Casting a Play

A director friend of mine, who is an energetic and successful playwrite, just remarked to me on the phone, "You don't cast roles, you cast plays, and auditions have nothing to do with 'fair', you cast relationships."

This is planned systemic thinking.

3L.

Special Functions

I attended a fantastic wedding reception about ten years ago. Nothing since has come close for eye-popping fun. It was in Toronto. It was loud, drunken, universally enjoyed, massive fun, without overt rancour, and Irish.

Jim M. was wed to the love of his life, a charming and vivacious woman whose very Richmond Hill Jewish family was quite scandalized by the behaviour of the hooliganish other half of the room - but without overt rancour, as I said.

The music - my God the music. Now, I'm a kind of Irish. I grew up in Canada raised by parents who grew up in Canada. So, really, I'm not Irish. And here's a fun observation. Someone asks me,"So, what are you?" I respond, "I'm Canadian." The natural next questions is, "Sure - but what are you really?" I respond, "Scots-Irish". Here I intend no disrespect to my Mennonite U.E.L. forebears, but this is the closest part to me, heredity-wise, in terms of ethnicity. Still, I build my own furniture...yeah, there's a bit of ruthlessly self-sufficient German floating around in there. And I have tremendous respect, although it's conflicted, for the reigning monarch. Yeah.

The music. Fast, frantic, and screaming Gael - the load of it. I watched the collected Irish clansmen hit the floor with their partners and perform the most complicated and chaotic yet holistically rhythmic and overall-coherent jigs. In the midst of this, the father and uncles of the groom introduced a new element into the dance. When the drum beats of the music, dum-dum-ta-tum, dum-dum-ta-tum were heard at the end of every couplet, they managed to work into the swirling dance a co-ordinate aggressive stomping of feet towards the partners nearest to them. It was a kind of a threat, really, but a threat with smiles and hurriedly lifted feet from the defendants. It was fantastic. Lots of laughter.

I managed to edge closer, through the crossfire, to the father of the groom. I had my line:

3L: (screaming over the noise) Hey, Joe, do you know why the Pope tried to ban shagging standing up?
JM: (the bluest of eyes alight) No...why?
3L: (triumphally drunk) They were afraid it would lead to dancin'!

Gales of laughter, a clip round the ears for me from the paterfamilias avec, "Ye Bugger!", looks of astonishment from the Hilliers of Richmond, and my Italian Catholic date's horrified scoff and blush of shame - damned inappropriate sauce from her considering the low cut and lacey top by which she was being, at best, barely contained. I use here the word 'bare-ly' advisedly, bless her trashy little sanctimoneous heart...that's about all that the crowd couldn't see of her.

Note the fact that in the face of the perceptible violence of the dancing, everyone involved knew it was a joke, and thus I shall turn sometime in the future to the topic of the 'pragmatics' of the communication. By the way, I ripped the joke off from the film Rob Roy. It's a good bit.

That wedding reception was a special function, special for me for different reasons than for the family of the wedding couple, and was also replete with special functions having nothing to do with me. Now, towards the point.

There's been some wild talk about a seminar in the coming term, Winter 2007, on the topic of Special Functions. It is the brainchild of one of the new hires in my department, Philosophy, and the reigning Chair of Mathematics. I don't know much more than the title, but I have some initial reactions that I want to suss out a bit.

Function: what something is for. There's a long and robust history of accounting for the existence of a thing by making an appeal to its use - I refer any interested parties to the vast and rarefied body of work in the philosophy of biology which parades under the title 'teleological functionalism', a topic on which I worked in a grad course under that name and about which I still understand next to nothing.

Function. This, in Aristotle, is the ergon of a thing. In the shortest possible terms, a thing's function is the use to which it is put by nature. There are surely more wrinkles and refinements that ought to be added to this, but they currently escape me. Chock that up to a long motorcycle ride back to London in cold weather and four (sorry, now six, erm...seven) bottles of Canadian (I'm editing this entry in increasing drunkenness).

The hand, so it goes in Aristotle, is a tool for using tools. This, observes my Master with a grin, is 'rather tidy'. And so it goes. A hand has the function of being an object subject to our command that has the function of using tools. The same cannot be said for other parts of the body. So, using tools is the particular function of the hand.

This makes tool use the special function of the hand. It is a function that can only be performed properly by use of hands. And here I joyfully add a new spin to the already dizzy corpse in Aristotle's grave by observing the great spirit who penned 'My Left Foot'.

On the great dear man himself, so sayeth the Pogues:

Christy Brown, a clown around town.
Now a man of renown, from Dingle to Down.
I can type with me toes, I sip stout through me nose,
And where it's gonna end, God only knows.

Take that Aristotle!...a man whose name renders as 'Noblest Goal' (or, 'most special purpose' with a certain looseness of translation). So now I think I'll have to download some Pogues to see me through this one.

If it is the special function of, say, a hand to perform a function of, say, using tools, then we can see one sense of special function in play.

There are certainly other senses of special function. One might be, to pick and example, a wedding. That is a function (read: event) that is special for lots of reasons. It's special mostly because it's the event of a rather important performative utterance, to whit: I do. It's also special because a lot of people agree that it's special. Now, why is it special?

It's probably special outside of the momentousness of the performative utterance because it's rare. It doesn't happen for either of the primary participants every day - or indeed more than once, twice, or at the outside three times in a life, barring serial divorcees who are, nevertheless, wedding enthusiasts. They've just got a way-too-hungry monkey on their backs. For me, beyond the second time, it ceases to be at all special - I mean really.

Here's a sidebar on the topic of "starter marriages" which is a concept introduced to me by my very yuppy cousin and her someday-to-be-betrothed.

Two people start dating. They start the part of the dating that requires some 'special time' alone. (Ahh, special again, and here for a damned special function that only loses its specialness under circumstances of mindless repetition - people need to think about this, be mindful!). They invariably each live with room-mates to make life affordable in Yuppidom. They negotiate with their room-mates to secure nights alone periodically. After a while, the ongoing static difficulty in securing nights free of room-mates, the increasing friction that develops between co-habitors, and the as yet unsatiated desire to have more time for 'special' nights, prompts our two yuppies to move in together in a rented apartment. Time passes. Their been-together-longer-as-a-couple-friends, in an attempt to normalize their own still fresh commitment to cohabitation in the context of home ownership, peck at our couple to stop throwing their money away (read: renting). Our heroes buy a little condo or townhouse. Two years on from the first 'special' night, they realize that they should probably be married since, for all practical purposes they are already. They wed. Two years (let's say) later, they realize that, as they come to know each other better, they're not really all that fond of each other. Promotions have been won, trips have been taken apart, and mortgage payments and the much argued-over Visa and phone bills are all they have left in common. They split up, divide the house, and are both now on the housing market with both their starter home and, (are you ready for it???), their starter marriage done.

They each marry again, but somehow - certainly for the families - the subsidiary wedding/s are not quite as 'special' as the first one. Yes, I have seen all this happen. No, I am not writing in any sense about myself. I rent. Please, no punchlines.

There are other special functions that are less personally committing than marriage - consider a convocation ceremony. It's certainly got the kind of special that is felt by the convocants, it also has the special that is felt by their beaming and financially drained relations. It also has the kind of special that the university likes, which is lots of Pomp and Circumstance and God Save the Queen. When I earn my doctoral degree, I assure you, that in spite of the fact that it is the third convocation ceremony in which I will take part, it will be by far the most 'special'. So special can increase with frequency in at least this regard. If I were at some point to decide to pursue a second MA, or a second PhD, it would probably be less special. Some do this, one occasionally meets them - collectors they are, I guess. One might well wonder what was wrong with the first PhD such that they needed another one. MUCH less special.

The thing is, that from the point of view of the university, there are a couple of dozen convocation ceremonies each year. Each one is special for the people involved, but each one is a matter of course for the system in which they are a culmination.

Here's the tie in to systemic thinking. My suspicion is that once a function is subsumed into a system of behaviour or practice, it starts to lose its 'specialness' internally since it is a part of the overall program of behaviour. This, obviously, not considering the particularity of functions performed by special persons, who we normally call 'experts'.

Ask anyone who is regularly called upon to help run a convocation. Reports generally agree that they're gruelling because there are so many, and because they're always the same. They should let the Irish run them, at least then there would be dancing.

So, a special function is either special because people agree that it is special, or because it is a funtion that is especially performed by one thing/person or another, or simply because it is rare.

And in the latter case, special functions become less internally special the more times they are replicated if particularity is not a consideration. Or, whatever. I still like getting 'treats' no matter how many Hallowe'ens pass by, and presents no matter how many Christmasses I celebrate. That stuff is just special.

Here's a parting thought: both the audience and the players find Opening Night and Closing Night to be special performances, but for completely different reasons.

3L.

Consider the Birds of the Air

It is said that the soothsayers of the ancient Celts, and of the Romans, looked to the flights of birds to find bases for their predictions. How wise they were.

I saw a flight of birds today. It's a good day. I taught my witchcraft course (mostly theology, really, so there!) which involved a miterm exam. It went well. I watched a roomful of people engaged in their task, and there were only two anomalies. One woman came in twenty minutes late and looking zombie-like. One young man seemed unable to keep his eyes off the work of the woman to his left for a time. He sits in the back row, so I could maneuver behind him to give a silent message. (More on the linguistic and non-verbal notion of 'pragmatics' when the spirit takes me) and then his attention was diverted to the work of the woman on his right (can't fault his positioning...ahem). I had a quiet word with him and it did not recur. This may be germane.

So now, I saw a flight of birds today. I take great pleasure in turning off all things electrical and sitting on my balcony, a wee space but at least the air is new, and having several drinks and several cigarettes. As I sat tonight, I enjoyed two signal events - a phone interview about a friend who is being profiled by our university's faculty newspaper, and the view of a flight of birds, to which I now turn.

It's autumn, and in addition to the grounded hordes of shit-making geese that infest, no, in the spirit of national pride, GRACE, our campus, there are other, less excremental avians who pass through. Enter the flight of birds.

There are three stands of trees, quite beautiful, two of which are pictured below (as of now) across the parking lot from my building. A massive flight of some kind of bird - I know not which - came into view of my smoking chair.

The flock bifurcated to the first and third stand, with much disorder. Now...a digression.

I am coming to suspect that perceptible disorder is in many ways only an appearance. Perhpas this is the historian in me. Local forms of disorder often make a coherent sense when viewed from without, and they make particular sense when viewed after the fact. There is no sense, no reason, to local forms of chaos to those who experience or are a part of it...or who instigate it. There can be a goal, certainly. There can even be an aspiration, a goal with a principle which underwrites it. But what are we to say about unreasoning choas?

If we're talking about unreasoning chaos on the part of a mob of people, we have to immediately jetison the notin of 'unreasoning' since people always - always - have reasons for their actions. I can perhaps construe some examples of unreasoned behaviour...picking the apple on the left rather than on the right, choosing one film rather than another from the shelf...but there are enough deterministic explanatory agendas to account even for what one commentator calls "the vanilla experiences" in our lives to preclude the notion of complete spontaneity. Chock it up to causal, biological (read: genetic), or even, if it's your cup of trans-substantiated wine, theological determinism.

I think that our behaviours are motivated, not 'mere'. For what is currently a peripheral accounts, but one that I think will probably be proven central eventually, consider the so-called Bayesian account of behaviour. A tennis player doesn't do conscious calculation to decide whether to hit forehand or backhand on a given bounce. Our well trained, but hardly spontaneous, instinct takes over and recommends an action to the conscious level that has proven, in the past, to yield positive results.

Speaking as an erstwhile tournament fighter, this is true. The more you think about a block, the less effective it is. I thank my colleague in theatre Andrew McC. for his recent unprovoked attack on the lower level of the University Community Centre for his Cato-like assault a couple of days ago. When I turned, the block happened without me thinking about it. I was as surprised as he was. This brings it all into focus.

As a martial artist, I train to suborn my decisions to reflexes. Much, I should note, as I suborn my decision making to systems of behaviour (my blogging interest). Another instance of the same.

I react from training, instinctively or, more specifically, acquiredly-instinctively, almost as if an animal had the choice to remake a part of its shadow-conscious makeup. And here the digression ends and we return to the birds.

A flock of birds bifurcated in the air, and lighted in two stands of trees. As they rarefied and condensced in the air, there was very little noise. They lighted on branches.

As the movement ceased, the birdsong increased - noticeably - from almost nothing to a riot of sound. They stopped moving and started talking. Then, and this is the neat bit, either the stragglers of groups A and B frittered around a bit and moved to opposing stands of trees. The birdsong ceased. The leaders were followed by the rest of groups A and B. Basically, the half-flocks switched trees. As they began moving, their chatter stopped.

As they lighted on their new perches, and ceased moving, their birdsong renewed.

I asked my father on a recent drive home to Welland whether he'd ever thought about the behaviour of flocks of birds. One can't help but be reminded of the movements of schools of fish. He said, and I think rightly, that this is "Just instinct".

Yes. It is. And I have instincts, too. There is a moment when I turn and face a 210lb. attacker named Andrew when "I" am replaced by a series of rehearsed physical movements, which are nevertheless open to recombination and improvisation. Still, instinct takes over. This is a learned instinct - an interesting concept that can only be cashed out, I think, by considering systemic behaviour.

Instinct covers a grand array of individual behaviours...but what about the behaviour of a flock?

There is something magical here. A flock of birds, a school of fish, a mosh-pit of fans, a house of MPs, a College of Cardinals, and, yes, a cell of terrorists, that guides behaviour when individual agency and critical decision making do not.

We seem to decide on, and make, our instincts. Perhaps we are not free. We are certainly not free of ourselves. The birds left their trees, became one flock again, and flew south for the winter under a greying sky.

When they stopped flying, they started talking.

They had to stop talking to fly.

3L

Systems

I went for my walk tonight - just over to the CIBC and back - and was thinking about how interest compounds on a credit card balance, and how it compounds on an RRSP. One ought to pay down one's credit card debt before buying long term savings, even shorter term things like GICs, so that one doesn't hemmorage money needlessly. But here's the rub: if you need money down the road, in the long term certainly, but also in the midterm, it makes sense to maintain a balance on the credit card and buy the GICs now so that you are sure to have, say, rent for, say the summer months when you're not getting paid by the university. (See that? The shift from 'one' to 'you'? Yeah, it was me all along.)

So the upshot is that a broader view of the whole system - where the system is here just a few factors over a few months - shows you a sound result that is counterintuitive. It rests on the assumption that I would make bad decisions if left to my own devices. That's probably true. Just getting a savings account and diverting money from a checquing account into it makes a psychological difference in spending habits - ask around. It's still the same amount of money (fiction though money mostly is, it's a very useful fiction to maintain...and one of someone else's authorship which is a bitch) but although it's the same amount of money, it's been put into a different virtual-pile, and somehow that makes a difference. It ought not to, not really, but there it be.

Maybe this is a piece of what I'm after - a coherent picture of systems. I've studied a few...in philosophy one can hardly help it. In this case the banking system can be used to help slow down my bad decisions by making it possible to enact a good, sound decision now in a moment of sound decision making, rather than leaving the door open to making a series of small bad decisions further on that would erode my utility.

So that is what I was thinking until some jackass in something four-doored and white with too-rich-smelling exhaust completely ignored the rules of right of way and edged into an intersection blocking my line of march. My thinking didn't need to change all that much to see the corollary. We set out a codified system of rules and laws to govern situations, then teach people the rules, so they don't have to intuit them locally and alone (which most people would do badly) and so that we don't have to come to some series of in-the-moment agreements on procedure when faced with something like right-of-way. The rights are set out, mostly understood, and periodically ignored but pedestrians, cyclists and the like expect this to happen, and don't walk blindly across roads when the lights are with them even though they have every right to do so.

This is where I'm going with this one: I think the same things that stand true for traffic and short-term money management as stand for the civil service, the military, corporations, the university (why not), families, and the Church. They may well stand true for the economy as a whole, if there were such a thing as the economy as a whole - there may not be, and even if there were I certainly wouldn't understand it. About the only person I know who could explain it to me thinks I'm going to be a priest and scares me a little. Oh yeah, I think the systemic rules work for culturally specific and local forms of courting and dating behaviour...more on that if I get it worked out.

There's something coherent in all this, it has something to do with being guided by systemic organizations, and that the systems in place have the great virtue of being crafted calmly, and the horrendous shortcoming of being impersonal.

Still, I think it was a bit of progress on this, and a damned fine autumn walk. The evening sky is changing. After sundown, it becomes a shade of blue that grows deeper and richer the longer you look at it. It's a sign that winter is coming, and it was just great tonight.

3L

Confidence is a Problem

Here's me thinking about confidence and trying to figure out some larger patterns I've been seeing around me in the last while. No need to read it. This is something I'll Write about sometime, but these are some early diagnoses.

This is a thought that occurred sharply when I was learning to ride a motorcycle: confidence is a problem, as is unconfidence (if that's a word). The more often I was reminded by people to be careful, and particularly the more I was told horror stories of bad falls and accidents, the more confidence became a problem.

Here's the rub. One must actually be confident enough in oneself and one's ability to start riding. Further, one must ride confidently to avoid the problems of falls and accidents. On the other side, having too much confidence can dull your edge, pacify your brain, and lead you into bad decisions.

So you have to have just enough confidence to do it, but not so much confidence that you don't try always to do it well. This is just the old Aristotelian maxim of the golden mean. This is also one version of something I'm starting to see all around me.

In terms of security, and here let's talk about national security in the States - you need people to be just afraid enough to accept certain arguably necessary changes (only 'arguably') in their political rights, etc., but you need them to be just confident enough to think that things are going well, and to go to work, and to have consumer confidence, and all the rest of it. A defect in confidence of a sufficient degree would paralyze, having just enough a defect in confidence seems to motivate.

I see this in the much smaller scope of personal security. We need just enough mistrust of our neighbours to prevent us from walking a dangerous route home in the dark where we very well might have a problem. Still, we need enough confidence to be able to go out the door and walk to work. We also need enough trust in our neighbours to have communities that are not armed camps. In this model, there's a vast degree of difference between the minimal amount of confidence and the maximal amount of confidence that is useful. I'm not sure if the distance is all that broad between the minimal and maximal in national affairs, but it might be.

We also need just enough fear of consequences to prevent us from succumbing to certain temptations, but not so much that we become unable to be in the same room with the object of our weakness.

Do these balances exist in good things, too? Tricky. I think what I'm seeing is the balance brought about by understanding, or at least perceiving, negative consequences. I don't know how it plays out in terms of hopes.

The reason for that, at least what I see as the reason in my own reflective moments, is that hopes and fears are remarkably similar things as states but hugely different in how we experience them. They're both dispositional reactions about the future - we have a picture of it, and we figure out how we feel about that picture. Sometimes fears trump hopes, if you're risk averse, and sometimes hopes trump fears, if you're a gambler - or an idealist, or a romantic.

For me, anyway, the vivacity of reactions I get to hopes and fears is different. Not just between hopes and fears, but between individual examples of each and - this is where it gets awefully murky - between the same example of a hope or fear at one time, and at another.

What this suggests to me is that there are probably only a handful of reliably consistent motivations that people can act on, the rest are highly fluid in terms of their products. Ever had a flippant moment while doing something dangerous? Most people probably have said to themselves after such a moment, "Wow, that was dumb, I know better than that."

What I'm starting to wonder is whether it comes down to confidence and unconfidence (which isn't the same, really, as worry). The rest of our dispositions might be coloured by our confidence, our sense of ego, and our basic 'oomphiness'.

On the side of sanity, we all have certain intellectual commitments that drive us to some decisions we would prefer to avoid, and some other commitments that keep us from doing things that we might locally enjoy. I didn't think I'd ever come to this suspicion, but perhaps our intellectual commitments are more reliable and sturdy than our emotional ones - in spite of the fact that the feeling of hope and fear is so much more vibrant.

Okay, again this is just me rambling my way towards an idea I'll really Write about sometime, but there's a point. The more we can shunt our decisions into principles the more stable we'll be. Also, the more we shift public responsibility away from quick decision makers motivated by interest and towards institutions that are impersonal, perhaps that's better. This horrifies me a bit, because I think that institutions are terrible decision makers. That's why we have rules to govern institutions, because they can't experience real guilt and learn from it. They can't be corrected in the same way as can, say, an agent.

Who comes to the conclusion that well run and regulated corporations might be better than individuals? It cuts across the grain of what I think of as my own moral commitments. Nevertheless, I'm thinking that decisions made apriori, with a minimal admixture of emotion, that provide guidance to institutional practices might be really preferable for some things than, say, people. Cooler decision-taking is itself desirable, but this strikes me as being a nasty thought. It argues a closeness between institutions and intellectual commitments, but I'm wondering if intellectual commitments are what policies really are, and vice versa.

Regardless, I'm seeing stuff like this crop up in lots of different places. So it starts with wondering about balancing confidence to cope with risk, and winds up arguing that institutions might do less damage than people. Welcome to my mind. Hope you enjoy the view.

3L

Leaves Start Falling

Having posted on other people's blogs from time to time, under the name Three Leaves, I'm starting one of my own tonight. I sort of thought I would hold out and not join the blogosphere, and I may just ignore it after posting three or four things. I also have little intention of telling anyone about this site. We'll see what happens. At the least, I'll have a spot to keep some of my papers and pictures and thoughts.

3L.