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Breathe with me

I’ve long contended that conspiracy theories are a substitute-religion for the disillusioned; it gives them the opportunity to believe in a Greater Power, even if it’s just a power for evil. I think this ties into that Orwell passage I quoted a few weeks ago.

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has a great piece on the mainstreaming of paranoia:

The rise of the conspiracy theory points to an important shift in journalism and public debate. There has been a move from debating the substance of someone’s beliefs or behaviour to focusing myopically on the motivations behind them; from challenging individuals over their words or actions to trying to uncover some deep, dark ulterior motive. This has had a deadening effect on public debate. It replaces a critical engagement with political developments with a destructive neverending search for the secret agenda. And it means that no one is ever truly held to account for what they say or do. After all, if Blair is merely the puppet of dark neocons forces when it comes to Iraq, then how can we hold him up to public ridicule for what has happened there?

This is not investigative journalism; it is gossip.

Read more, if you dare.

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Update

Sorry I’ve been out of touch, dear reader. We’re closing in on the wedding date (March 12!), and this has necessitated a ton of work at the day job, preparing the April issue of the magazine so that my associate editor can handle what I’m leaving behind.

This will necessitate my knocking out articles on biogeneric drugs and site selection criteria for pharma facilities, and updating our glossary of pharma & biopharma terms. Since one of my associates at a major pharma company just sent me an in-house list of acronyms used in the industry, it looks like I’ll be updating a bunch of the glossary entries for this year’s edition.

And I’ll be getting married in 9 days. So, I’m probably not going to post anything for the next bunch of days, is what I’m saying. Typing. Whatever.

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Mo’ Woe

In January, I wrote about Anya Kamenetz’ book, Generation Debt, and Daniel Gross’ criticism of it. I was mean (enough to warrant a smackdown challenge from Mrs. Kamenetz), but hey. Buy a dog.

Today, we have more criticism of the book, by Kerry Howley at Reason:

Kamenetz, a 2002 Yale graduate, is the latest spokesperson for a paroxysm of anxiety among “emerging adults.” But you don’t have to accept Kamanetz’s absurd thesis—that a group of people among the healthiest, wealthiest, and most educated in human history deserve your pity—to get angry about the way their prosperity has been manhandled. The term Generation Debt is nothing if not apt: Young Americans come of age in a world where heaps of their as yet-unearned cash has already been promised away. They are embodied I.O.U.s to Medicare, to Social Security, to extended obligations in foreign countries with unclear objectives and no end in sight. A glance at the latest projections for, say, Medicare Part D is fair game for some righteous anger.

As a bonus, Chris Farrell at BusinessWeek has an article critiquing the arguments of another book in the “WAH! We’re going to be poor” cycle, Tamara Drout’s Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead:

Drout takes a hardline stand in her book. She argues that the younger American generation faces a life of “downscaled dreams.” The traditional middle-class life is out of reach for more and more young people. Going to college, owning a home, and having a child — or two — is increasingly expensive. Paychecks are increasingly meager, so more and more, the younger generation is taking on onerous debt. “They will be the first generation who won’t match the prosperity of their parents,” Drout writes.

Considering that a staple belief in American society is that each generation ends up a bit better off than the previous one, Drout’s charge is remarkable. And it’s also largely nonsense. For instance, she laments that recent college graduates, already burdened with student-loan obligations, have to rack up steep credit charges to furnish their apartments and buy a wardrobe for work.

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Overthinking It

Amy & I are getting married in two weeks, and I’m still trying to come up with a good reading for the pre-game show. The following passage is a hoot, mainly because I always envision it on one of those “Love Is” fridge magnets, except it’d have to be about two miles long and has disastrously fascist overtones:

Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. But love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in its natural form. In the state, it is no longer present. There, one is conscious of unity as law; there, the content must be rational, and I must know it. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person in my own right and that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I gain recognition in this person, who in turn gains recognition in me. Love is therefore the most immense contradiction; the understanding cannnot resolve it, because there is nothing more intractable than this punctiliousness of the self-consciousness which is negated and which I ought nevertheless to possess as affirmative. Love is both the production and the resolution of this contradiction. As its resolution, it is ethical unity.

–G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

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Gilgamesh and the Genome

It’s a blast from the past! Here’s a From the Editor page I wrote in March 2000, when I was a newbie on my pharma magazine! Enjoy

Nearly 50 years ago, Francis Watson and James Crick uncovered the double-helical structure of DNA. A little more than a century ago, the fragments of the epic poem of Gilgamesh were discovered in the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. The tablets on which the poem were written date only a few hundred years after the invention of writing, a discovery that fundamentally changed human culture. The four-letter alphabet of DNA contains the possibilities of life in all its aspects. In both cases, scholars and scientists have spent years trying to decipher these strange languages.

Both of these sources, in a sense, address the same issue, albeit from opposite directions. Through the mapping of the human genome and the discoveries we shall make of the secrets of individual genes, we learn about the myriad individual components that create a gestalt of human life. Through gene therapy and other advances in biotechnology, we are told, man will someday overcome aging and possibly transcend death.

Through translating the story of Gilgamesh, we learn that man has always tried to circumvent death. The greatest king of his time (two-thirds divine, one-third man) travels to the limits of the underworld to learn how to overcome mortality. He learns that nothing is permanent. Upon returning to his kingdom of Uruk, all Gilgamesh can do is praise the strength of the city’s walls. Today, not one person in a million could identify Uruk on a map. Nor do those city walls stand. The first hero in literature faces the same limitations as a garbage man in the year 2000. Time passes and unmakes us all.

Scientists today question whether that process is necessary, and whether it can at least be slowed. The mission of translating the genetic language and making genes into a manipulable objects may accomplish Gilgamesh’s quest, 5000 years later.

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About that fountainhead . . .

Neat interview at BusinessWeek with Joshua Prince-Ramus, the lead partner and owner of the New York branch of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the firm founded by Rem Koolhaas. It’s all about the rational process of designing “outrageous” buildings:

We believe in a hyper-rational process where you accept the constraints, conditions, and challenges of a project, and you attempt to engage them by going back to first principles. You don’t accept any convention. If someone says, “This is how you solve that problem,” you give them the bird. You just say, “I don’t want to hear it.” [. . .]

We’re seeing constraints as opportunities. It’s not like we’re getting around the constraints. We’re saying, “The project’s just the constraints.” If we can solve the constraints, that’s where the form will come, that’s where the beauty will come, that’s where the logic will come. And more likely than not, you can get it built, you can get it financed, you can get it on budget.

I find this stuff fascinating, but I have a different view on art than some of my friends. Read more.

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Left out

Jane Galt has a nice post on the “message-vacuum” of the Democratic party. Here’s a piece:

Democrats have been blaming the candidates: the wooden Gore, the hapless Kerry. But it seems to me that the problem is that the fissures on the left are so deep that it takes a political genius like Clinton, who zeroed in on symbolic wedge issues with the daring precision of a World War II ace, to cover over them long enough to get elected. Neither Gore nor Kerry were particularly good candidates, to be sure, but it’s not like George Bush is a stunning rhetorician or a dazzling political strategist. His main skills (and weaknesses) lie in dogged determination and keen administrative abilities. Yet he defeated Al Gore, who should have walked all over Bush, given that he was running as the incumbent’s successor in the sunset year of America’s longest postwar economic expansion. Kerry couldn’t beat Bush even though the guy had been caught in bed with a naked economic recession, suffered through a subsequent jobless recovery, and got the country into an enormously expensive, and prolonged, conflict in Iraq. Is that really a problem of the candidates, or the party?

Read all about it.