A View of Moral Behavior

The large context of human behavior consists of scalar fields (the dark), pure, unknowable energy, decaying into measurable particles (the light). Human beings are composed of such particles and, whatever the unmoved mover of scalar fields consists of - God, gods, or force, exist in the universe of the demiurge creating order, such as human beings, out of chaos.
In such mechanical confusion what moral compass exists that can guide human beings in their incidental and strategic behavior. That compass is self-interest, especially in the large sense, and self-aggrandizement, also especially in the large sense. Both of these prescripts are interpreted in terms of happiness, existence in meaning, and the pursuit of happiness, moving to the light, creating order out of chaos in order to be happier, to increase the possibility of meaning which is structural and contingent.
In contrast to this schema are unstable exercises of control that decrease meaning as well as the destructive madness of crowds undermining social structures, meaning, and happiness. The Twentieth century was a history of such anti-social, in the sense of moral behavior, exercises. The net result of this destruction of civilization is a great nihilist age in which meaning is dear and moral behavior rare.
We civilizados are in the position of an ancient Byzantine monastery in a hostile wilderness, carrying civilization without quite being civilized. The possible severely limits what moral action can be taken. Martyrs are useful to posterity in ennobling a social structure being set. A civilizado going away in a dark alley for no sustainable gain in meaning is not the stuff of martyrdom.
Thus, simply put, moral behavior consists of action, myth creation motivating such action, database creation, and paradigm development generating humane, sustainable order out of chaos to the limit of the possible. Neither grandiose ambitions nor libertine indulgence reference the limits of the possible, the first being routinely disastrous and the second being positively uncivilizing. If civilization is a vehicle for consistently moral behavior, then this is the essence of it.
Next: Markets and Moral Behavior
Be well and do well.

@BasilBrylcreem

Some Notes on Mental Illness

Current psychiatric theory deals with imbalances in neurotransmitters, imbalances in neural activity in the cerebral cortex, and actual damage to neural structures such as the hippocampus. Leaving experimental psychology to the qualified practitioners perhaps it is an appropriate moment in the development of neurophysiological knowledge to step back and use the brain to understand the brain logically.
Certainly the phenomenon of personal trauma resulting in psychosis is well known. Specific diagnoses such as PTSD are defined in those terms. It is generally agreed that the inability to process through trauma causes psychotic symptoms. This leads logically to an inquiry as to what an external trauma would look like in the brain. Hypothetically it would be an unintegrated structure of dendrites and synapses. If this is the case and one is intent upon curing this type of psychosis, what approach would be taken?
Obviously the object of psychotherapy in this case would be to integrate such a structure, a trauma fragment, into the greater neurology of the brain. There are many effective techniques for doing this which are based on conjectural psychological theory. Wouldn't it be easier to use a physiological model and address the mechanics of managed dendrite formation directly? Of course it would.
What would such a therapeutic regimen look like? Hyperconnectivity probably involves dopamine, HGH, vitamin B12, and neurostimulation. Such a regimen would involve, as any sufferer of psychosis will tell you, an espresso and a cigar. Properly practiced, it would also involve LDopa, 1000 mcg of B12, and exercise. There is no doubt in my mind that reading the right books, nonfiction and fiction, and regularly participating in appropriate conversation is required to fully integrate a significant trauma fragment.
One must think through personal trauma in order to fully integrate it into a healthy brain. Popular culture is not in the business of integrating trauma. At times it appears to be in the opposite business of incurring trauma. A healthy retreat from a constant diet of discomfort and shock can only improve the coherent structure of the brain, but this can only be a temporary withdrawal in the manner of a lion licking his wounds. At some point reality must be dealt with successfully as a criteria of recovery.

Personal Myth; Personal Canon

All readers have favorite books. Postmodernists deal in personal myth and each personal myth is symbol to a canon of theory, of philosophy, of experience. Significant to the writing of my novel in progress is that there is a gap in the canon implied by my personal myth in which an unknown volume fits and I am writing that volume, a simple and legitimate motivation.
Human knowledge increases by a process of 'puzzling', finding a missing piece that nears the larger puzzle to completion with Gestalt moments of paradigm shifts when puzzles are recognizably complete and perspectives shift. We live in such an age of perspective shift, a Gestalt moment. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are only a century old and the String Theory that unifies them less than that. Science is now working in Information Theory. It will be another century before we acculturate the descriptively powerful image of scalar fields decaying into particles and all that that implies, a century away from understanding these magnificent theoretical constructs in our cultural behavior.
I have a personal need to write this book and I perceive social value in its existence. This is a difficult and dark dystopian age where meaning is dear and found largely in personal terms. By examining the human condition within the framework of my personal canon and filtered by my personal myth, I might have the germ of idea that will provide the missing piece to someone's personal myth and perhaps contribute to a New Grand Narrative if such a thing is possible. And so I write.

http://www.amazon.com/author/johnfrazier

The Sport of Writing

I have always been fond of sports metaphors and quotes in casual conversation. However today I decided to write a blog comparing writing to sport. It is not far fetched. Sport requires talent, diligent practice, discipline, and will. I could be describing a good writer. The difference lies in the fact that the reader only sees the result of the writer's performance, not the performance itself. With sport, the game's the thing. It is an interesting difference.
Within the writing community, some do appreciate the game itself. We are aficionados of the writing game and it has been characterized as such. Writing is our sport however the reading public sees it and they generally see it in much more grandiose terms. An elegant sentence is the equivalent of a three point goal in basketball. No more. No less. When one is blessed or burdened with a deep understanding of the process of pen across page, it is an incredibly rewarding experience to get all the moving parts moving together like a Rolex and make that three point goal, write that elegant sentence.
Sports, however, are played against other players and here the metaphor gets a bit thin. Any self-respecting writer does play against a canon of similar talent. They wrestle in their own weight class but they do wrestle. I am no Hemingway or Nabokov but I do have writers in mind that I would like to match or better. To me and, in practice, other writers, writing is a sport.

The Fiction Narrative as Product

When I began conceptualizing the novel I am now writing, I first imagined a superb (Indie) bookstore and visualized the shelf on which I was trying to place this book. In other words, this novel is market-driven. Books are written to be read and writing with any other criteria then unit sales in mind makes no sense to the union of pen and paper. I do engage in writing exercises to hone my craft and develop form but always with an eye to saying something worth saying well enough for it to be read and enjoyed.
A generic book is a product in the same sense that a painting is a product. While the category, books by the pound, exists just as the product category, motel art, exists, the defining attributes of vision and talent select certain books for certain shelves in the book market, the universal bookstore.
Unlike some other writers, I appreciate Amazon's business model for the creation and marketing of books as products. They do make mistakes such as treating books as a commodity by lowering unit prices to increase volume of sales but, as it becomes obvious that this is a mistake, they will change their model. Theirs is a pragmatic, heuristic approach to selling more books and, since I want my novel read, I support their approach even when they make mistakes.
I will say that the Amazon search engine, which constitutes the shelves of that bookstore, is mysterious, even enigmatic. In my personal experience, it has behaved brilliantly in presenting certain books of interest to me and in a fairly mediocre fashion at other times. Writing for a search engine is a totally different concept than writing for a physical shelf and I admit that I am struggling to master it.

The Meaningful Sentence

When a writer has, as I have, an irrational fear of writing without saying something worth saying or what I call prattlephobia, it is the focus of the writing exercise to create meaningful sentences. If that focus puzzles the reader, I strongly recommend Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on the logic of language and meaning in his 'Philosophical Investigations'. Otherwise, please read on.
What is a meaningful sentence? It is an approximate solution to a problem in combining idea, lexicon, and syntax. If there is insufficient idea, it is a failed solution. It does not say anything. If the dictates of the market requires a lexicon insufficient to express the nuance of what the writer is saying, it is a failed solution. It does not say enough. If the writer lacks the talent and skill to manage the manipulation of syntax, it is a failed solution. It does not communicate anything.
However one may excuse solution failures in lexicon and syntax, there is no excuse for a sentence not saying anything. If the writer has nothing to say, don't write. Read and maybe an idea will germinate. The craft of writing consists, as far as I am concerned, in creating meaningful sentences that build meaningful stories.

The Art of Saying Something Worth Saying

I'm going to begin this blog by saying that fiction is not well suited to serious thought as such. I can think of very few exceptions to this observation, Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which he inserts a brilliant essay on architecture, culture, and technology in media res being one of them. He manages to do this with style and success, but as far as I am concerned the exceptions prove the rule. I tried to include thoughtful digressions in my novella, 'Chances', with notably poor results.
While it is possible to have reservations about nonfiction, historians spinning facts, theory laden volumes of science, fiction is just fiction. It is a vignette frozen in time of a specific state of imagination and not a vehicle for polemics. My working definition is that legitimate fiction is a valuable vision of the possible which entertains. It is an examination and hypothesis of human conditions of existence but it should not be approached with grandiose personal narratives of the genius of the author as thinker. Genius in fiction lies in elegant, evocative sentences that say something worth saying about human beings. Fiction is, after all, the most humane of written works.

A Sketch is Not a Blueprint.

When I plan a work I want a free-form vehicle to take the story from conflict to resolution. What I do not want is a rigid structure that micromanages my prose. While the romantic image of a novelist just sitting down at a typewriter and tapping out the Great American Novel is amusing indeed, there does, if the planning is done correctly, come such a moment when one simply 'Writes'. That is the objective of proper planning.
To get to that point of 'Writing', I begin by sketching paragraph topics, scene by scene, with a sense of chapter endings and beginnings. I then develop these topics into full paragraphs and those paragraphs into pages of content draft. By doing it this way, I maximize my creativity in the moment while maintaining my narrative structure, while making sense. This content draft is the underlying structure of the book which I then transform, by 'Writing', into a rough draft of some literary merit, of some style.
A novel is a complex and difficult form but it does reduce at some point of experience to a magic mix of what the author said and how they said it. Sketching a work allows that magic to happen. Blueprinting it denies such possibility.

Method and Meaning

How one writes ultimately depends on one's predispositions and abilities. I prefer a loose structure to my writing. I may be and, in fact, am guilty of overthink but I never overplan. That destroys spontaneity and, to me, being creative in the moment defines the practice of meaningful storytelling. I could comprehensively outline a competent story with a valuable moral but, then, in writing it I would be filling in the blanks. Some writers can pull that off with style. I cannot. I like to turn the English language loose and go where it leads me. That results in elegant sentences that say something and that is my concept of excellence.
Next week I will detail how I plan a work to maximize my creativity.

A Work in Progress

Seven years ago I gave up writing seriously for a time, producing in those years only a short story, 'The Railers'. I felt at the time that, given my morbid fear of writing without saying anything, I did not know enough within the framework of current thought to write even a forgettable contemporary novel. So I delved deep into current thought, starting with 'middlebrow' compendiums and moving to source documents such as journal reports and original works. I completed that major task about two years ago and, while still filling gaps in my knowledge base, I began, as Carnap put it, 'thinking the world' with this new information. I began integrating all of this material into a coherent world view.
As I proceeded in this project, I blogged this integration as I accomplished it. The record exists in my old blogs of that integration. I am now confident enough in my intellectual processes to begin to write a science fiction adventure set in the near future, acknowledgements to Philip K. Dick's 'Blade Runner' which was written over fifty years ago.
My Work in Progress, tentatively titled 'Out of Paradiso', is scratching and clawing its way through the crystallizing but chaotic web of information in my brain and into existence. It is a slow go and I intend to keep interested readers informed of its progress.

http://www.amazon.com/author/johnfrazier

An Appreciation of a Postmodern Political Economy

What differentiates a postmodern political economy from a modern one? The modern political economy is defined by fixed geopolitical borders, an autonomous legal system, a societal narrative, and the evolved institutions necessary to secure these elements. The postmodern political economy is defined as a functional unit of human material existence engaged in rational optimization as expressed in a market and its purview which encompasses all products and services whose relative value is directly established by that market and is the effective range of its value calculus or currency/currencies and the narratives, conventions, and institutions necessary to ensure contract performance.
The actual result of each of these political economies resemble each other but the orientation of each differs enormously. Modern orientation is irrational and ad hoc. Postmodern orientation is rational, inscrutable, and systematic. They are different intellectual universes and they are in coincidence which causes much confusion. Even as the theoretical basis of the postmodern political economy comes into being, the narratives of the modern political economy are shown to be insufficient to conserve humankind and the universe in a satisfactory manner.
The essential difference between these two systems is their view of markets. Modern political economies consider markets incidental and temporary necessary evils to the good of the Triumph of Reason. Postmodern political economies consider markets the demiurge that creates order out of chaos. People who engage in market behavior do so in a manner of rational optimization to some end. That does not mean markets are rational. As any market maven will tell you, they do not always behave rationally. They are inscrutable.
Certain research points out that there appears to be deterministic chaos in the behavior of markets. That is no reason to write them off. That would be as hallucinatory to the human condition as considering the Invisible Hand of the market to be the hand of God. The reality is that existence is a shifting dynamic of order and chaos. Sometimes markets are models of rationality. Sometimes they're not.
The defining difference between these two lies in their intellectual cultures. The Grand Narrative of Western Civilization is in abeyance, having been found wanting in World War 1. It is inadequate to modern technology. The science that has replaced it is heuristic and ad hoc and unsatisfactory to the nature of the universe that it is in the process of uncovering. The intellectual culture of postmodern political economies holds narratives to be incidental strategies in game play. To repeat myself, these are different universes.
To engage in postmodern economics is to deny the Triumph of Reason as a human possibility and to accept the inscrutable nature of a reality forged from chaos. It is to consider society a system of individuals engaged in such tasks through the magic of markets and, like all federalist systems, subject to checks and balances.
This is a Great Age of Transition and while it is likely that we will lose our way, it is important that we keep our eyes on the prize of the greater good for the greater number while respecting human life and liberty,

A Living Wage and Rational Material Existence

First, two tenets of rational material existence:
1. Markets exist as an expression of human social existence. They are absurd in any other context.
2. Human social existence, although bounded by scarcity including a lack of meaning, is by definition humane, concerned with human values.
This being said, no market based economy can be inhumane except as an expression of the madness of crowds. Economies can be insane. This economy of the United States is by analysis and anecdote a little mad and getting worse. There is one obvious problem that is driving this maniac market.
People working 40 hours a week who cannot afford the necessities of life is lunacy. I do not care what profit margins are cited or what competition exists, this is crazy. We knew in the late 19th century that innovation and economic dislocation go hand in hand. We knew that progress has a price. We knew that a living wage defined rational material existence.
Have we gotten so technologically delirious that we have forgotten the hard lessons so dearly earned? The numbers the market is generating are funny numbers. They are so because we have no reliable gauge of real employment, the kind where the employed person can eat, can adjust to changing conditions, can afford decent housing.
Without a humane bottom to a market based economy, that economy is inhumane, that economy is absurd, that economy is insane. Funny numbers make investors do funny things. We do not need that happening in an age of innovation. It costs too much in human capital, the very measure of an inhumane economy.
The problem of a living wage is technical. What number works? Set too high, there will be excessive interference with entrepreneurs and excessive inflation. This is a solvable problem. Increase the minimum wage gradually and watch the rate of inflation and listen to struggling entrepreneurs.
We need to relearn the difficult lessons of the introduction of the locomotive and the automobile. We need to revisit the psychological space of a human value economy and set a Living Wage.