Castle Craig: Whatever goes up, must come down. Fast!

As a practicing bicyclist, I dislike climbing.  I’m not a racer, and the cols of the Tour de France do not call my name.  I like drifting along, enjoying the scenery.

Nonetheless, I decided yesterday to take a little hike over to Castle Craig.  Castle Craig is not my usual kind of ride.  It’s certainly scenic:

But it’s also reasonably steep:

The top photo was shot from the road on the Eatern side of the reservoir, just north of the island, if I remember correctly.  Note that the map leaves off most of the trip from Cheshire due to its zoom level, but that the terrain profile includes the whole trip.

So why did I do this?

In part, because I’m still trying out my leg.  You wonder, when you have a new piece put into you, whether your hip really is going to work as well as you hoped.  I think this will be my last test, because the answer appears to be “yes.”

I now have a pretty good idea that I can climb any hill, including some I’ve been putting off even trying.  Yes, I will stop on the way up a few times, but that’s OK.  And when you go up, the view is worth it:

The other reason I went up was to come down.  I like going fast, and as you can see from the map, the road that goes from ~500 feet to around ~950 feet is pretty straight (on the way up, this is one of the hardest things to deal with, because you can see just how far you still have to go).  It’s also in reasonably good condition, and there are few cars (a number of walkers, though).

I wanted to go down that road.  So I did, but using my brakes most of the way.  The top speed I’ve ever done on a bike was just north of 53 MPH, but that was a good while ago.  This time, I limited myself to 35 or so, and was very glad I had installed excellent new salmon Kool-Stop brake pads that morning!  When I’m coming down a fast road, I alternate front and rear brakes so that I don’t heat up the rims very much.  Good pads are essential for this.

Sitting next to the tower, eating the lunch I’d brought along, was a very cool experience.  I think I may have to do it again sometime.  It’s a beautiful site to see.

A Windy Century/Acceptance, Part I(?)

 

I’ve been getting bad about posting lately; this one has been sitting in my queue for a couple of weeks now.  I originally intended it to be the first part of a longer thought which I now recognize may never happen.  Apologies in advance…

Wait a second.  You’re reading this of your own free will.  Apology withdrawn!

Two weekends ago, I rode a metric century:

A metric century for cyclists-well, it’s not that far.  For you non-cyclists, and those who didn’t learn the metric system in high school, it’s a 65 mile ride (more or less—mine ended up being 68 due to a small navigational issue).  The ride drew a nice circle around New Haven, CT, starting at West Rock and curving around a circle that included Durham and Guilford, finally heading west along the coast roads and north back into New Haven to East Rock.

I’ve always thought the person who named “West Rock” and “East Rock” showed a stunning lack of imagination (I am reminded of Wash’s “this is a good land, and we shall call it ‘this land’”).  Ah, well. It was a very hilly, windy day.  Hills I’ve learned not to mind, because, after all, you will ultimately crest the hill and there will be a payoff.  Gravity is your enemy on the way up, but your dear, dear friend on the way down.  Coming off one significant rise, I hit 38+ MPH.  Wind, on the other hand, generally is only helpful when it’s directly behind you, which it seldom is.  You pedal into an invisible force field that makes you feel weak.  It’s demoralizing. 

On this particular ride, once we hit the coastal section of the ride, it was solid wind, and not behind us.  You just had to push into it, and feel it rejecting you.

And now for the unsubtle segue… 

This got me thinking about groups.  Groups are important, because we all want to be accepted.  Now, a group can be anything from a dyad (you and one other person) to an organization (ideally, pronounced the way Arlo Guthrie says it in Alice’s Restaurant).  Social movements (see my earlier entry) are groups.  So are religions, neighborhoods, youth groups, gangs, cults, associations, bands, etc., etc., etc. ad nauseum.  What could be more obvious?

Yet not all groups are by any means the same.  Some groups are nominal, and some are self-aware; some are exclusive and some are inclusive. 

Some reject, and some accept.

Those that reject are like the wind; you must meet very strict requirements to become part of the group.  These requirements are often things like making a public confession of a particular religious belief.  Once you do that, you have the wind at your back (and, notably, you have drawn a line that separates you from many other people).  What’s more, the group will monitor you and keep you on course. 

There are greater or lesser variations on this theme:  I think of monastic religious orders, the LDS (Mormon) church, or religions we think of as “cults.”  Militaries qualify:  indeed, basic training is as much about breaking you from the past as it is about preparing you to be a soldier.  Further, there is an emphasis on continuing sacrifice often involved in such groups.    Genuine social movements are often of this sort; fraternities and sororities on college campuses partake in this definition to some extent, though their monitoring is generally less, and they share certain aspects of a second type of group.

The second type of group has a steep entry, like a hill, but once you make it in, the costs are a great deal lower.  These are membership organizations, a lot (but not exactly) like the ones I described as MINOs in my entry about social movements.  Often the steep entry is payable in cash only.  Sometimes it involves the consent of existing members. In any event, though, there may be a sense of membership on the part of a participant, but seldom a sense of continuing obligation.

Toennies would see these as aligning with, respectively, Gemeinschaft and Gesesllschaft—community and society.  And would likely see the latter, more “isolating” type of membership as reflective of the society in which we live.

It’s probably a good idea at this point to note that Max Weber, who used the term ideal type, meant by that the fact that we seldom see ‘pure’ examples of any type.  The LDS church, for example, is neither gemeinschaft nor gesellschaft, but a combination of both.  Likewise your local grocery store.  It’s rare, but you sometimes get a nice fast downhill with a strong tailwind (though, ironically, much less rare to get the opposite!).

All of this is preface.  What we usually see is groups that combine wind and hills.  Most important for me, among these groups, is a combination premised largely on acceptance.  Some such groups are formal or quasi-formal organizations (think of the Alcoholics Anonymous network, especially as explored in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest).  AA is not ideal-typical; you have to walk up that first hill to become a member.  Nevertheless, key to the way AA works is the fact that aside from this one item (which may, granted, be central) the group accepts you the way you are.  Some of those accepting groups have also been of the windy variety.  Or maybe it’s a matter of change over time.  Or perception changing with age?

As I think back on my own life, it’s remarkable how acceptance groups have been important in shaping my life.  Perhaps yours as well.

I was one of those kids who had a miserable existence through junior high school (what we now think of as middle school) because I had an easily triggered temper and was eminently teasable.  I had no physical skills, so I was dead last in “choosing sides for basketball”—or anything else. 

Although I had one or two misfit friends before, the first accepting group I can remember is one I fell into sort of by accident.  Being an isolated kid, like many others I read a lot, and that took me into science-fictional worlds.  So, in the late 1960s, I pestered my dad into buying me a rocket.  By that I mean a solid-fuel, reusable, build-it-out-of-balsa-and-cardboard rocket.  These were cool.  There was a group that flew rockets almost every week that met in a church basement near the university, and I managed to get there once or twice a month for the meetings, and almost every week for the launches.  It was made up mostly of college-age guys who were, in a way, proto-geeks.  Some were hippies, some were technology students, some were radio-control modelers.  We all loved rockets.  And as long as you were willing to put days of work into something that was likely as not going to end up high in a tree for the rest of its life, that was cool.  Acceptance.  I was 11 or 12, and I felt like part of a group for the first time.

Then I met a friend, another geek, in junior high.  Bruce became my best friend from 7th through 11th grade.  I got him interested in rockets—which, perfectionist that he was—he preferred to build than to fly.  And he got me interested in electronics, and more specifically, in ham radio.  A small group of 7th-grade geeks (acceptance!) worked together to learn morse code and pass the FCC exam.  We had our tickets, and the world opened up to us!  Still, it was a limited world (things you don’t [or didn’t] talk about on the air:  sex, politics, and religion, which greatly limited its appeal as I grew up in the early 1970s).

As I started high school, though, new interests were stirring, and I left (mostly) these technological acceptances behind.  I now think about junior high as “the wonderful thousand days” (or so) in which I learned that it was at least possible not to be alone.  High school was hard, because the most important groups were those that brought you together with those of the opposite sex.  Something for which tech acceptance had prepared me not at all.  It was no longer teasing that hurt, but being shut out of opportunities to meet those obscure objects of desire.

The first important accepting group in high school that I can remember clearly was a Lutheran youth group that had a lot of members who attended my school.  It all started because at the same time I was getting involved with the other accepting group of my high school years, the theater group (we thespians not only acknowledged, but reveled in the fact that we were losers).  I became helplessly infatuated with a girl who was a member of both. 

I got the impression that she wouldn’t date me unless I was a Christian, and while my family was by no means religious, we were at least nominally Jewish (a fact that had probably contributed to my isolation earlier in school).  Knowing nearly nothing of Christianity, I started by reading the copy of the New Testament that she gave me cover to cover in the course of a school day, and felt somehow instantly liberated.  Christianity wasn’t, as I had thought, about self-flagellation for imagined sins, and wasn’t solely the province of uptight bible-bashers.  It was about peace. 

In retrospect, this was in part an artifact of the translation I was reading, and in part, an artifact of the times (this was the era of the hippy-associated Jesus People/Charismatic movement, and there was more joy in the churches than there had been—or would be—for a very long time.  In any event, I became a Christian.  She still wouldn’t go out with me, and while I carried a torch, I began to care less, because I became part of a group that felt incredibly accepting.  My hair was long?  I decided to grow a beard?  You smoke?  You prefer a different translation? No big deal.  Once each of us had gone up that hill, we had the wind at our backs.  Yes, we watched over each other when one of us began to stray a little, but it was honestly done with a gentleness I haven’t seen in many years.

A good part of this was the youth leader, and the fact that he oriented the group heavily toward music (what we called “praise”).  This was where I first heard guitar (he played a mean 12-string) and fell in love with it.  Before this part of my life was over, I would have my own Christian Rock band.

In any event, as I said, the girl in question was also part of the theater group, and if you were in high school at the time, decades before Glee!, you know as well as I do that the theater was a dumping ground for misfits.  Of the three principle groups in the school—jocks, brains, and burnouts—we had a little of each, but always the folks who were marginal within each category (this was true of the youth group too, I realize as I write this).  The theater was the place where we could come out of our shells and be something else.  We could aspire to a greatness that didn’t depend on physicality, intellect, or the ability to let go.  This was more of a hill group—you simply showed up and associated with the other losers, and you were in.  There was virtually no monitoring, something that caused a little friction with the (slightly) more boundary-oriented Christian group, like the girl who got pregnant her senior year, or the student director who warmed us up with Chairman Mao exercises, or the stage manager who spiked the punch at his cast party with vodka and enjoyed watching the results.

Both groups, though, let me in, and here, more than 35 years later, I still think of myself in their terms.  They remain, in sociological terms, some of my most important reference groups.  They also changed me more than I would realize.  Had I not encountered those groups, I might have become an engineer.  But they altered my course considerably, and for that I will always thank them.

The Jerk with the Blue Tooth.

In blogspace, nobody can necessarily hear you scream…which is precisely what I want to do right now.

I saw something this morning at my local Panera. 

There was this guy.  And he appeared to be talking to himself, until I realized that he had a headset in his ear. 

You’d think I’d have gotten used to it by now.  When I worked in software engineering, it wasn’t terribly uncommon to see the folks in marketing walking down the hall talking to themselves–or rather, talking to the big foam ball that covered the microphone in front of them.  It’ not that they had to walk and talk, it’s that wireless headsets had given them a feeling of empowerment.

I see lots of young people (I’m 55, so I get to call almost everyone “young”) doing the same thing, but fewer than you’d think.  For them, it’s mostly texting, not speaking.

But this guy was my age.  And he talked and listened to the person on the other end while waiting in line, while giving his order, while paying, and while taking his order.  He was talking to both the person on the other end of the line and the barrista.  But he was only listening to the person on the other end of the line.

I hate headsets.

Have you ever been in a doctor’s office talking to the receptionist when you ceased to exist?  The receptionist is looking at you but thinking of–and speaking to–someone else.  Someone on the phone.  S/he’s lost focus.  You no longer exist.

This is what we inflict on other people when we use headsets in public–which, honestly, is pretty much the only time we need to use headsets.

You are implicitly telling the physical person in front of you that you’re dealing with someone more important than they are.  That as far as you’re concerned, the physical person doesn’t exist.

I suppose what I saw this morning was a worst-case example; what could have been a pleasant interaction with another human being instead turned the barrista into nothing more than a machine to supply coffee and a bearclaw to that guy.

So.  The takeaway?  Don’t be that guy.  Treat people around you as ends instead of means, as valuable and worthy of your attention in and of themselves.  A kind word, a thank you, eye contact. 

Don’t just be nice.  Concentrate on being nice.

MINOs

I am a recovering sociologist.  That is to say, I got interested in sociology when I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, went to grad school at the University of Chicago and wrote a Master’s thesis, and wrote much of, and finally abandoned, a dissertation that would have earned me a PhD in sociology, had I finished it and demonstrated a sufficient grasp of German.

I didn’t do those things because I got involved with the process of having children and spending time with them and probably for a million other reasons but largely, I think, because I got bored and because I am one of those people who is scared of finishing things and as a consequence does not do a good job of finishing things.  Finishing things requires that you look back and evaluate.  I’m good at things that are ongoing.

But this bit isn’t about me.  It’s about what I was studying, which was the sociology of social movements.  What is interesting about social movements is how our conception of them has changed over time–and how much that concept has to do with the politics of the period.  Gustave Le Bon, an 18th-century social observer, thought that social movements, which he described as crowds, were necessarily irrational and driven by emotion.  Conservative thinkers have tended to hew to this definition, all the way up (or, if you will pardon the editorial note, down)to Ann Coulter.  Less conservative thinkers, from Charles Tilly to Theda Skocpol, reflecting on some of the social movements that have shaped social policy in the United States (and in which, in some cases, they participated) have come to see movements as both less mob-like and more important.  

I tend to fall into the latter category, and the movements I was most interested in–the gay rights movement (which I “discovered” as an undergraduate in the late ’70s, studying deviance), the antinuclear movement (on which I wrote my Master’s thesis), the movement against South African apartheid (in which I marched)–reflected that view.  While I am tempted to turn Le Bon around and aim him at the Tea Party movement, that would be a mistake.  I suspect it is far more a rational policy “thing” than merely a gaggle of conspiracy theorists.

Anyway, all of this came together early this morning when I was reading a New Yorker article by Nicholas Leman titled When the Earth Moved:  What Happened to the Environmental Movement?  I consider myself an environmentalist, and since that’s one of the movements I’ve thought about and participated in, it seemed like it would be an interesting article to read.

I won’t pretend to be au courant on social movements theory.  But what Leman wrote reminded me of the movement that formed the core of my abandoned dissertation.  That movement, known as the American Agriculture Movement, began as a small group of farmers in Colorado who decided to protest the fall of farm prices (in the wake of export embargoes) by driving their tractors cross-country to Washington, DC.  What fascinated me about that movement was the evolution of the “tractorcade,” over the course of a few short years, into an organization known as American Agriculture Movement, Inc.

The American Agriculture Movement (AAM) had, as of the end of the ’80s, effectively transformed itself from a populist organization into a lobbying organization (I attended, as an observer, one of AAM’s annual meetings in Washington during that period).  In doing so, it had come, as Leman would say, to “play the inside game.”

The environmental movement, born to a great extent out of the decentralized Earth Day of 1970, is emblematic of the inside game.  And perhaps it should be–global warming is not something that individuals can do much about (though we can try).  But as Leman points out, neither is it something that governments are willing to do something about (pointing to the failure of “cap and trade” legislation to even make it to the floor).

The inside game is problematic, however, not because it can never work, but because it leaves so much on the table.  And because it wastes a great deal of the energy that might otherwise come to the cause on administrative expense.  It raises funds instead of consciousness.  What do I mean by that?

Any reader of this blog (and I thank both of you) knows that I’m a serious cyclist.    I ride because it’s better for the environment.  I also ride for the sheer fun.  Consequently, I get involved in a lot of “charity” rides, including the American Diabetes Organization’s Tour de Cure (donations welcome!) and I’m also riding in New Haven’t “Rock to Rock” ride, which is touted as an Earth Day ride.

Now, what’s interesting about this is that the Earth Day ride is not being done to educate people about the environment but to raise funds.  Granted, the money will go to good causes, but it’s money.  Where is the movement aspect?  Why not instead of a ride, get people to clean up their neighborhoods?  To plant trees?  To clean the shoreline?

To be certain, there is some of that.  But there is also organizational overhead, and that’s because money walks.  By that I mean that it’s far easier to pay a few people to work full-time on an issue than it is to get a lot of volunteers to do something about it.  I’m an exception:  as I said, I bike because it’s good for the environment (but then again, I enjoy it, so it’s no loss to me).  But in general, social movements tend to evolve in the direction of least resistance, and that means a transformation from the many to the the organization.

Consider the mailings you get from various “movement” organizations.  The Sierra Club.  The World Wildlife Fund.  The American Diabetes Association.  The National Breast Cancer Foundation.  Rails to Trails.  NPR.  In general, you will get a packet consisting of a letter, often with copious underlining; a gift of some sort (either a sticker or some stamps to make you feel obligated or an offer of bag or mug for a basic “membership.”  And with that membership will come a magazine and some minimal other benefits.

I suspect that much of the basic donation (perhaps all of it) is used up in producing and mailing the packet and the magazine.  And I’ve gotten tired of it (I hardly ever open anything that comes in an envelope marked “First Class Presort” because that’s essentially the term for bulk mailing.

The problem with most of these organizations is precisely that they leave so much energy on the table and collect money instead.  They are Movements in Name Only (or MINOs, pronounced “minnow.”  They are self-perpetuating organizations, existing for the sake of existing.  Sure, their employees are committed to the cause, but they’re also–being employees–committed to their paychecks.

I’m about out of time this morning, but this is something to which I hope to return.  Perhaps, too late to earn a degree, I will be putting some of my dissertation on line.  But before I depart this subject–honestly, probably departing it forever–let me suggest something:

No social movement has ever succeeded by becoming an organization.  True social movements succeed precisely because they are so broadly spread that they precipitate political crises.  They force social change.  The next time someone thanks you for your contribution, ask yourself what you’ve risked.  If you haven’t risked your job, or your life, or at least the social disapproval of family and/or friends, you’re not involved in a movement.  You’re just funding a MINO.

“That’s the way dogs die.”

Today, I was heading back from my lunch ride when I came to an intersection.  A car approaching the intersection with right of way stopped, waiting for me to cross, but was immediately honked at by other drivers.  I waved the car on and it went.  The same thing happened a couple of times more, the squeal of brakes and the sound of horns.  Finally, as I managed to cross, a somewhat aggressive driver in a convertible who scrambled through the light after–as far as I could see– it had changed yelled at me “That’s the way dogs die!”

And I realized that he was right.

Having the right of way never protects you against a mass of steel, glass, and testosterone (or, for that matter, against steel, glass, and a cell phone). 

Be careful out there, be you cyclist, pedestrian, or driver.  Set an example, even if it leaves you feeling taken advantage of.  And, when possible, hold other yourself and other walkers/cyclists/drivers to the legal standard:  do not let a driver wave you through when it’s not your turn.  Stop at stop signs.

And watch out for traffic that doesn’t follow the rules.  Like dogs, we are far, far smaller and more fragile than the dinosaurs that roam the streets.  Someday we will overcome–let’s make sure we don’t die like dogs before that day comes.

 

Monsters (a blog entry in progress).

We’ve all seen this video.

I found Poppy’s report appalling–and yet, as I’m a recovering sociologist, I also found it perversely fascinating.

We want to find that the rapists are generally monsters who tear the wings off of flies and microwave baby kittens. We’re angry because this reporter didn’t find them to be utter and complete beasts But in fact, they’re not.

This isn’t to excuse them because they’re “great football players” or “young men just starting out” or anything else. Just the opposite. I think the message to take away is that people who are not monsters in the rest of their lives can still be rapists.

And that’s monster enough.

It’s rather like the idea that arose immediately after WWII that the Nazis had to be horrible people because they had done such horrible things. They had to be different from us in some fundamental way.

In fact, as Stanley Milgram and other social scientists showed in the post-war period, there’s very little or no difference between a Nazi and a citizen of New Haven. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.

We need to understand that any of us (at a minimum, any of us who is male) can be a rapist. It doesn’t mean that we are. It means that the difference between those who are and those who aren’t can’t be measured by what we do in the rest of our lives. It has to be measured by what we do in this area of our lives.

Moreover, as a friend commented when I made essentially the same post on Facebook, we need to think about the consequences of the rape for the victim.  I missed this.  The victim’s family gets mentioned in this report, but the victim, hardly at all.  What happens to her?

Now, in part, neglect of the victim is something that happens commonly in criminal cases.  After all, a criminal prosecution is not about victim v. criminal, but is about state v. criminal or the wonderful bit of legal fiction, the people v. criminal.  So when there is a trial, it’s not about the victim (though media reports will likely include some of that), but about the criminal.

And I’m ashamed that I bought into that (as my friend pointed out) but at the same time it goes to my greater point.  We focus on criminals because we can cast them as monsters.  Victims are in most ways just like us.  It’s the criminal–the rapist, the murderer–who is different.

Schrödinger’s Dishwasher

I live in a house that has Schrödinger’s dishwasher.  Or that might as well.  Allow me to explain; no, there is too much.  I will summarize.

For four years, my wife and I rented a house while I went to law school and she worked as a visiting professor.  Shortly after we moved into that house, the dishwasher died and was replaced by the landlord with a new one that was all-digital and which had a neat light that went on when it was finished.  When you first closed the dishwasher after opening it when the cycle had completed, the light went out.  So you knew, or had a pretty good idea, when the dishwasher contents were clean and when they were not.

Two weeks ago, more or less, we moved into our new house, and in it was a dishwasher that had no such light.  So I took a magnet I’d had for a while and marked it so we could keep track:

This works great, but it is (of course) dependent on the family member who starts the dishwasher to put the magnet on the door right-side-up (to indicate that the machine is cleaning or is clean) and the family member who empties the dishwasher to turn the magnet up-side-down, indicating that the dishwasher is not clean. 

Now, if you have a family you may have the same experience that I do–that of quantum uncertainty, akin to the situation of Schrödinger’s Cat.  The eponymous cat is part of a physics thought experiment (no animals or dishes were harmed).  Take a sealed box.  Into it, you place a cat and a sealed vial of poison gas sufficient to kill the cat.  The chamber also contains a Rube Goldberg mechanism consisting of a small amount of radioactive material, a Geiger Counter, a hammer, and various electromechanical parts.  The mechanism and poison cannot be influenced by the cat, and the material decays such that it may (or may not) release a radioactive particle in the course of an hour.  If it does, the Counter detects the particle and releases a hammer that smashes the sealed vial and releases the poison. 

The burden of the experiment is this:  after an hour, is the cat dead or alive?  There are equal probabilities of life or death, but you cannot know the outcome–and implicitly, whether the radioactive substance has undergone decay–until you observe by opening the sealed box.  And was the cat alive, or dead, before you opened the box?  This is a vulgarization, but you get the sense of it, I hope.  Arguably, the cat is both alive and dead until observed.  The observation collapses the probabilities into a certainty.

Our dishwasher works in much the same fashion.  Because there is no indicator as to whether or not it has operated, it is largely dependent–in the absence of someone correctly placing the magnet–on observation.  There are probabilities (likely not the 50% of the cat, but…) that the contents are clean or not-clean.  Only by opening the dishwasher can we collapse the probabilities into a certainty. 

Life is like this more generally.  I have friends who, having attended law school, are now lawyers, and some who are not.  Me? I thought about law school because my old career was drying up, and never thought about anything but becoming a lawyer. 

But when I was preparing my application, I happened to list my membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and subsequently, a professor looked at that and asked me if that was a “dispute resolution” group.  I didn’t quite make that connection then, but I should have realized that it was, and is.  So, after a heads-down first year, I gradually became more and more involved with the notion of reconciliation and mediation.

That’s not what I went to law school for.  But to quote Forrest Gump’s mama, a woman who would have understood Schrödinger’s experiment on another level, “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get.”

So as I study,once more for the bar exam, and waste time blogging, I stand before you.  Schrödinger’s cat.