Quick Update

Hello all!

Just a quick update.

1) Colin's on page 92 of his thesis and still going strong! He's into his fourth chapter (the last major chapter) and is hoping to have a draft completed by the beginning of the summer.

2) Carina's last graduate teacher agreed to write her a recommendation for her MAT application, which is really exciting.

3) Colin may let Carina buy a pizza again. This is very exciting because sometimes food gets really boring here.

4)Carina may or may not be getting hired by Colin's advisor as a research assistant. They're still working out the details, but it is the first real response for work that she has gotten locally. Let's all cross our fingers and pray it works out.


Note: These rankings do not indicate order of importance.

Bangkok Honeymoon

I know this has been a long awaited post, so here it is. Our trip to Bangkok:

I enjoyed the flight to Thailand, but then I like flying. I'm not sure that Colin enjoyed it as much in transit to the Land of Smiles. But land of smiles it is, and Colin found his grin soon after we landed. Our flight had been delayed so we didn't get into Bangkok until around 1pm and we decided to eat lunch in the Airport. It's funny that we went someplace as "authentic" as Bangkok and then got Subway and Baskin Robbins for lunch, but there you are. It was the first time that we'd had turkey in months and ice cream is always a nice treat.

It took several maps and talking to several people that did not speak English to finally figure out what metros (called the BTR in Bangkok) we needed to take to get to the closest to our hotel. Once we got on the BTR Colin and I boggled at the green. GREEN! There were trees and grasses and plants. And they weren't all landscaped. But more than that - it was overwhelming. There was an overwhelming oxygen in Bangkok that is just lacking in Hong Kong. I have been told that the forest trails in Hong Kong give this effect as well, but I have yet to experience it.

The BTR stop Chong Nonsi was about five blocks from our hotel and easily walked. We stayed at the Luxx Hotel, which was lovely and modern. The floors were all dark hardwoods and everything form clean visual lines. It was also blessed with air conditioning. I've not yet experienced the serious heat of Hong Kong, but I am now prepared for what is coming in a month's time. It was humid and hardly ever dropped below 80 degrees our entire time there.

We were surprised to find on arrival that we got a complimentary breakfast each day of our visit. This was no ordinary continental breakfast of dry cereals and toast options. No No. This was your choice of eggs (boiled, omelette, scrambled or fried) with or without bacon AND sausage, cereal with chocolate or plain milk, your choice of fruit (banana, orange, pineapple, apple), either french toast or a croissant, a side of toast, a choice of fruit juice (tomato, pineapple or orange) and your choice of breakfast drink (coffee or tea). It was insanely huge and it caused us to not to have to eat a lunch meal both weekend days we were there.

After living in a tiny Hong Kong apartment with a mattress on the floor for a few months, the room itself was all the vacation we could have asked for. This hotel is particularly known for it's very modern bathrooms, which include bathtubs made like wooden barrels. Very relaxing.

The first night (Friday) after taking a brief nap, we headed to Siam Paragon, the most modern shopping experience in all of Bangkok. The food court (if it can be called that) was amazing. Yes, it did include a Burger King and KFC, but there was also a gourmet grocery, and sit down locations ranging from mid-level to expensive budgets. It was very impressive and we settled on Mexican (since we haven't been able to get that in Hong Kong either). The conclusion we came to after two days there was that if there is a style of food in existence, then the Thai can make it. After burritos and a shared margarita, we went to the basement of the mall complex to the Siam Ocean World Aquarium. We may or may not have pictures from this event. We discovered upon our arrival at the aquarium that the battery in Colin's camera was nearly dead and that he had forgotten to pack his charger. That being said, we did get a few pictures in before it died. This is also the reason for the video (2 posts previous to this). Colin had the bright idea of taking video with his iPod since we did not have the camera, which allowed us to get some images of our time there.

We had a very relaxing night of sleep and a HUGE breakfast (as described above) Saturday morning. Though one of the travel guides I had read said that people try to walk in Bangkok, but they should really just take a taxi, we decided to walk anyway. Colin and I are both keen on hiking, so why not hike through the city and get a glimpse of some real street culture. We hiked somewhere between four and six miles (our route not being the original intended and therefore not plotted for distance) from the center of Silom to Rattanakosin (see the map) to the Grand Palace. Along the way, many people offered to help give us directions and two of them tried to convince us that the palace was closed (one for construction and the other for a protest). This is apparently a common occurrence. I read that people will tell you this and sure enough they did, giving us their suggestions of other places to visit while in town. Nevertheless we persisted and found our way to the Grand Palace.

Luckily we had both planned to dress appropriately for our visit to this most auspicious location, which meant that we'd worn long pants and a long dress to walk 5+ miles in nearly 90 degree weather, but this saved us the trouble of having to rent appropriate clothing at the door. No shoulders, nothing above the knees, no chest were allowed to show and no holes in clothing permitted. We managed to get a disposable camera at one of the shops and so should have a few pictures (eventually) of our trip there. You can also see the video Colin took of our time.

One of the most fascinating things about the temples, burial chambers and buildings there is the sheer weight and volume of the materials used to build them. The walls of the buildings were all made of mirror, ceramic, or gold mosaics (each piece never exceeding the approximate area of a square centimeter) that were often layered and all of the roofs were made of ceramic tiles. I don't know if it is just the archaeologist in me that finds this amazing, but the sheer weight of the structures themselves means that the buildings must be exceedingly sturdy and well supported, and while they gave the impression of a gravity of permanence, they also were surprisingly delicate to behold. Perhaps it is the nature of the small tesserae or the intricate floral and geometric designs that they created, but it was an extremely impressive display of architecture and artistic craftsmanship.

We got to go into the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which is actually made of a solid piece of jade rather than emerald. Photography and videography were not permitted in this temple as it is an active place of worship and considered disrespectful (even as a tourist attraction), so Colin and I sketched our impressions of different parts of the altar.

Colin's sketch is of the main structure that housed the Buddha and the Buddha itself.The drawings on the right are mine and on the left are Colin's. I drew one of the golden statues (in pencil) that form part of the processional of the Buddha and one of the two trees dedicated (in blue, seen sideways here). There are two trees that are dedicated, one in gold and one in silver.

After our tour of the Grand Palace, we dodged raindrops on our walk to Khao San Road. For some reason (and a lot of that reason had to do with maps that do not accurately depict the roads in this are of the city), it took us a good two hours or so to walk to and find Khao San Road. Let's just say it involved two torrential downpours, some arguing over how to read the map, asking directions of people with no common language to us, wandering in circles, some hair-pulling frustration and two fresh fruit smoothies.

By this time it was already close to 5pm, so we directed our path toward a restaurant called Ethos. What wonderful food! We shed our shoes at the door and sat on pillows next to the low tables of the restaurant. We shared a local beer, discussing our impressions of the day and Colin's current philosophical project. I ordered the more middle eastern style pita and hummus and fresh veggie salad served with falafel and a lime tahini dressing. Sooo good. Colin order the more local cuisine of yellow curry, a curry soup full of freshly stewed veggies, including cauliflower, potatoes, snow peas, carrots, tomatoes and tofu. Yellow curry is one of the less spicy, more tourist friendly curries and while still involved a little heat was quite enjoyable. For dessert, we had hot chai with a multi-grain pancake served with banana, mango and cream.

Dinner took us a good two hours to eat and enjoy, meaning it was dark by the time we left the restaurant. We got turned around when walking through a protest (against censorship) and could not convince a taxi to take us back to our hotel (and not for lack of trying). It was very odd. In my planning of the trip, I read up on the customs of how to get around. I read that taxi were really common and not difficult to find. Tuk-tuks were even more common than taxis, but more of a rip off and, because of their open sides, exposed you to more traffic pollution. Water taxis/ferries were also available along the river. We attempted several times to get a taxi, but when we stopped and gave them our desired destination, they refused to accept us as fare and drove away. We decided to take a water taxi back to a dock near our hotel, but couldn't find our way to the river. Though a significant portion of the population in Bangkok speaks English, we ended up in a neighborhood that was too local/residential to find people that did. We ended up roughly communicating with two women in a closing restaurant that essentially played charades with us in order to give us directions to the river. Colin got really nervous as we continued to walk and not find the river, though we seemed to be headed in the right direction. Instead of finding the river, we found our way back to the Grand Palace, which was helpful as we finally knew where we were. Still no taxi would take us as fare and the traffic was picking up for its busiest hour as we tried to navigate crossing traffic. Strangely enough, most intersections have marked crosswalks for pedestrians, but no pedestrian lights to signal that they ever get right of way. As we nervously stood awaiting a break in traffic in the dark, a saffron-robed monk took Colin firmly by the hand (who took me by the hand) and led us into the traffic safely to the other side. He asked us where we were going and we explained our taxi problem.

We had debated taking a tuk-tuk, but had been wary of doing so. The monk convinced us this was the best course of action and, thus, we ended up taking a (very comparatively expensive) tuk-tuk ride that was worth every cent. Our driver was not the man whose picture graced the license to drive the tuk-tuk (seemingly younger by several decades), but was enthusiastic to take us to our hotel and knew where it was. The ceiling of the vehicle was strangely covered in spiderman logos. We got in as he finished his sandwich and he climbed in after us, finally turning to ask us how much we would pay him. Smiling (both with the grin of knowing the game I was about to play and the one that is customary when taking up a complaint in Thailand in order to ease the tension), I haggled him down 50 baht in his price before we began our journey. Colin has used the descriptors of "raucous" and "better than any roller coaster he'd ever been on including Space Mountain". It seems that every tuk-tuk driver in Bangkok wants to both be on his motorcycle (the most common form of transport for locals) and also be driving the Indy 500. He swerved and dodged and negotiated and corralled and gave way to and slipped through traffic in ways that I had not imagined those little vehicles could achieve. To our great amusement, about halfway through the trip the driver pulled over and stopped the engine. I started to worry (as we were nowhere near our hotel) that he was going to push for more money for the fare, but instead asked if we cared that he stopped for a drink of bean water. Not minding at all and being more confused and amused than anything else, we agreed and waited a few minutes for him to offer patronage to a place he knew. Bean water imbibed, we continued on our journey, finally arriving at our hotel. Colin had enjoyed it so thoroughly we ended up giving him the extra 50 baht he had wanted anyway, which made him laugh.

Sunday was much more laid back, being the last day of our trip. We breakfasted at our leisure and walked around the neighborhood a bit before heading back to Siam Paragon to try some of the desserts from the plethora of bakeries we had seen. The video features me eating fudge brownie cheese cake, while Colin opted for strawberry yogurt cake. By the time we got back to the hotel (early) our arranged transport vehicle (a black Japanese luxury-size sedan) was waiting to take us to the airport.

We had hoped that the flight back would not have the same delay as the flight there, because we were already supposed to be getting back at 8:30pm (and had another hour before we could expect to be home), but we had no such luck. Not only was our flight delayed, but after checking us in at the gate, we were informed that we needed to rush to a different gate that the flight had been moved to. So we rushed through the airport like that scene from Home Alone 2 and arrived to find an empty gate terminal that was locked. Many other people arrived rushing to the gate as well and found themselves similarly annoyed. We ended up having to wait about hour for the plane and did not make it back to the apartment until 10:30 that night.

While the flights at either end were slow and delayed, the vacation itself was terrifically wonderful. Both of us had been pushing hard to edit Colin's most recent chapter of his thesis and our general projects and had frankly just been cooped up in the apartment for too long. Getting away and taking the time to relax and enjoy a place helped us to unwind. And the food. Oh good gracious the food. You may have read about our previous entries concerning food, but let's just say there is a world of difference (and enjoyment) between the food cultures of Hong Kong and Bangkok. While eating in Hong Kong is an activity that is generally treated as a mere necessity, Bangkok allowed us to appreciate our palettes and vegetables proved to be the rule rather than the exception.

Overall the honeymoon was interesting, relaxing and extremely enjoyable. Bangkok has made our list of places to go again.

The Importance of Thinking

*NOTE: Today's post is another that was either requested of me or that I felt I should write in response to a conversation I overheard and probably have absolutely no business inserting myself into...so, of course, I am going to write about it.*

Thinking is important. I know that probably sounds mundane if not downright obvious, but there is a reason I make this assertion. The fact of the matter is that any creature with a brain thinks on at least some level of complexity, and this ability to think allows for amazing possibilities. Thinking creatures are able to discern and make judgments; they are able to plan and calculate; they are able to form bonds with other things on a cognitive level. Naturally, this has led to the incorporation of thought into survival strategies for many species, such as complicated group alert systems by meerkats, tool-use by apes and otters, and the ability to learn.

Of course, not everything that goes on in the brain is what we would call thinking. There are plenty of reflexive programs that run through the brain, such as the command line your brain has to run to keep you breathing. Non-voluntary actions and knee-jerk reflexes are pre-programmed or conditioned / primed responses that constitute a different kind of mental process. Granted, no one has ever really given a sufficient, universally-accepted definition of what "thinking" is, but I think for the sake of discussion here we can say that things like jumping back when you step on something painful is not really an action you think about; it is a reflex.

Now, as humans we possess the double-edged sword of higher cognition, higher-level thinking, that many of our fellow species lack. The result is that we are able to think of things in the abstract, form and hold opinions and other ideas, and develop complex concepts such as language and culture that can be shared throughout the species. All of this is accomplished simply by putting our fantastically wired brains to use and, for the most part, can be done with very little effort on the part of the thinker. Consider the seemingly simple task of making a sandwich: for the well-adjusted human, this process takes little mental (and probably physical) effort assuming one knows the basics of how to make a sandwich, where the sandwich-making materials are, and what kind of sandwich one intends to make.

The key phrase here is "well-adjusted" and, as anyone who does think critically will point out, not everyone out there is well-adjusted. A social problem that is currently gaining more and more attention is that people seem to be doing less higher-level thinking and more lower-level thinking or merely abiding by simple conditioned or primed response. When we talk about the higher-lower distinction, we are talking about the difference between critical observation and analysis ("There is a rock, it is composed of materials X, Y, and Z; these are not materials commonly found in this area and the fact that it is sitting in this study near the shards of glass around the broken window suggests it was probably launched through it, causing the break.") and simple observation ("Hey, a rock. Hey, a broken window.").

Naturally, a decline in this higher-level thinking leads to decreases in innovation, capability to cope with difficult life situations, and an inability to develop competence in fields in which normal humans are clearly capable of developing competence (Else how could the fields have gotten as far as they have?). We can see these effects plainly.

The economy of Hong Kong is based largely on rent and distribution, not development and innovation. As a result, there is a huge wealth gap between the elite inheritors (yes, inheritors) of financial empires and the average fellow on the street, some of which are even forced to live in cage-dwellings (for info, a simple Google search brings a bounty of information: Hong Kong Wealth Gap). A good deal of this imbalance can be attributed to a refusal to critically examine the consequences of this rent-based economy by those who possess sufficient power and/or influence to do something about it. Their opinion? If it ain't broke (for us), we won't fix it.

Another issue is that a lack of stimulation or support often leads people down a dark path of psychological development, often running the road of depression into either suicide or an utterly unsatisfactory life. Studies on orphans have been a recurring theme in the history of psychological research, especially those kept in orphanages that did little to encourage the cognitive activity of their inmates. Google the Romanian Orphan Study, a now-infamous event in our world's history: following the fall of the Soviet Union, it was discovered that many Romanian orphans had been left neglected and, as a result, showed poor psychological development, unable to perform some basic life skills, and definitely not emotionally-developed. You know how your brain is full of wrinkles? Their brains were comparably smooth.

Then comes what I call the "I can't do it" generation. Doubtless, throughout history we have found ourselves in a world of people who denied that they could perform certain tasks because they were "too hard"; we may have even made that call ourselves at some point. The problem is that, in this era of standardized testing and teaching to said tests, U.S. public schools have been churning out students with a lack of critical-thinking ability, let alone a desire to think critically. I often find myself pondering over poorly-worded undergraduate responses to philosophy questions and wondering if mine were so bad when I was starting out. I check back and, as my own toughest critic, I can thankfully say, "No." Of course, that thanks also comes with some dread: If these are the philosophers of tomorrow, is our field doomed? What about other fields, like medicine and law? It makes one seriously consider alternative schooling. Check out the Wikipedia article on the supportive research for home schooling for some interesting information (of course, you should also check out the criticism of the supportive research to keep it fair and balanced).

All of these factors contribute to the terrible metamorphosis of people into "sheeple". This unnerving term refers to those who are unreflective, who refuse to employ higher-level thinking and defer wholly to the pre-processed responses given unto them to say on behalf of some propaganda machine (think of politics in the US). They are led along by some person or tagline that they will follow whenever and wherever. All of their decisions are already made for them; there is no higher-level thinking to be done, so just kick back, open a beer, and watch the big game. It sounds relaxing, right? So did soma.

What we are seeing from this drastic down-turn in critical thinking is a decrease in diversity of personal opinion, which leads to complacence with a system that may be harmful, which can ultimately lead to destruction not only for ourselves but for all of those we care about or may come to care about at some future date. If we do not begin to think, to really think, about ourselves, about others, and about all of the world around us, then we are quite probably dooming ourselves to a horrible fate that I cannot possibly begin to describe here.

Let me do away with this fire and brimstone for a moment, though, and return to a simpler matter at hand, and that is that people need to think to hang onto their opinions. Why? That is because your opinions are your world-views; they are how you understand and get along in the world to begin with. If someone takes away your opinions, they may as well be taking away your life, because they are certainly voiding you of your personality. Not really your life then, is it? A big part of this is that we have to start thinking, and we have to start thinking specifically about what we perceive to be the hard questions. That means we have to start examining our world, our institutions, and the subjects we are taught in school. That means we need to motivate ourselves to learn (and if the reasons I have given are not motivation, then I wonder what will motivate a person to learn) and we need to start making the connections between the many things we learn. That means not just learning that "2+2=4", but why that is the case and how to do addition in general. All that it requires is for you to stop and think. Really, it is not too hard.

Bangkok (not so) Dangerous

And now, your feature presentation...

Back from Thailand - Updates

Hello, all you lovely people in Internet-land. I suppose it has been quite a while since we posted anything here, and we are sorry for neglecting you. You like your updates, yes? Well, here are some updates.

I have been working day and night on my thesis and making a lot of headway, thanks largely to the brilliant editing of Carina and my friend and colleague Donald Sturgeon (who has blessed the world with the super-awesome Chinese Text Project). This has left us all very busy, along with the daily chores that need doing, but please do not think I have forgotten any of you.

In more exciting news, we recently got back from our honeymoon in Thailand (Bangkok, to be precise). It was a blast and we would love to go again some time. The bad news is that I forgot to bring the charger to my digital camera, so we have no pictures to upload at this time. We did pick up a disposable camera while there, so once we develop those photos we can show them off but, yeah, nothing at the moment. The good news is that we did not come back empty handed: I took video of our trip, and I am working on editing together a short film of the trip, including the highlights of the Grand Palace and our awesome food court experience at the Siam Paragon mall (we were there for a mere forty-eight hours, how much did you think we would cover?). I will also provide details from some of our other lovely experiences, and I know Carina has some points to add in.

That video will take some time to put together, though, and I do want to give you something substantial. To that end, I want to give a review of an article that Roger was kind enough to turn me onto: Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand. The article is by an interesting fellow out of Harvard Divinity named Chris Hedges, and it is a pretty well-thought, well-researched piece. Critic that I am, however, I have some points I want to shoot back to Hedges.

(SPOILERS: You really should read the article I am responding to first, otherwise what follows will probably make little to no sense!)

All right, I want to be fair in my response to this. Chris Hedges is clearly fired-up, and rightly so: things have gotten entirely out-of-hand in the US (okay, not like that is news to anyone); he is mad as Hell and he does not want us to take it anymore! But soft, Mr. Hedges. What is truly the source of the things that drive your ire? Let us take a considered look at his opinions.

First of all, I think we can see that what Hedges is most upset over is that he sees our “liberal” government as bending us over and forcing us to take it in the rear from the numerous hateful, criminal, and despicable groups he lists off in his diatribe. I can certainly sympathize with that: In a country where freedom is one of the most-prized values in life, said freedom has also been used as a shield to protect numerous heinous acts.

Yet is this the fault of liberality? Hedges, I think mistakenly, conflates ideals of multi-culturalism and tolerance with the “liberal agenda” which, for the record, neither philosophically nor politically full-on endorses the former ideal and only conditionally accepts the latter. Yet in our country we do have, or are at least supposed to have, protections against certain extreme behaviors (slander, libel, harmful acts, etc), and I do not think it is exactly the fault of liberalism that these things continue to rear their ugly heads. For that matter, it is not the fault of multi-culturalism (again, an entirely different doctrine), and it is only a form of tolerance (protectionism) that allow them to propogate. I am reminded of the US Supreme Court's 8-1 decision to allow the Westboro Church's protests at the funerals of military personnel (which, many including myself would agree, is detestable and flies in the face of protection from harm). The US Supreme Court, by the way, made that decision not on a liberal interpretation of the Constitutional First Amendment right to free speech, but a conservative one (see the opinions here: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-751.pdf).

The fact of the matter is that the liberal does not haphazardly advocate blind tolerance; it is always a tolerance bounded by a protection of freedoms and, perhaps more importantly, a protection from harm. If Hedges wants to call out liberals, fine. He is not, however, calling out proper liberals, who have certainly not forgotten Popper's words, but merely those who lazily sing a doctrine all day without having any understanding of it. The conservatives are no better, for they also stick dogmatically to a doctrine that is pulling our entire culture down the metaphorical tube.

What disturbs me more, however, is that Hedges refers to the following as “toothless pursuits”: inclusiveness, multi-culturalism, identity politics, and tolerance. Somehow, these values are subordinate to justice which, to me, seems to be a concept that must inevitably be founded upon them. Susan Moller Okin has a wonderful critique of John Rawls's first pass at principles of justice (essentially justice as fairness), wherein she critiques the traditionally sexist (and in my opinion classist) institution of the family as being an inalienable factor in determining interests. If true liberalism is to be established, we have to provide a much more in-depth analysis of persons and their identities. For Okin, that included looking at women as individuals, but also as women...which means looking at men as men, children as children, and...wow, that really brings the whole Veil of Ignorance crashing down! It is the flaw of liberalism to assume that all are equal merely in virtue of being human, and that accommodation for inequality can always be made by a purely liberal system. It cannot, it simply cannot.

The fact of the matter is that we need the aforementioned “toothless pursuits” to even be able to instantiate a conception of justice. I do not mean that justice is subordinate to these ideals, as they are all subordinate to our needs as human beings and the natural laws that govern existence. What I mean to suggest is that, if we must break-apart and analyze the picture, we must still pursue this project holistically, else we will be unable to fit the pieces back together in the end.

Now, there are also a number of points in this article where I am totally with Hedges, especially where he calls out the abuse suffered by the worker from the higher-ups in big business. The businessman's seemingly inevitable hunger for profit drives corporate greed, and it is our government's unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the worker that allows this tapeworm to grow ever larger. Of course, it has been the Republican party, the conservatively-minded folk, that has been the biggest source of benefit to these blue-blooded parasites. The big contribution the liberal side has offered was: nothing. By nothing, of course, we mean that no aid has been offered to either the mice or the fat cats. Whether this is out of “tolerance” or out of a total inability to act is unknown to me. When I was a younger lad, I always viewed myself as a liberal, but not as a Democrat. The Democrats, I decided, were too disorganized to get anything done. Even if their numbers matched those of Republicans, they would certainly fall from lack of unity. To this day I still hold the same belief, and I find it wholly unsurprising that nothing has been done to stem the wave of unemployment, poverty, and abuses of Constitutional rights launched by conservative policies and unchecked by liberal practices. This, of course, is the problem with liberalism: It is to protect against significant harm, but when is the harm significant? We need some standards; we need some culture.

Also, we cannot deny that Hedges hits the nail on the head when he points out the rigging of US politics. After all, how many in Congress are genuinely middle-class or lower? How much say can a man who makes roughly $400 a week have in our national legislature? The answer is not much more than one thousand men who make the same wages. The fact of the matter is that the government can, does, and will continue to cater to the interests only of those in its monkey-sphere: Only those who “representatives” think of first will be considered and, since that is largely limited to an elite few, the rest of us are left out to dry.

Mind you, I am uncertain and skeptical of the purely democratic alternative view, wherein each man votes his own mind. Certainly there are a good number whose brashness would endanger us all (such as stocking up on KI pills to prevent radiation poisoning from Japan), and we do want to have those most-capable in charge. Certainly it would be impractical to take a vote from everyone on everything that the US sets out to do. Most certainly there are some who need to be shouted down because their beliefs and actions pose a danger to all of humanity. What is to be done is to find a way to tear-down the class elitism, the factioning, and the foolishness without tearing down the whole system. We also need to find a way to dispel the illusions perpetuated by the cattle-drivers in politics, endlessly pushing their bovine constituents through the polls and into the slaughterhouses. This country is in need of revolution, but not of the bloody sort. I would suggest education and civilization.

When we speak of things like tolerance, what do we speak of? Do we simply accept what some might call “fate” and allow ourselves to be dragged down with the ship? MLK Jr may not have spoken of tolerance (or he may have, Hedges's sources are unclear), but ancient Asian philosophies certainly do, and when they do they speak of it in terms of being a wholly physical act, not just a mental one. Nin is a concept from bushido, and it can be glossed as tolerance, endurance, and serenity. Specifically, it seems to refer to the idea of enduring pain with grace. Confucianism also speaks of such endurance; so does daoism. As we know, though, Confucians and adherents to the code of bushido did not have wholly tolerant views of the world: they allowed that there were institutions and values that could and should be upheld; they had a cultural backbone. Whether the exact points of culture they picked out, and how they adhered to them, are things we might disagree with, but the framework is one worth considering. We can and should tolerate some things: slow traffic, an annoying sibling, the construction outside the apartment. There are some things, however, that are not matters of toleration, but matters of rightness: hate, violence, suffering, etc. When we are confronted with such matters, our cultural values spur us to act against them. When confronted with a starving man, we tend to be moved by compassion (even when we do not offer him anything), and philosophers like Mengzi took this to be a sign of how the human passions could be drawn upon to develop a harmonious society. Xunzi elaborated on this, drawing upon cultural concepts and standards to help us learn how to channel these feelings and develop a refined sense of right and wrong. Were these people liberals? Probably not, but there is no reason their notions of tolerance are incompatible with the core elements of liberalism.

Hedges: Your words are loud and clear, but your target is incorrect. Your ire is not at tolerance, but at apathy. Do not call people away from tolerance, but call them toward action; call them toward humaneness.