On reasoning

The worst, one of my lecturers in law school explained, is not to come to a decision, reasons for it you will find afterwards. For many years I took this only as a telling illustration of how practitioners of the law operate: you do not reach a decision by solving problems, you reach the decision first and then you argue the problems away. Over the years however I came to think of this approach as a very human way of dealing with the complexities of life. We usually do what we do without thinking too much why we do it - and afterwards we justify our actions.

Some time ago, a British journalist was interviewed on BBC's "Hardtalk". He had been allowed to play mouse when Tony Blair's inner circle was about to decide whether to go along with the Bush government in invading Iraq. What had baffled him, the journalist said, was how easily ("off the cuff", I believe he said) the decison had been taken. No heated arguments with knowledgeable people, pundits, and the like. No, nothing of that sort, just ... okay then, let's do it ...

In short, we mostly do not use our brains to solve problems, we use them to justify our actions.

Kim's world

In 2008, when teaching English in the Brazilian town of Santa Cruz do Sul, one of my fellow teachers was Kimberly Krulikowski from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Kim, a linguist by training, had (and obviously still has) clear and distinctive views on pretty much everything and the kind of dry humour that I love (and that is not often found in North Americans). When I recently came across Kim on Faceboook, I also encountered a number of examples of her quite particular world view. Here are some of my favourites (I asked her permission, she doesn't mind me posting them here):

Religious views: no thank you

Studying a second language puts me in awe of how I ever learned a first one.

One of these days, I will play the violin again. Definitely before I'm thirty. Until then, it will stare at me from across the room, untuned and dehaired.

I'm actually happier than my face lets on.

Feeling spent

The other day, I came across an article in The Observer that attempted to explain how the modern world that we have created makes us sick. The author, William Leith, not only tells the story of Kate and others but also his own story - and it is not least his sharing of what he went through that makes this article so convincing. Here is how it begins:

On a Sunday morning in early June, Kate, a 36-year-old counsellor, was sitting on a sofa, drinking a cup of tea, and saying she didn't think she could go on any more. "I can't see a way out," she said. "I look at my life and I don't see any possibility of hope." She dipped her head and put a thumb up to her eye to brush away a tear. "I know I've said it before. But this time... I've come to the end."

Kate said: "I don't know what to do. God, I could just give up. Yesterday I had this feeling that I could just give up my responsibilities. I could become derelict and hopeless. But that's not the way to go, is it? I have a child. I have my job. Something's got to give. I don't know what, but something's got to give, because I'm at breaking point."

I was talking to Kate about exhaustion. I should say, first of all, that Kate is not her real name - she does not want me to use her real name. What if her boss knew the state she was in? For one thing, she is responsible for the wellbeing of other people - people who are supposed to be more vulnerable than her. Although sometimes, these days, she's not so sure.

What state is Kate in, exactly? She is drained beyond belief. Her facial expression reminds you of one of those young combat veterans you see in war photography; she has a "thousand-yard stare". Her facial muscles are somehow bunched up. Her body, she says, aches all over. She is often dizzy and nauseous. She describes her mental state as "foggy" and "fuzzy". On top of this, she has persistent bacterial and viral infections - this month she has had a cough; last month she had aches and fevers. She has just finished two courses of antibiotics; her cough, she says, is dying down. But when one thing dies down, another always springs up to take its place.

Once or twice a day, while she's working, Kate feels as if she's going to faint. It's as if her entire system is shutting down. "Something descends," she says. "I feel draped in it. It's like a curtain coming down." What's the explanation? Kate does very little physical labour. She does not run, or cycle, or walk long distances, or carry heavy loads. Her exhaustion may feel physical, but it is coming from somewhere outside the physical realm. "It's weird," says Kate.

But there's nothing weird or abnormal about Kate. She is one of an enormous number of people with a similar constellation of symptoms - millions of people at the end of their physical, and spiritual, tether. Frank Lipman, a South African doctor working in New York, has identified the condition in hundreds of his patients - he has a word for it: "spent". Lipman says that feeling spent is an understandable response to the 21st century. If you put a human being in a modern city, and add computers, mobile phones, credit cards, neon lights and 24-hour shopping, he says, what do you expect?

The full text you will find here

Consensual reality versus facts

When I asked Sukey why the Hmong community accepted her so readily, she said, "The Hmong and I have a lot in common. I have an anarchist sub-personality. I don't like coercion. I also believe that the long way around is often the shortest way from point A to point B. And I'm not very interested in what is generally called the truth. In my opinion, consensual reality is better than facts."
Anne Fadiman: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Von Döneressern und Ausländerfeinden

Am 10. Juni 2009 fand sich auf Spiegel online ein Artikel der 18jährigen Schülerin Ildiko Mannsperger, die vor kurzem ihr Abitur am Hölderlin- Gymnasium in Nürtingen abgelegt und mit ihrem Beitrag "Von Döneressern und Ausländerfeinden" für die Schülerzeitung "Spongo" beim Schülerzeitungswettbewerb des Spiegel den ersten Preis in der Kategorie Reportage gewonnen hat. Es ist ein toller Text und er gehört gelesen. So fängt er an:

Ich bin Deutsche. Mein Vater ist auch Deutscher. Meine Mutter auch und meine Schwester ist auch eine Deutsche. Zumindest haben wir alle einen deutschen Pass und auf unserem Personalausweis steht unter Nationalität: deutsch. Und trotzdem werde ich immer wieder gefragt ob ich wirklich aus Deutschland komme, denn so sehe ich gar nicht aus. "Wie sieht denn ein typischer Deutscher aus?", frage ich mich dann immer wieder. Existiert dieses Bild vom perfekten Deutschen mit den blonden Haaren und den blauen Augen immer noch?

Meine Großeltern waren Immigranten, sie sind aus anderen Ländern nach Deutschland eingewandert. Meine Eltern hatten hier keinerlei Probleme mit deren Herkunft und wurden und werden hier als Deutsche akzeptiert.

Doch das Thema Migration ist gerade in letzter Zeit immer mehr in den Vordergrund unserer Gesellschaft und somit auch in den Vordergrund der Medien getreten. In der Schule werden Bücher zum Thema Migration und daraus entstehenden Problemen gelesen. Man liest im Unterricht etwa über Schicksale, die dramatisch, beängstigend oder vielleicht auch hoffnungsvoll sind. Doch diese Schicksale sind immer noch Fiktion. Man kann sich mit ihnen nicht identifizieren. Sie sind meist zu weit weg. Aber es stimmt: Migration und Migrationsprobleme gibt es überall um uns herum.

Es ist Montag. Ich habe Ferien. Ferien sind super, da kann ich morgens immer ins Fitnessstudio gehen. Meine Mutter ist auch dabei. Ich will mich gerade auf mein Spinningrad setzen und losradeln, als eine Frau meine Mutter anlächelt und sie in gebrochenem Deutsch begrüßt. Ich kenne die Frau nicht, aber irgendetwas in ihrem Gesicht kommt mir bekannt vor. Doch ich denke nicht weiter darüber nach. Als unsere Sporteinheit vorbei ist, lächelt die Frau wieder freundlich meiner Mutter zu, fragt sie noch wie es ihr geht, und verabschiedet sich dann wieder.

Ich glaube sie ist Türkin. Was mich da so sicher macht? Sie hat eine etwas dunklere Haut, dunklere Augen und dunkles Haar. Ihr Akzent lässt darauf schließen, dass sie nicht in Deutschland geboren wurde. Sie trägt jedoch kein Kopftuch und auch ihre Kleidung ist alles andere als zugeknöpft: ein Top und dazu eine kurze Sporthose. Man muss allerdings dazu sagen, dass wir uns hier in einem Fitnessstudio nur für Frauen befinden.

Der vollständige Text findet sich hier

Why explore space?

40 years ago, on 20 July 1969 (at 10:56 p.m. New York time; on 21 July, at 3:56 a.m. Swiss time - my father had woken me up to watch it on TV), Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong stepped on the surface of the Moon. It was also the moment the American space program died, writes Tom Wolfe in The New York Times, because the so-called space race between the Soviets and the Americans was seen as just one thing: a military contest. Here's an excerpt:

NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

For the full text go here

How photography forces us ...

… how photography forces us to see a past that's still lurking in the present. As Ennis explains to a pair of newlyweds holding a pose before his apparatus: "The light is carrying you now, like a word into an ear, through the lens and onto the glass. This little instant of your lives will not go into the future but will remain here, seeded in time as you grow leaves above it."
Michael Redhill: Consolation