I read an interesting piece regarding Communism, Occupy Wall Street and Dave Graeber recently on the American Enterprise Institute web site (of all things). You probably know that the AEI is a think-tank with a right-wing political and philosophical bias. So, you would guess that this article, written by political writer Lee Harris, would not be not very positive and enthusiastic about its subject matter. And you would be correct, more or less.

But on the “lesser” side of your correctness (the politically correct side?), Mr. Harris gives Professor Graeber credit for his concept of “natural communism” (the phrase taken from Mr. Harris’s statement that “communism in short was natural to us”) . To back up for just a moment, David Graeber is an academian and writer who was involved in the formation of the Occupy movement and is credited for giving it a catchy motto: “we are the 99 percent”. As to natural communism, Graeber’s writings assert that in all human societies, even the highly greed-driven American landscape of the 21st Century, there is a natural tendency for people to act communally (or “communist”). In other words, not everything in our collective live is about barter and payment; not everything is subject to the market economy. (Although a recent article in the Atlantic laments that too many things today are considered “for sale” these days and available only to those who can pay the price. Things such as the right to talk to your doctor when you need to, and the duty of grammar school students to do their reading, were once thought of as an unspoken right or obligation. They were not put up for auction — but now they are).

Even in today’s America, though, people still help strangers in need without  »  continue reading …

Being a public agency employee, I spend some time each workday perusing a variety of web sites. Nothing that could get me into trouble, of course. I look for interesting, well-written articles, not for lurid pics or video.

One of today’s interesting articles was on the Atlantic magazine web site. It was a discussion with a professor of philosophy named Nick Bostrom on the possibility of human extinction over the next few hundred years. During the chat, the good profession made a quick aside that I found just as interesting as his various doomsday scenarios. I.e., that even if we don’t go extinct, evolving social, economic, technical and environmental trends could conspire to create a rather unpleasant world, a bit of a hi-tech revival of the Dark Ages.

Here’s what Prof. Bostrom had to say about that:

Of course there are also existential risks that are not extinction risks . . . One could imagine certain scenarios where there might be a permanent global totalitarian dystopia. Once again that’s related to the possibility of the development of technologies that could make it a lot easier for oppressive regimes to weed out dissidents or to perform surveillance on their populations, so that you could have a permanently stable tyranny, rather than the ones we have seen throughout history, which have eventually been overthrown.

Hmmm, a stable authoritarian regime using high-tech tools to keep an eye the rebels and rabble in check. Hate to say it, but doesn’t that sound a bit like modern China?

People are always dying and it’s hard to keep up with that, even just the celebrities. But I’ll offer a quick comment or two on three recent celebrity deaths.

First, Christopher Hitchens, back in December. Hitchens was quite a phenomenon in “the world of letters”, but I mostly knew of him from his book reviews in The Atlantic. And to be honest, he was one of the most abstruse and incomprehensible authors to appear in that magazine. I couldn’t figure out why they kept him. Hitchens covered a wide variety of topics during his many years with The Atlantic, and had a way of muddying the waters even with relatively famous subjects like Gandhi and Stalin. But a majority of his reviews focused on British and European writers from the 1800’s thru the first half of the 20th Century. His finale is on G.K. Chesterton, and as usual, I hardly know what he’s getting at. Something about Chesterton’s conservative defense of Roman Catholicism in the context of British history, but it’s hard to make out; Hitchens always assumed that you were an expert on his latest field of interest. No time to get dilettantes up to speed.

So, I am not going to miss his writings. He was an interesting guy given his hard-core atheism, which  »  continue reading …