R.I.P. Michael Jackson
on learning, knowing, opinions, and naked emperors
I have to apologize in advance if this post seems terribly obvious. I think it’s pretty obvious, but it’s something I’ve felt like writing for a while.
Over the last few years, the old fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes has struck me time and time again as the perfect lesson for surviving in this crazy world of ours. The story, of course, goes roughly like this: a con man decides to make a name for himself by proclaiming himself the finest tailor in the land and eventually gets hired by a vain emperor to make a new set of clothes. He eventually presents him with “invisible” clothes that he says make the emperor look absolutely stunning – so stunning that those of lesser intellect would not even be able to see such finery. The emperor, not wanting to expose himself as of lesser intellect and convinced by the swindler’s reaction (who in turn convinces everyone around him to pretend the outfit is amazing) falls for it and behaves likewise. He takes part in a procession to show off his new “clothes” and onlookers, also not wanting to look stupid, pile on the praises, until finally a little boy yells out, “The emperor is naked!” The villagers come to their senses and realize that it’s true, while the emperor, embarrassed, continues on down the street.
With that in mind, here is something about me:
I don’t consider myself terribly smart. I mean, sure — I’ve always done well in school, I can write and think analytically, I can absorb information to a point, I’m creative and I can express myself reasonably well. But when people call me smart, I tend to wince a little. I’ve always been acutely aware of this gaping hole of ignorance lodged in this brain of mine, blocking the boundless flow of knowledge, particularly as I’ve gotten older. I’ve never been great at keeping up with current events, I’m a disaster with economics and statistics, my memory for history is just about enough to get the easy Jeopardy questions right.
I don’t think I’m stupid either, obviously. I have the capacity to learn, to retain, to critique, to analyze and think outside the box (and you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to give me a brainteaser, I can think a little too far outside the box). BUT, I think that knowledge and intelligence are largely functions of curiosity. And for most of my childhood, I was never all that curious.
Or, okay, let’s be more accurate: I just never asked that many questions. This is probably less of a lack of curiosity than it is intimidation by authority. I had always been an Obedient Child – strict Christian school, strict Christian teachers, and I wanted to have Good Christian Conduct. I never asked why rules were they way they were, although I might have wondered — I just followed them. It’s a bit akin to what Jared Diamond notes in the opening pages of Guns, Germs and Steel – he considers tribal New Guineans smarter than Americans because even though they don’t have as much access to global information networks or our formal education system, they’ve spent their developing years talking to one another, learning through conversation, living within a community instead of rotting away their brains on TV. I, having been a shy kid who would rather have buried myself in books than surrounded by people, can vouch for this less desirable effect. This unhappy trait followed me around until – well, maybe it’s still around. This is the block of ignorance, the fatalistic flaw.
I had always considered certain types of students in my classes to be the smart ones. They were the ones who had strong opinions, spoke up all the time, argued with the teacher. I’ve come to realize, perhaps a little later than I ought to, that opinionated people are not necessarily the same as smart people. I respect a person much more if they can state a position with careful consideration of opposing arguments in mind — not just choosing the best ways to deflect popular arguments, but really considering them — than someone who could just spout off. I had always felt a little dubious of those who could really have such strong opinions about something they never had any direct experience with — to use an analogy my coworker used once, it’s like supporting abortion your whole life until finally your friend actually gets one. And, of course, there are some cases where having an opinion on an issue just doesn’t help at all if you don’t really know what the fuck is going on. But, because they act passionate about the topic, and they seem like they know what they’re talking about, you believe them anyway, especially if you’re not all that familiar with the subject. Or, well, I believe them anyway. This has been my basic attitude for most of my life – I’m not good at figuring out the rules of the world, so it must be others that know them better than I do. This guy sounds like he understands what it’s all about, so I’ll take his word for it.
This is the part where the naked emperor comes in.
As I’ve gotten older and become increasingly aware of my own gaping ignorance, my own penchant for accepting things without question, I’ve been able to liberate my curiosity a little bit. I’ve been on an information binge since I graduated college, and especially ever since I started graduate school here in New York City — sometimes a heavier one, sometimes lighter, but never complacent. In some way or another I’ve been thirsting for knowledge, for information, from anything to why ethnic conflict in Burma exists, to where do neutron stars come from, to how do I do a good palm mute or hammer on without breaking my finger or my damned guitar? And as I’ve been on this binge, I’ve become even more aware that, well…nobody else really knows anything, either.
I had known this before to an extent, but as with many things that you learn too early, it has only really hit me in the face in recent years. Those economists who predicted the banking crash were left in the margins, even freaking Elie Wiesel got ripped off by a Ponzi scheme. Radiolab has shown me that all laboratory science really is is a bunch of folks in a lab making a bunch of mistakes over and over again until they finally get lucky. Nobody really knows how the damn economy works. In a media world that is saturated with so-called experts, specialists, spouting off advice and predictions, this acknowledgement of a universal ignorance is, really, freeing. It’s the little boy crying out that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
We all want to understand ourselves, our societies, these problems that plague us, the way this crazy universe operates. And as far as our civilization has progressed, we still don’t really know anything. We guess, we get lucky, we adapt, we learn by living. By asking questions, even stupid ones. And this is why I am the way I am today, and why, if I’ve talked to you frequently over the past year or two, I’ve asked you a lot of incessant and annoying questions about the way things work in this world. And it’s these stupid questions and the knocking down of our own pride and the challenging of authority that, I think, will get us to come up with the best solutions. By acknowledging our own vast ignorance and that of our parents, our journalists, our presidents, our scientists, this is how we survive and thrive and grow.
“and so died riabouchinska”
My revulsion-fascination with creepy ventriloquist dummies and unrequited love comes together in this fantastic performance by Claude Rains in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of my favorite shows. The episode is called “And So Died Riabouchinska,” about an inspector interrogating a ventriloquist about a murder.
Here Claude Raines has an amazing (and incredibly creepy) monologue about building his ventriloquist dummy, a Russian princess named Riabouchinska:
bubbles
This weekend I saw a man walking down the street with a bubble gun, leaving a whole trail of bubbles wherever he walked. I think having a trail of bubbles behind you automatically brings happiness wherever you go.
The role of a physicist is oddly spiritual and somewhat romantic, beyond all the abstract math equations and Nobel quabbles. Policymakers, doctors, engineers, teachers all work to sustain life and livelihood – sustain a society, a human body, a species, a natural resource. But a physicist is always aware that the inevitable lies just outside the atmosphere — and that eventually, these life forms and this planet return to being dust and particles and energy and waves, but even as we as humans will cease to exist, we will still be all around.
I’m happy that I can play an instrument, however mediocrely. Being able to create music is an amazing ability.
the fabric of the cosmos!
I finished The Elegant Universe and I’m getting through A Brief History of Time now. I went to the Strand last weekend and got Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos for $6. I think, if I’m still on this time-space kick in a couple of weeks maybe I’ll pick up Death by Black Hole also. I think the main reason I’m so interested in the universe now and not back in sophomore year Astro 10 is that all these books and documentaries specifically leave out all the math.
Today I went to the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History for a show featuring a visual guide through an atlas of the observed data-plotted universe. The guide there was promoting the Galileoscope — a replica of the kind of telescope Galileo used to observe the craters on the moon, Saturn’s rings, Venus, etc. I bought one and am really excited. I always wanted a telescope as a kid.
APPARENTLY, the static you see in between channels on analog TV is partially (about 10%) radiation left over from the Big Bang. ISN’T SPACE WEIRD?
Interestingly enough, at the same time I started getting into all this time-space crap, I started reading this copy of a Gideon Bible that I picked up in our hotel in Atlantic City. Reading about the origins of the universe from the Big Bang perspective alongside the first two pages of Genesis sort of leaves a lot of questions for God to answer. (If there was technically no earth “in the beginning,” what constitutes a day? How come creating the stars is just thrown in there as an afterthought? What exactly do they mean by “heavens”? Why the hell is Genesis so vague?)
Aside from all this, I went to LA and San Diego this past weekend to see my boy, and it was fantastic. I learned to surf (well, how one is supposed to surf), ate a ton of sushi, rode a bunch of roller coasters, and saw Fleetwood Mac in concert. I have now been close enough to Stevie Nicks to bask in her cocaine-laced essence. Next month when Mark comes to visit me, it will be Peter Luger steak and Aerosmith.
In the meantime I will wait for my awesome telescope to arrive.