Pointing the Finger II - A final thought.
A couple of weeks ago, before the throes of a research paper derailed my unscheduled-yet-regular blogging, I spilled some thoughts about degraded communication. Instead of reiterating everything I wrote there, I will simply post a piece of the Arnheim quote which opened that entry:
We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to other made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
Okay, that's pretty well established. Unless we consciously communicate our thoughts and impressions of life in a literate and descriptive manner, as was once the necessity, our capability to do it at all will diminish.
Considering the matter further, it struck me just how much that we as a culture have become accustomed to "pointing the finger."
Consider:
- Emoticons
- Microblogging
- Chatpspeak
- GIFs
- Memes
Intermittent fasting and the myth of "three squares a day."
Scenario #1 Standard American Life
I wake up in the morning and start my day with a bowl of cereal, toast and a glass of juice.
At noon, I eat a sandwich with chips and a Snickers bar for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm hungry and focusing on work is difficult, so I eat another Snickers and wash it down with a cup of coffee.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat a "real meal" of meat, vegetables and a dinner roll. A piece of leftover cake follows for dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #2
I wake up in the morning and start my day with some eggs and salsa or a leftover piece of meat from the night before.
At noon, I have a salad with grilled chicken strips, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I eat a few squares of dark chocolate for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm feeling a bit peckish, so I toss back a handful of nuts.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat meat, vegetables and some fruit as a garnish or a dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #3
Primal Blueprint + Intermittent Fasting
I wake up in the morning. I ate a big meal the night before, so I drink a cup of coffee and decide to wait until I'm hungry to eat again.
At noon, I'm hungry for lunch, so I go out to my favorite restaurant for a bunless hamburger with plenty of onions and mushrooms on top, served with a side salad or some mixed vegetables. A few squares of dark chocolate round out the meal to satisfaction.
At 3pm, the fats and proteins in the burger are satisfying enough so that I am not hungry and can work through the day without loss of focus.
At 6pm, I'm hungry but not ravenous. Dinner is another arrangement of meat and vegetables, light portions.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day, with variation in schedule and meals skipped based on hunger.
Which of these makes the most sense? The latter two are obviously the more healthy choices of food, as well as in which order the meals are consumed, i.e., starting the day with protein and fat instead of simple carbs...but what's all that nonsense about skipping meals?
Question for your Sunday: Why do we eat three meals a day? Do we eat because we're truly hungry, or because a government-recommended diet high in simple carbohydrates has conditioned us to want three meals a day?
America has an epidemic. It isn't obesity or diabetes or heart disease; those are symptoms.
The epidemic is herd mentality. Blind acceptance of a status quo.
A USDA stamp on a box does not make a food nutritious or ideal as an energy source. It simply means that it has the required amount of certain ingredients or "fortifications" to make it passable to be sold to consumers. 60 Minutes aired a piece several months ago that showed how companies actually engineer processed foods to have the same qualities as addictive or controlled substances. Pre-made food bought in colorful boxes is created specifically to manipulate you into feeling hungry sooner, desire that taste again, and buy more. Think about that.
Healthy foods, that is to say, whole foods, meat and produce, raised or grown without additives, are where true nutrition is to be found. They provide necessary fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals for human life. And most importantly to the human experience, they provide satiety.
When your food is satisfying and provides your body with what it needs to replenish cells and nourish your muscles and organs, there is no reason to eat, unless you are hungry. The problem is, food is so easy to procure in our culture that we often forget what hunger actually feels like, resulting in snacking and overeating. One reason for this is the Western attachment to the idea of three meals a day, and the oft-repeated mantra that breakfast is somehow the most important meal of the day.
However, if your meals are complete and provides actual nutrition, you might not really be hungry first thing in the morning. If so, don't eat! Alternatively, if you are hungry in the morning and eat breakfast, and the satisfaction from breakfast stays all the way until the lunch hour, do you really need to eat lunch?
This applies to any meal, or more than one meal. Modern life often requires a lot of time spent being sedentary, either working behind a desk or, in my case, spending time sitting in a college lecture/regurgitate-lecture-on-paper environment. The assumption that we need to constantly replenish the very minor caloric expenditure of sitting is just silly.
In a hunter-gatherer society, or at the very least, a society that is not dependent on grain agriculture (something that wasn't necessary until humans started congregating in cities and found it necessary to sustain large populations with cheap, bulk crops), food isn't always readily available. That is why primitive cultures who still hunt and gather instead of rely on farming for their food sources tend to be incredibly healthy until "heroes from the West" descend to "civilize" them.
If you're not hungry at one of the culturally prescribed 8am/12pm/6pm meal times, do yourself a favor and just wait. The idea that "one size fits all," that something terrible will happen if you skip a meal, is just silly. What you put into your body is an individual experience, and should be a conscious choice. If you're not hungry, no one has the right to make you eat.
Every now and again, I like to go twenty-four hours without consuming food. I'll drink some black coffee (no sugar) or tea, but I give my body time to reset. It accelerates fat-burning, it sharpens my mind through consequent ghrelin production and restores insulin sensitivity. And when I am between meals, I try not to snack; my liver needs a break now and again. This comes in handy on long flights, where the unapologetically disgusting food served on airplanes actually does more to discourage one from eating.
But, perhaps most importantly, it makes me appreciate food. You have to eat properly before you can skip meals properly. When you eat real foods like meat, fowl, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts, your palate becomes much more sensitive; the act of enjoying a meal when nobly hungry takes on special significance.
When you choose to set your own schedule, you are no longer one of the herd. Your relationship with food changes. Instead of mindlessly shoving back lab-engineered, factory-assembled crap every few hours, the food experience becomes just that: an experience.
I am fasting as I write this. I indulged in a large meal of Indian food yesterday, liberal helpings of chicken and vegetables topped off by an indulgence in the heavenly Indian dessert gajar halwa. I haven't been hungry since, so I haven't eaten. It's been almost twenty-four hours now, and I feel fantastic. I am awake and alert; the words are flowing freely as I write.
Respect yourself. Respect your food. Eat when hungry or not at all.
Further reading:
- Mark Sisson's "Why Fast?" Series [Mark's Daily Apple]
- I Am a Ghrelin Addict [gnolls.org]
- Intermittent Fasting: A Beginner's Guide [Art of Manliness]
- The Flavorists [60 Minutes Excerpt - Video]
College Life
I was reminded again today of how nothing is ever as easy as it seems. One would think that, by now, one could write a paper in the well-designed and intuitive interface of Apple's word-processing software Pages and export the finished document to a Word format without irreparable loss.
Not so much. Furthermore, apparently these files are read differently by different computers, even if they all also use Word. I summed up this afternoon's dot-doc foibles in the following Facebook status update.
Write paper in Pages, using required margin and typeface settings: exceed page count. Review paper in Pages: gee that's pretty!
Review paper in Word at same margin and typeface settings: fall short of page count.
Review paper on another computer, in Word, at the same margin and typeface settings: the footnote numbers have now become Roman numerals.
[Bang head against wall]
Sometimes, life imitates The Oatmeal.
Some new entries in the works for tomorrow or the next day. As this is my "train of thought," I have some more stuff to get off my chest about communication.
Easter versus Christmas
As a Christian, I support Easter. I support it on the basis of principle. Contrary to many people, I prefer it to Christmas.
Ghandi once said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” And it is so true! I say this as a Christian. Christ lived his life without fanfare, without dispensing judgement on everyone he met. He lived a life summed up by the word "love." It staggers me how few Christians' lives can be summed up in similar terms.
Christ did not ask for His birth to be remembered. However, he did request that we remember his death through the rite of communion. Communion is a purely symbolic practice, and Christ laid it out in the following terms:
And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him. And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer: For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. [Luke 22:14-20]
No such request was made for Christmas. Christians of the more conservative persuasion often contend that the early church practice of moving into a new area, "converting" the population and remodeling the native holidays with Christian iconography, means that Christians today should not recognize these holidays at all. Christmas, after all, is simply a replacement for pagan winter solstice holidays, and Easter, as a holiday, is tainted by lingering pagan fertility symbols.
While I would never be opposed to removing the commercial hoopla from what should be holidays of the spirit, I tend to see things along a different tack. Rather than grasping at some desperate argument from how holidays came to be celebrated, I prefer to go back to the source material for an answer. I realize that reading the Bible is become a novelty, what with the convenient alternatives of groupthink and popular opinion, but in the Bible, Christ himself said that he wanted his followers to remember the sacrifice he made for them. He didn't make that request of Christmas. Oddly enough, Christmas became the holiday most violently hijacked from its origins, extrapolated from the destitute birth of a child in a manger into a corporate juggernaut.
Meanwhile, Easter is simply a means for candy companies to break even through a few weeks of sugar-laden sales. What a shame. What a waste.
"Pointing the finger..."
Sometimes I become genuinely concerned about the future of interpersonal communication between people of my own generation. There is no shortage of ways to spread ideas, but there seems to be a lack of faculty to utilize these avenues.
Before going further, I want to preface my own thoughts with a quote from Rudolf Arnheim. Arnheim's essays throughout the 1930s on the subject of film, mass communication and psychology were far more insightful than most of what is written on the subject today. The following quote comes from Arnheim's 1938 essay "A Forecast of Television:"
Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to other made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
Read it again, but replace "television" with the "Twitter," "Facebook" or any other social networking service which has made shorthand communication popular and accessible. I firmly believe that these services have led to problems between how people relate to each other face-to-face.
Social networks are not a problem in and of themselves. From cuneiform inscriptions to Gutenberg's printing press to the iPad, ideas, throughout history, always utilize the latest advances in technology to spread from person to person. However, until the past few years, the communication of what happens in daily life required complete thoughts to be committed to letters or emails.
We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to other made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts.
Today, the capabilities of smartphones have finally equaled the possibilities offered by online social networks. It is no longer necessary to harness the power of words to describe what interesting things we saw in the course of a day; we can take a photograph with a mobile device and share it with the entire world in the space of a few seconds. I don't imply that this is a good or bad thing in and of itself, it is simply the place to which we as a culture have come.
Where I see a very definite problem with social networking is the irresponsibility with which it is used by the people who have grown up with it. The children of the Baby Boomers viewed the arrival of everything from text messaging to Facebook with varying degrees of suspicion, while their kids, who have known these advances from an early age, are not only comfortable with them, but are increasingly reliant on on them to communicate.
As a result of this reliance, the "shrinkage of the mind" which Arnheim mentions is increasingly apparent in conversation. There is an experiment which I like to perform to gauge people's use of language. When someone mentions having seen a new film or read a book, I ask them what it is about. If they start to tell me what happens in the plot, I stop them and say "I don't want to know what happened, I want to know what it was about; what the theme was." And, sadly, very few people seem concerned with the true meaning of what they watch or read. They fail to "draw the general from the specific."
I realize, and have previously written, that entertainment is less and less concerned with offering ideas that transcend aesthetics. As such, it isn't surprising that stories are viewed by most audiences as little more than a chain of events strung together without deeper meaning. However, I am growing concerned that an entire generation has grown up with little regard, or even awareness of thematics and meaning.
For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
Communication is necessary to life. But it isn't enough to "point the finger" with a photograph or a star rating. Language, and the full usage of it, is important. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he explored the idea of an oppressive state reducing the breadth of language to in order to communicate ideas efficiently and without emotion, as detailed by the character of Syme in chapter three:
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Prior to writing 1984, Orwell wrote on this subject in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," in which he discussed the effects of thought upon language, and of language upon thought:
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
I feel vindicated in my feelings on this subject when they are confirmed by a mind like Orwell's. However, unlike me, Orwell was able to find a foreseeable solution.
The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
It only remains necessary to impress the importance of language upon culture--language as a living, complete, exciting way of expressing thoughts and ideas. And in the age of convenience, when it there is the constant opportunity to reduce the human experience to a shared photo or a "check-in," therein lies the challenge.