I left Palo Alto yesterday afternoon, and as I drove out to 280 I was struck by The World Outside. The brightness of the sun, the brilliance of the blue sky, the flashing effect of the wind in Eucalyptus trees. It seemed, well...outsized. And a little overwhelming, like something you've been looking at for a long time, suddenly seen through 3D glasses.
It's easy to lose touch with the The World Outside when you're working in an office. You get inured to your little paths between your desk, the lab, the printer, and the secret coffee machine squirreled away in that code-protected area. And it occurs to me that this is the NUMBER ONE PROBLEM: the fact that we lose touch with The World Outside, that we forget the warm embrace of the air, the scent of the summer breeze, the softness of the rain, the whisper of trees in the wind.
It's not surprising that CEOs and top execs have no relationship with nature or respect for biodiversity. They never really meet either, except perhaps obliquely on a hunting trip laid on by a client, and that hardly counts. They are the nearest thing you can find outside of a fifties sci-fi movie to brains in jars, fed by an automatic feed of pre-digested nutrients.
How can we expect them to have any idea what a forest is like when it's just dusk and you can feel it breathing? How can we blame them for not understanding that manipulating transactions of profit and loss is the least of all human activities? How can we hate them for not seeing the world as more than a sink for effluent they never smell, see or touch? It's literally all numbers and concepts to them. They speed past it on their way to other things; things that exist in their minds and on their balance sheets. Things that exist ONLY in their minds and on their balance sheets. Who ever saw a share price build a nest and lay eggs? Who can lay total customer satisfaction on a plate and watch hungry people eat it?
While I was pondering all this I drove to my meeting. It seems to be consolidation time again inside the company I'm working for. It's not too far along yet, but I can scent change coming, like rain in the fall. And it gets me going. The blood starts zinging in my veins, my heart beats a little faster. I start thinking strategically, I churn out ideas. It's not excitement that generates this; it's a mixture of fear and competitive spirit. If you even have a little competitive spirit, the scent of danger can drive your adrenalin sky-high as you start to accelerate to make sure you get ahead of the team before the wolves are let loose.
After the meeting I left to drive back through the same glorious country, with the blond grass glowing in the late afternoon sun, and the smooth hills curving green to the horizon. And once again I had to struggle to see it. I was too speeded up, too hyped on paranoia and determination to survive. I was full of plans for how to feather my nest in this abstract world of contingency plans that have nothing to do with anything I could actually weigh in my hands, or plant in the earth, or gaze at with eyes that well up at its beauty.
Is it any wonder The World Outside is in such grave danger when our minds are so full of the immaterial? When even I, with my deep ecology agenda and concern for the world, struggle to see it through the film of figures that runs up and down over the inside of my eyes like the titles for The Matrix?
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Monday, May 22, 2006
gulab jamun
I've lived most of my life in other people's countries. I was born in a Confucian culture to ex-pat British parents (one Welsh, one English), and apparently learned Chinese before English. I started primary school in a Protestant country and moved a couple of years later to a Mediterranean culture where I was fascinated with little street-side shrines to the Virgin Mary. At nineteen I went to University in Scotland and moved pretty soon after graduation to France. Now I'm a resident alien living in the US.
Given all of this, in some ways diversity is my specialised subject. I have never really felt particularly British. Having friends all over the world makes you pretty unfit for patriotic pride, basically because you realise that everyone is just as important as you. Learning to speak French changed the self inside of me, and permanently altered the way I interact with the world.
Living in South East Asia as a teenager gave me a different locus of importance in the world. You may know this feeling if you've spent a lot of time somewhere else; the centre is no longer London or New York, but Hong Kong, Japan, Jakarta. It FEELS different when you look at a world map.
But recently I've noticed something more: a deepening of that feeling of cultural relativity, of that geographical off-centering. I don't know whether it's the result or the cause of this deepening, but I'm increasingly glimpsing a different centre...as though the focus of the world, and the important areas in it, were shifting eastwards.
In Large IT Company, Inc., where I work, most of our young engineers are Chinese and Indian. And for good reason. Recently the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, and the US Institute of Medecine, published a report called 'The Gathering Storm', in which they warned that the US lags far behind other countries in science education. Personally I have noticed, based on meeting kids in developing countries as varied as Senegal and Vietnam, that we also lag in terms of our motivation for educational achievement. We can't get our disillusioned kids to finish school; their kids seem sharp as tacks, learn everything they can and are clamouring for more. At seven the Vietnamese street kids read and write, and insist on conversing with you via a phrase book. Little kids in Senegal have to be VIVID to survive, and their twenty-somethings are dying for opportunties to use their talents in the world.
The African CIO of a large defense company recently told me that he had noticed a significant change in West Africa. The Chinese, he said, have moved in. And, he said, their attitude was completely different from that of Western partners. For a start, they built stuff that was actually useful; that is, for more than simply money laundering via pseudo-aid. Such as hospitals. And secondly, they moved their people there, to live in the area and integrate. He said it looked like real investment.
I thought it sounded as though he also meant investment by people who, though different, act as though you're both equal. And I thought, woooo, this changes everything. Because the Chinese can contribute to Africa without the legacy of colonialism. (By which I mean both a culture of superiority, and trade restrictions built to continue the fleecing of the Third World that we began four centuries or so ago.) And I felt a little excited, because perhaps we don't have to work through all that colonial shit anymore if some other people can just come along and side step it. Then us Whities will be out of the game. Someone else will bring a ball, and everyone will go and play with them instead. And the joke will, for once, finally, after all these hundreds of years, be on us.
While I had this on my mind, I noticed an interaction in the coffee-corner at work, while I was sharing some gulab jamun with some Indian colleagues. An Iranian engineer wandered by and was offered some of the delicious syrupy treats, and there followed a conversation during which it was pointed out to me that gulab jamun came to India by way of Persia. And I had a little moment of realising, in a visceral way, that the Rest Of The World has a life of its very own.
The shock was not that I realised this. It was that I realised it in a new way. I realised it, not in a way related to the past, but in a way related to the future. I realised it in my body, as though I lived a dozen time zones to the east. And as we laughed, I got that the West is done. We don't realise it yet, but the sun has set here. The future is in the Rest Of The World. It's in China and India (and probably South America, given the recent revolts there against US hegemony).
I'm nervous about this economically, since my savings are partly in dollars and partly in Euros, and I worry about my old age in a dead empire. But I'm also excited about it. Will the end of colonialism happen in my time? Whatever happens to me and my small life, I look forward to whatever small role I can play in a world in which the tired old horse of the British empire, and its nasty starred and striped nephew, are finally put out to grass.
Given all of this, in some ways diversity is my specialised subject. I have never really felt particularly British. Having friends all over the world makes you pretty unfit for patriotic pride, basically because you realise that everyone is just as important as you. Learning to speak French changed the self inside of me, and permanently altered the way I interact with the world.
Living in South East Asia as a teenager gave me a different locus of importance in the world. You may know this feeling if you've spent a lot of time somewhere else; the centre is no longer London or New York, but Hong Kong, Japan, Jakarta. It FEELS different when you look at a world map.
But recently I've noticed something more: a deepening of that feeling of cultural relativity, of that geographical off-centering. I don't know whether it's the result or the cause of this deepening, but I'm increasingly glimpsing a different centre...as though the focus of the world, and the important areas in it, were shifting eastwards.
In Large IT Company, Inc., where I work, most of our young engineers are Chinese and Indian. And for good reason. Recently the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, and the US Institute of Medecine, published a report called 'The Gathering Storm', in which they warned that the US lags far behind other countries in science education. Personally I have noticed, based on meeting kids in developing countries as varied as Senegal and Vietnam, that we also lag in terms of our motivation for educational achievement. We can't get our disillusioned kids to finish school; their kids seem sharp as tacks, learn everything they can and are clamouring for more. At seven the Vietnamese street kids read and write, and insist on conversing with you via a phrase book. Little kids in Senegal have to be VIVID to survive, and their twenty-somethings are dying for opportunties to use their talents in the world.
The African CIO of a large defense company recently told me that he had noticed a significant change in West Africa. The Chinese, he said, have moved in. And, he said, their attitude was completely different from that of Western partners. For a start, they built stuff that was actually useful; that is, for more than simply money laundering via pseudo-aid. Such as hospitals. And secondly, they moved their people there, to live in the area and integrate. He said it looked like real investment.
I thought it sounded as though he also meant investment by people who, though different, act as though you're both equal. And I thought, woooo, this changes everything. Because the Chinese can contribute to Africa without the legacy of colonialism. (By which I mean both a culture of superiority, and trade restrictions built to continue the fleecing of the Third World that we began four centuries or so ago.) And I felt a little excited, because perhaps we don't have to work through all that colonial shit anymore if some other people can just come along and side step it. Then us Whities will be out of the game. Someone else will bring a ball, and everyone will go and play with them instead. And the joke will, for once, finally, after all these hundreds of years, be on us.
While I had this on my mind, I noticed an interaction in the coffee-corner at work, while I was sharing some gulab jamun with some Indian colleagues. An Iranian engineer wandered by and was offered some of the delicious syrupy treats, and there followed a conversation during which it was pointed out to me that gulab jamun came to India by way of Persia. And I had a little moment of realising, in a visceral way, that the Rest Of The World has a life of its very own.
The shock was not that I realised this. It was that I realised it in a new way. I realised it, not in a way related to the past, but in a way related to the future. I realised it in my body, as though I lived a dozen time zones to the east. And as we laughed, I got that the West is done. We don't realise it yet, but the sun has set here. The future is in the Rest Of The World. It's in China and India (and probably South America, given the recent revolts there against US hegemony).
I'm nervous about this economically, since my savings are partly in dollars and partly in Euros, and I worry about my old age in a dead empire. But I'm also excited about it. Will the end of colonialism happen in my time? Whatever happens to me and my small life, I look forward to whatever small role I can play in a world in which the tired old horse of the British empire, and its nasty starred and striped nephew, are finally put out to grass.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
final rant about dating
It seems terribly francaise of me to hate something linguistic with such venom, but I loathe the verb to date, as in "I'd like to date you".
I despise its blunt and mechanistic transitivity. Subject, verb, object: I, Date, You. It shocks me. Worse than that; it repells me.
Prior to coming to America, I had always used the phrase to go out with. "She's going out with him" seems to me to be about as far from "She's dating him" as "She's making love with him" is from "She's doing him".
She's making love with him allows so much more openness, gentleness, nuance and mutuality. In She's doing him the action is stripped to the most basic common denominator, in which one person operates upon another, almost irrespective of that person's own subjectivity. In this phrase, and in the mindset represented by this phrase, the other exists merely as a target for the activity of the subject. There's no I/Thou there; it's strictly I/it. And what's worse, it's I/it in denial.
It's more subtly the same with He's dating her. HE's dating HER. What's she doing? Well, in this sentence construction, not much. She's reduced to being the object of his activity of dating. She's not going out with him. They're not seeing each other. He's dating her. (Ditto by the way, with She's dating him. I'm not talking about gender roles here, I'm talking about ways of viewing the opposite sex as an instrument for one's own agenda of self-gratification.)
As I said, it seems very French intello of me to be so concerned with the deep structural psychology underlying a banal piece of surface syntax, but I truly think that the transitivity of this verb phrase reveals what is so unhealthy about the whole relationship scene here in Silicon Valley, in which it is quite normal to date multiple people, compare them on a kind of mental spreadsheet (for all I know people use real ones), and then pick the "best" contender.
You can buy tickets to expensive 'speed dating' soirees, during which you rotate through people in slots of six minutes each, and ask those with the best personal PR for their numbers. You can subscribe to online dating services, some of which (such as eHarmony) have already decided for you that if you're a woman, you need an older man (on the basis, they claim, of research). Women apparently sort men by height and income. So, if you're a short nice guy with a low paid job, kiss your subscription goodbye. I don't know what the men sort for, but I do know the woman post glamour shots.
All of this exhausts me on the deepest of levels. I'd rather stay single than enter this world, with its loaded agenda and its instrumentalist goals.
How have we have allowed ourselves to become so commercialised that every exchange has become one of profit and loss? In a society in which everyone continually looks for the biggest return on the least possible investment, every interaction becomes an advertisment, every meeting an interview.
I despise its blunt and mechanistic transitivity. Subject, verb, object: I, Date, You. It shocks me. Worse than that; it repells me.
Prior to coming to America, I had always used the phrase to go out with. "She's going out with him" seems to me to be about as far from "She's dating him" as "She's making love with him" is from "She's doing him".
She's making love with him allows so much more openness, gentleness, nuance and mutuality. In She's doing him the action is stripped to the most basic common denominator, in which one person operates upon another, almost irrespective of that person's own subjectivity. In this phrase, and in the mindset represented by this phrase, the other exists merely as a target for the activity of the subject. There's no I/Thou there; it's strictly I/it. And what's worse, it's I/it in denial.
It's more subtly the same with He's dating her. HE's dating HER. What's she doing? Well, in this sentence construction, not much. She's reduced to being the object of his activity of dating. She's not going out with him. They're not seeing each other. He's dating her. (Ditto by the way, with She's dating him. I'm not talking about gender roles here, I'm talking about ways of viewing the opposite sex as an instrument for one's own agenda of self-gratification.)
As I said, it seems very French intello of me to be so concerned with the deep structural psychology underlying a banal piece of surface syntax, but I truly think that the transitivity of this verb phrase reveals what is so unhealthy about the whole relationship scene here in Silicon Valley, in which it is quite normal to date multiple people, compare them on a kind of mental spreadsheet (for all I know people use real ones), and then pick the "best" contender.
You can buy tickets to expensive 'speed dating' soirees, during which you rotate through people in slots of six minutes each, and ask those with the best personal PR for their numbers. You can subscribe to online dating services, some of which (such as eHarmony) have already decided for you that if you're a woman, you need an older man (on the basis, they claim, of research). Women apparently sort men by height and income. So, if you're a short nice guy with a low paid job, kiss your subscription goodbye. I don't know what the men sort for, but I do know the woman post glamour shots.
All of this exhausts me on the deepest of levels. I'd rather stay single than enter this world, with its loaded agenda and its instrumentalist goals.
How have we have allowed ourselves to become so commercialised that every exchange has become one of profit and loss? In a society in which everyone continually looks for the biggest return on the least possible investment, every interaction becomes an advertisment, every meeting an interview.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)