convinced his compatriots to invade Syracuse. Nicias, a general, disagreed. Alcibiades was to command the expedition, yet the night before he set sail he beheaded a series of statues renowned for their ability to bestow good luck. Controversy marked his departure; when he arrived at Syracuse, a ship overtook his fleet with the news that he would face trial.

Who commanded the doomed conquest of Syracuse? None other than Nicias.

You've got to wonder whether the Athenian invasion succeeded or failed because Alcibiades, in a fit of drunken idiocy, decided those statues would look better headless. Alcibiades was as brilliant a general as he was an orator; his presence, no doubt, would have transformed an expedition renowned for its incompetence. Ever cautious, poor Nicias never stood a chance. And the price was high: 40,000 lost for Athens, and then the empire, and then the Peloponessian war, and then democracy itself.

All because of reckless general's drunken whim.

It's strange how actions shape history in a way the actors rarely understand. I'm not sure if Alcibiades would have particularly cared; from the sources, it seems he'd have downed that wine regardless. But it's a little unsettling that the smallest decisions - will I take another glass? - can change reality. And it's not just for the great: a servant bought the wine, another served it, and of course far down the line someone decided that a vineyard would do well astride the Athenian polis.

Strange because I'm always thinking about how I can reach a position in life in which I'm able to make a real difference - what that means exactly can be a subject for future entries. How darkly ironic, then, that random chance so often decides the course of events. Ironic, also, that often the lowliest people play as great a role as those possessed of real power. Ultimately, perhaps none of us have real power over our actions - or historical footprints.

Just a thought. When you study history you often remember snippets from the past and apply them haphazardly to your own life. They're almost like flashbacks, and to some degree they shape how you view the present. For me they're never remembered with perfect clarity, and so I wonder how my mind shapes what's remembered and ignored. Is memory altered by how and when we choose to access it, or has a memory been permanently shaped at the time of its construction? Is memory subconsciously or consciously assembled?

Probably both.

Anyway, I'm really quite keen to get away from this line of thought. In spite of the temporary title for this page - or whatever it is - I think future blogs will focus less on philosophical meanderings and more on everyday events.