Dinesh D'Souza: "Life After Death: The Evidence"

I recall, in the fall of 1958, in sophomore English at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, that a (female) classmate wrote a theme in which she tried to prove the existence of God. She got an A on the theme (I don’t remember what my choice was for that assignment).

That long memory trace popped up into my mind when I heard about Dinesh D’Souza’s new book “Life After Death: The Evidence” from the (“conservative”) Regnery Publishing Company in Washington DC, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59698-099-0, 267 pages, hardcover, with a garish blue dust jacket.

The most striking piece of “evidence”, for my money, comes from general relativity, and the evidence today that there are up to eleven dimensions, seven of which are out of sight (since we live in “space-time” in our Universe). These dimensions might be accessible through “branes” linked to subatomic quantum-like particles, perhaps inside black holes. But their very existence gives a Deity an opportunity to “construct” (not needing a sharp-point compass or protractor) lots of other Universes to house versions of an Afterlife. Indeed, Clive Barker had toyed with a theory of all this with his Five Dominions (the First was essentially the Afterlife amd the Fifth was ours) in his epic 1991 “Chinese puzzle” novel “Imajica”.

Quantum theory maps out to the duality of mind and matter, and to the paradoxes we get into when we account for the Universe being the way it is and our planet’s being exactly right for life (and particularly Ben Stein’s exploration of Intelligent Design in the movie “Expelled”). That’s the “Anthropic Principle” perhaps, lending on a number of factors (our large Moon, Jupiter, the properties or water, etc) making our Blue Planet Earth just right (means we’d better take care of it).

This gets to be elaborated into what sound like a conservative’s view of New Age theory about spirit, self, mind, the group, etc. D’Souza takes us through a thorough philosophy of morality (or a blueprint that he would call a teleology), particularly an interesting idea of “selfishness” at the genetic, rather than individual, level. That explains some self-sacrifice (and it certainly explains “conservative” notions of “family values”) , but “evolution” cannot easily deal with higher order altruism expected in Gospel-style Christianity.

Here, I feel tempted to digress into my own area. D’Souza does not delve into gay issues (other than one metaphoric humorous oxymoron “zombie pride”), but in my own experience I can relate to replacing “genetic selfishness” (otherwise I would want to procreate and have a lineage to provide vicarious immortality) with “mind selfishness” in which a “legacy” of intellectual property (be it music or writings, all with ideological influence as to bearing on right and wrong) lives on. This can become boorish, whereas living “real life” is replaced by kibitzing the emotions of others. For me, the worst psychological horror is to be coerced into joining into the cultural causes defined by others regardless of my own view of the "morality" of these causes, and wind up being part of their group asking for help in a group manner. Yet, jumping ahead, Christianity (even compared to other religions) seems to demand some suspension of one's own judgment of right and wrong. Call it "pride" if you like, or even "the knowledge of good and evil."

Generally, higher moral notions (and the propagation of the “noumenal” part of us) do relate to various conceptions of an afterlife, even in agnostic or atheistic conceptions by philosophers such as Schopenhauer. Ultimately, D’Souza explains how Christianity is “different” with its notion of grace, which replaces almost completely the idea that one can earn one’s own salvation with works or good karma in the usual sense. D’Souza speculates on what Hell and Heaven would look like, with a degree of Hollywood imagination (I suspect he’s read “Imajica”, and perhaps seen some films like “Wristcutters”). D'Souza, on p. 228, offers an odd comment, "Some humans may be better than others, but the differences aren't enough to make a difference." Maybe we need Grace because a progression of Life is impossible if it must adhere to absolute justice at an individual level; Life by definition, out of its dualistic biological processes, must be "unfair."

In 2002, I read (and reviewed on doaskdotell.com) an earlier book by D’Souza, “What’s So Great About America?” (again, Regnery). I seem to recall a metaphor or example about a “Starbucks Guy” and a concept of “authentication” by which one establishes that one’s work has some real worth to others.

Levitt and Dubner: "Super Freakonomics": a does of existential analysis of many popular issues

In recent days, major media outlets have given a lot of attention to the new book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, a followup on “Freakonomics”. The new book is titled “Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance,” 2009, from William Morris Publishers, ISBN 978-0-06-088957-9, 270 pages, hardcover, indexed.

Most of the book talks about the existential paradoxes that we reach when we follow popular thinking about major issues. The authors believe that many positive changes in society have come about as a result of relatively simple innovations. They give the polio vaccine as an example. Or, they say, consider that whale oil as a fuel source had sustainability problems in the Nineteenth Century. That was replaced, almost on a whimsical accident in Pennsylvania, by fossil fuel oil, leading to today’s debate on peak oil and global warming.

The authors discuss some relatively simple proposed innovations that could cool ocean and Gulf of Mexico waters to prevent super-hurricanes, and also discuss a huge global “straw” to siphon some sulfur dioxide up into the stratosphere to oppose global warming. They also say that global warming could be more influenced by bovine flatulence (releasing methane) that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, and locally grown food is not always more energy efficient.

On the social issues, the authors get interesting. They talk about selfishness and altruism, and show that many nursing home visits or eldercare efforts by adult children seem to be motivated by a desire for bequest; therefore, Singapore (wise to all this) passed its “Maintenance of Parents Act”, one of the world’s most rigidly enforced filial responsibility laws putting responsibility on adult children (most of all the childless themselves).

The authors also discuss statistical evidence that violent crime may have increased since the 1950s in relation to how much exposure young men or boys have to television. It's not violent content that is the issue, as much as the lack of socialization, perhaps.

The authors also explain the particularly self-destructive behavior associated with terrorism, which they say often comes from relatively privileged young men seeking to make their lives into bombastic public statements. They discuss not only 9/11 but also the 2002 Malvo sniper cases, and lay out some horrific hypothetical scenarios which need not be repeated here. They also discuss some profile characteristics of these young men (some of which are kept classified, a secret that the authors say they respect), one of which is the lack of life insurance (because of a lack of generativity).

Geoff Livingston: "Now Is Gone": Social media replace one-way self-publishing

Geoff Livingston was one of the panelists at the “Social Media Outlook” forum at Tysons Corner Va. Oct. 14, sponsored by Potomac Tech Wire, and he mentioned his book “Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs,” published in Laurel MD in 2007 by Bartleby, with ISBN 978-0910155731. The book runs 194 pages, with an attractive “Milwaukee Road” yellow and black cover, paperback. The website for the book is this.

The transition from “Web 1.0” to “Web 2.0” roughly marks the development of a duality: the Web moves from being a one-way publishing platform (especially for self-publishing) embellished with the kernel of e-commerce, to a public interaction forum that restructures not just social meeting, but the whole functioning of a market economy, with public relations and marketing.

My own experience is instructive. I started by writing a book focused on trying to lift the ban on gays in the military, and found that I was developing a whole paradigm to understand the tension between individualistic and group or family-based ways of looking at moral issues. Once the paradigm is published and becomes known, it is difficult for special interests to maintain a grip on the debate, because it is “always there,” available through search engine for anyone. I maintained “running footnote” files as flat web pages to supplement the book (and put the book online). But in 2006, I basically replaced the “running footnote” maintenance with the blogs that you see today.

But the Web 2.0 approach to repealing “don’t ask don’t tell” would support the “special interest” way of doing things: you use social media to find and grow like-minded people, raise money (organizations call this “development”) and make your cause socially, rather than just intellectually, compelling. Indeed, the social aspect of this problem (DADT) is in practice much harder than the intellectual part (it’s pretty easy to knock down the old arguments for the military ban, that is).

Indeed, the media has presented many ways in which the Web is used for charitable giving and organizing volunteer and relief efforts (as after Hurricane Katrina).

When I wrote my book and first created my site in 1997, I regarded my “work life” and “expressive life” as separate, the latter as almost my “private life” (even despite my Minneapolis television appearances in early 1998). Social media, however, force “unification” of one’s “online reputation.”

The book includes an introduction by Brian Solis, and some “Best of the Buzz Bin Interviews” with Shel Holtz, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Derfen, Brian Oberkirch, Laura Ries, Kami Watse Huyse, and Scott Baradell. It’s interesting to me that the Additional Reading Lists gives Rebecca Blood’s “The Weblog Handbook” but not Nancy Flynn’s American Management Association guide “Blog Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policy, Public Relations, and Legal Issues" (006).

Discount retail chains erode publishers' business models

Wal-Mart, Target, and Sears are drawing Amazon into a book-pricing war that could be harmful to publishers (especially self-publishers), according to a story by Stephen Lowman in the Washington Post, Wednesday Oct. 21, p. 19A, link here. The title of the story is “Amazon, discounters in book-pricing war; Wal-Mart fires first, online giant responds, then Target enters fray”.

The strategy of the lowballing on book prices is to draw customers into adding other higher profit margins, like clothing, to their shopping carts.

Libraries allow readers to download books, one at a time

Public libraries are exploring “digital lending” of books, in a model in which only one reader can download a particular digital book at a time, according to a story by Mokoto Rich in the October 15 New York Times, “Libraries and readers wade into digital lending”, link here.

Generally, these books cannot be read on Amazon’s Kindle or the Apple iPhone. But still, since visitors can download onto their personal laptops, publishers worry that the practice would ruin sales, as visitors could essentially get personal use copies for free.

Of course, I have no objection if readers do this with my authored books.

Also, look at this column by Ashley Surdin in the Monday, Oct. 19 2009 Washington Post, "In some classrooms, books are a thing of the past : Digital texts gaining favor, but critics question quality", link here.

E-books could faces "Napster-like" threat

Randall Stross has a provocative article in The New York Times this morning, “Will E-Books Be Napsterized?” link here, in the Digital Domain section of the paper’s Business Section.

My own personal reaction is, if I want to read an entire book, I usually want a hard copy, to peruse while waiting for the previews in a theater (if the overhead lights are on). But, as the article points out, portable tablet devices, self-illuminated even for dark spaces, may quickly change things, even “on the beach”.

The article discusses RapidShare as having unwittingly been involved in questionable hosting of copied book material. The company says it honors DMCA take down notices.

Again, I’ve made my own books available online for free viewing (at doaskdotell.com) in order to gain “limelight”. However, established authors and publishers depend on original sales, and the world of trade publishing, like movies, is a bit insular and self-protective (as discussed in the review of Patry’s “Copyright Wars”, previous post). Authors Guild, for example, the last time I looked, only accepts as members authors who are normally able to gain advances before publication. The rise of self-publishing may challenge this old model, and new authors may object much less to free copies, further eroding the older business model.

Patry: "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars"

Author: William Patry.
Title: "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars".
Publication: London: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-538564-9, hardbound, 266 pages.

Patry, a Senior Copyright Counsel at Google who says that this book expresses only his own views, has an interesting metaphor. Copyright is an adjunct to social order, or, that is, it has been set up that way over history. Intellectual property rights are not necessarily a “natural right” (like land ownership perhaps); but once enshrined in the law and business, they can be manipulated to protect business models already commensurate with a certain social order (read: the family, judging from previous reviews on this column, although Patry stops short of making that comparison explicit). Hence, he develops his notion of "moral panics" or breakdown of social order (eg, the family, the corporate state).

I got a self-taught novice course in copyright law when I wrote my first book in the mid 1990s. I learned what fair use means, and discovered that there were double standards in place throughout the i.p. world even then, just as the Internet was taking off. There were companies around that would, for a fee, get “permissions” for you; but with any care, you really didn’t need permission. The danger was that an amateur writer could tick someone off.

It’s not unreasonable, in my mind, to maintain that a book author should have, according to conditions of a reasonable marketplace, get some royalty when her work is distributed; or that a composer ( a couple of current friends (pun if you like) of mine are young classical composers) should get paid when his work is performed. I’ve always understood that. It was nice to get a few hundred dollars in book revenue during the latter part of 1997. But my main purpose was to make an argument and, frankly, enter the limelight.

What gets hairy, as Paltry explains, is how businesses over the centuries tried to control how media could be developed and distributed by others, going all the way back to the time of the Catholic Church faced by the threat of the printing press. In his introduction, Paltry asks if copyright was a “tax” on consumers for the benefit of content authors, but as the book develops, it seems like it’s a tax to preserve the corporate-familial state.

In that sense, as I have explained on my blogs before, my own model for distributing political arguments is a “threat” to established models of publishing, and of lobbying for political influence. Back in the late 1990s, fellow libertarians in Minnesota warned me that I would be perceived as a “threat”; it’s turned out that Napster was a threat (as was P2P file-sharing, which the RIAA and MPAA took on as an existential threat, to the point of telephone lawsuits against individual downloaders), but Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, in the final analysis, were not, even though they all proposed revolutionary models. They were what consumers wanted.

That’s the rub, Patry says. He brings this out particularly in his discussion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is remarkable in its reach in controlling content playback or distribution devices from third parties, even prohibiting what would be fair use. (I recall that back in the 1960s a friend and I would tape each other’s classical records for private use; and we would justify it morally by saying that we both bought lots of vinyl records anyway, usually at big sales; Patry brings up the notion that even the CD was at one time perceived as an existential threat to the vinyl record, before the Sony BetaMax case blew the whole old-fashioned “record sales” and old broadcast television models out of the water, because Sony also gave us non-infringing uses. Don’t forget here MGM v. Grokster, where downstream liability applies if a “new” business model is predicated primarily upon the expectation of user infringement.)

OK, on the DMCA, let me get back on subject. Patry’s point is that Congress was promised that the DMCA would actually promote legitimate consumer interests; in fact it did not, as we know. The notorious “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA, the take-down (or “disable”) provision, often credited (along with Section 230 of the 1996 CDA) of “saving the Internet” for free entry, is very much abused, Patry says, by third party companies who automate the process of generating bogus complaints, often intended to suppress free speech (rather like SLAPP). I digress here and recommend the link “Blogopshere Hails Tim Lee’s DMCA Paper” (“Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), link here at the “Technology Liberation Front”. Patry goes into some other side cases, like Redbox and even Cartrivision, an awkward precursor to the VCR.

Patry’s last chapter, “How Innovation Occurs” gives a good distinction between innovation and invention, and makes the case that “creative destruction” really does support “Reagan-style” economic well being for people who do have initiative to act on their own – which fits well into individualism but not into a world predicated on social control. Indeed, think about the “we give you the words” model of sales culture, designed to propagate an existing business structure founded on social and familial structures, in which most people never really become content creators.

Patry’s writing style is interesting, and paradoxical: he has lots of very long quotes himself, developing his subject matter in academic dissertation-style.

I don’t think the book makes a “Michael