No college freshman in America is able escape his courses without encountering Kant's Categorical Imperative in some form or other.  Drawing on a Medieval moral tradition that held that God had placed in each man's heart, whether catholic, pagan, or apostate, the knowledge of right and wrong, Kant held that each person has an inherent rational knowledge of the Moral Law, or the pure form of moral action, which is commonly known as the Golden Rule.  Behind the Golden Rule is, furthermore, an impulse to act according to the Moral Law which Kant dubbed the Categorical Imperative -- a concept which Freud later took up and reinterpreted as an irrational force in the Super Ego.

For Kant, however, the Categorical Imperative was always a rational impulse which revealed our transcendent selves.  How, then, to explain the not infrequent impulse to not fulfill one's duty to the Moral law?  According to Kant:

"We are not, then, to call the depravity of human nature wickedness taking the word in its strict sense as a disposition (the subjective principle of the maxims) to adopt evil as evil into our maxim as our incentives (for that is diabolical); we should rather term it the perversity of the heart, which, then, because of what follows from it, is also called an evil heart. Such a heart may coexist with a will which in general is good: it arises from the frailty of human nature, the lack of sufficient strength to follow out the principles it has chosen for itself..." -- Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone

Edgar Allan Poe made a point of exploring that which Kant would rather leave aside as pointless and empty of content.  In an 1850 short story, he wrote:

"Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not.

...

"There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is usually curt, precise, and clear, the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged.

...

"We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay... We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle." -- The Imp of the Perverse

The tendency which Poe calls perversity -- the tendency to say the wrong thing, to zig when one should zag, to procrastinate merely to see what will happen next -- seems to be more ubiquitous in software programming than in other occupations.  I've known programmers who not only say things they shouldn't, but seem to take a particular joy in doing so.  They do not simply lack an internal censor that would keep them from saying certain things, but seem to actually be possessed by some sort of Socratic daimon who eggs them on.

Yet sometimes I think it is not the programmers who are especially possessed of this imp, but simply they who are not able to mask it behind other, more acceptable, modes of behavior.   We often hear of the disgruntled chef who spits in a difficult customer's food, or the unhygienic bartender who slips unsanitary items in a customer's drink.  The same impulse, I think, takes over middle-managers at times.  They, who are forced to do unpleasant tasks by their direct managers, and who in the end are blamed by both the people under them as well as those over them when things go wrong, are always suspected of taking a particular pleasure -- dare I say a perverse pleasure -- when unpleasant things, such as dressing down an employee or on occasion firing one, must be done.  What is more perverse, after all, than actually taking pleasure in performing unpleasant tasks, and who could blame them if they did?

Similar to Poe's "mobile without motive," Robert Herrick captured the mood as one of Delight in Disorder (1648):

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

The sexual element that is implicit in Herrick's understanding of the imp of perversity is remarkably absent from Poe's, just as the element of danger, pervasive in Poe, is absent in Herrick.  Our contemporary notion of the perverse tends to span both elements, and is generally accessorized with leather where Herrick has petticoats, and piercings where Poe envisions only murder.  Yet even in our own times perversity has started to lose some of its perverse luster.  The Christian Coalition may decry the slipping of moral standards as a slow slouching towards the Rapture, but I see the problem, rather, as one in which we've denied ourselves the real pleasures of perversity.  When even leather and piercings have lost their power to outrage as well as titillate, where shall we turn?

I've recently been enjoying pulp novels from the 40's with a certain amount of furtive excitement that those authors are writing things they would never get away with writing today.  For instance, from Mickey Spillane's 1948 I, The Jury (for those unfamiliar with the series, Mike Hammer is a tough detective, while Velda is his faithful secretary):

"Here's one you'll like, chum," Velda grinned at me.  She pulled out a full-length photo of a gorgeous blonde.  My heart jumped when I saw it.  The picture was taken at a beach, and she stood there tall and languid-looking in a white bathing suit.  Long solid legs.  A little heavier than the movie experts consider good form, but the kind that make you drool to look at.  Under the suit I could see the muscles of her stomach.  Incredibly wide shoulders for a woman, framing breasts that jutted out, seeking freedom from the restraining fabric of the suit.  Her hair looked white in the picture, but I could tell that it was a natural blonde.  Lovely, lovely yellow hair.  But her face was what got me.  I thought Velda was a good looker, but this one was even lovelier.  I felt like whistling.

"Who is she?"

"Maybe I shouldn't tell you.  That leer on your face could get you into trouble..."

And so on and so forth.  I, The Jury was a runaway bestseller and made Mickey Spillane's career.  This was due in no small part to the racy writing and tight plot, but something should also be said for the cover art.  Here's the cover of the original 1948 edition:

And here's the cover redone for a later edition:

Finally, here's the poster art for a film version:

Do you notice a common theme?  A man with a gun pointed at a woman undressing.  Is he holding the pistol in order to force her to undress?  Or is she undressing in order to compel him to drop the pistol?  Thousands of readers in the 40's and 50's felt compelled to read the book in order to find out what was behind this juxtaposition of sex and violence, drawn by the imp of the perverse. 

Anne Applebaum has written one of the better obituaries for Alexander Solzhenitsyn in her column for the Washington Post:

"Even Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from Russia in 1974 only increased his notoriety, as well as the impact of "The Gulag Archipelago." Though it was based on "reports, memoirs and letters by 227 witnesses," the book was not quite a straight history -- obviously, Solzhenitsyn did not have access to then-secret archives -- but, rather, an interpretation of history. Partly polemical, partly autobiographical, both emotional and judgmental, it aimed to show that, contrary to what many believed, the mass arrests and concentration camps were not an incidental phenomenon but an essential part of the Soviet system -- and had been from the very beginning.

"Not all of this was new: Credible witnesses had reported on the growth of the Gulag and the spread of terror since the Russian Revolution. But what Solzhenitsyn produced was simply more thorough, more monumental and more detailed than anything that had preceded it. His account could not be dismissed as a single man's experience. No one who dealt with the Soviet Union, diplomatically or intellectually, could ignore it. So threatening was the book to certain branches of the European left that Jean-Paul Sartre himself described Solzhenitsyn as a "dangerous element." Its publication certainly contributed to the recognition of "human rights" as a legitimate element of international debate and foreign policy.

...

"His manuscripts were read and pondered in silence, and the thought he put into them provoked his readers to think, too. In the end, his books mattered not because he was famous or notorious but because millions of Soviet citizens recognized themselves in his work: They read his books because they already knew that they were true."

It is a peculiar meme in Western Culture that, at some level, the evil of Stalin's Soviet regime cannot be viewed on the same level as, say, Hitler's Third Reich.  It sometimes takes the form of faint attempts to explain it away, or to see it as an aberration of the Soviet state, and generally ends in a change of subject.  This aura of lingering romanticism about the Soviet State among Westerners is odd and, I think, rather inexplicable.  A meme is probably the best way to describe it.

In Russia itself, the attitude is perhaps easier to understand.  No one likes to be reminded of their own sins, and no one likes bad news that is unlikely to gain them anything.  In her book, Gulag: A History, Applebaum describes the typical reactions of people she encounters in Russia once they discover that she is doing a historical investigation of the Gulag system.

"At first, my presence only added to their general merriment.  It is not every day one meets a real American on a rickety ferry boat in the middle of the White Sea, and the oddity amused them.  They wanted to know why I spoke Russian, what I thought of Russia, how it differs from the United States.  When I told them what I was doing in Russia, however, they grew less cheerful.  An American on a pleausre cruise, visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see the scenery and the beautiful old monastery -- that was one thing.  An American visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see the remains of the concentration camp -- that was something else.

"One of the men turned hostile.  'Why do you foreigners only care about the ugly things in our history?' he wanted to know. 'Why write about the Gulag?  Why not write about our achievements?  We were the first country to put a man into space!'  By 'we' he meant 'we Soviets.'

...

"His wife attacked me as well.  'The Gulag isn't relevant anymore,' she told me.  'We have other troubles here.  We have unemployment, we have crime.  Why don't you write about our real problems, instead of things that happened a long time ago?'

...

"In my subsequent travels around Russia, I encountered these four attitudes to my project again and again.  'It's none of your business,' and 'it's irrelevant' were both common reactions.  Silence -- or an absence of opinion, as evinced by a shrug of the shoulders -- was probably the most frequent reaction.  But there were also people who understood why it was important to know about the past..."

This is toward the end of the book.  Just as interesting is how the book begins, with an observation on a bridge.

"Yet although they lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself, and although many millions of people passed through them, the true history of the Soviet Union's concentration camps was, until recently, not at all well known.  By some measures, it is still not known.  Even the bare facts recited above, although by now familiar to most Western scholars of Soviet history, have not filtered into Western popular consciousness.

...

"I first became aware of this problem several years ago, when walking across the Charles Bridge, a major tourist attraction in what was then newly democratic Prague.  There were buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and every fifteen feet or so someone was selling precisely what one would expect to find for sale in such a postcard-perfect spot.  Paintings of appropriately pretty streets were on display, along with bargain jewelry and 'Prague' key chains.  Among the bric-a-brac, one could buy Soviet military paraphernalia: caps, badges, belt buckles, and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms.

"The sight struck me as odd.  Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans.  All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika.  None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat.  It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed.  For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another murder makes us laugh."

I do not play the game myself, but a friend tells me that there is a similar controversy in Civilization IV concerning the presence of Stalin as a player character in this PC game and the absence of Hitler.  Here is a small flame war over it, with links to more flame wars.  Another friend, who is ethnic Chinese, resents the presence of Mao in the game.

Perhaps the greatest trick the Devil ever played, to paraphrase Kaiser Sose, was to convince people that he was Adolf Hitler, while men like Alexander Solzhenitsyn worked to convince us that things were otherwise.  To quote the man himself:

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”  - The Gulag Archipelago

Like an Empiricist prescription or an occult warning, depending on how you take it, Wittgenstein wrote as a coda to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,  Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.  C. K. Ogden translates this as "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

I have spent the past week trying to learn how to be silent, again.  I unplugged myself from the Internet and went to the beach with my family where I spent several days trying to silence the various voices that constitute a perpetual background cacophony in my head.  The ocean swell helped me to accomplish this quiescence of the noetical Madding crowd, until finally there was nothing left but stillness in my brain and the inbreath and outbreath of the sea as it filled up the new tide pools of my mind, and a gasp escaped my lips and traveled over the waters as I realized that this really was a vacation, at last, and it wasn't what I had expected.

This sense of quietude is what I have always taken Heidegger to be referring to when he discusses Lichtung -- the clearing -- in his writings, for instance in Being and Time where he writes:

"In our analysis of understanding and of the disclosedness of the "there" in general, we have alluded to the lumen naturale, and designated the disclosedness of Being-in as Dasein's "clearing", in which it first becomes possible to have something like sight." -- tr. Macquarrie & Robinson

Except that for me, sight is a place holder for my inner monologue, and the clearing is a place to rediscover my inner voice.  We are all social animals, after all, and when we are with other people our inner voices become drowned out by the various social pressures that sweep us along, whether this is in politics, or at work, or on the Internet, the biggest stream of voices available.  My general strategy in life is to fill my mind with so many voices that they eventually begin to cancel each other out so that my rather weak voice can have some influence within my own head.  But this doesn't always work, and I eventually need to detox in a quiet place.

Heidegger uses a clearing in the woods as his metaphor for this place, but I think the ocean serves the purpose even better.  The ocean is a natural source of white noise, and the way white noise affects human beings is peculiar.  According to some studies, the appeal of white noise seems to be specific to primates, and to humans in particular.  According to the Aquatic Ape theory, human evolution is intimately tied to the coast, and this might explain, in a hand-waving sort of way, our affinity for the ocean and the sounds of the ocean.  It is the music that calms the inner beast.

The inner monologue is a peculiar, though pervasive, phenomenon.  An interesting observation concerning it occurs in Augustine's Confessions.  Augustine expresses amazement at the fact that his mentor, Ambrose, is able to read without moving his lips.  This gives us a strange impression of the Roman world -- apparently it has not always been the case that people read silently in an ALA approved manner.  This in turn has led various philosophers to wonder if the inner monologue existed for these Romans, or if they simply articulated everything they thought.

For Derrida, this became a motif for his philosophical studies.  In an early work, Speech and Phenomena, Derrida tries to find the source of Husserl's phenomenological insight in The Logical Investigations, and concludes that it is due to a basic confusion between observation and speech.  Because in speech we are capable of this inner monologue, Husserl, according to Derrida, made the analogous assumption that we can exist, in some peculiar way, without the world.

"For it is not in the sonorous substance or in the physical voice, in the body of speech in the world, that he [Husserl] will recognize an original affinity with the logos in general, but in the voice phenomenologically taken, speech in its transcendental flesh, in the breath, the intentional animation that transforms the body of the word into flesh, makes of the Körper a Leib, a geistige Leiblichkeit." -- tr. David B. Allision

Just as Derrida saw in the Logical Investigations the germ of the entire Husserlian project, the Husserlian David Carr used to tell us that the germ of Derrida's project could be found in this brief passage.  Taking the problem of authorial intent to a philosophical level, Derrida wants to cast doubt on the meaning of the inner voice, and it's privileged status as the arbiter of the meaning of its utterances.  It is a sort of Neo-Empirical game that resembles the attacks often made by material-reductionists on the folk-psychology of consciousness, which has at its core the notion that for the most part we all know what we are talking about when we talk about something.  Instead, the inner voice is a sort of illusion to be dispelled, like witchcraft and theology.

And yet I can't help but feel that there is something to the inner voice.  For instance what was George Bush thinking about when he was first notified about the 911 attacks?  What was Bill Clinton thinking and intending in that fateful pause between the phrases "woman" and "Monica Lewinsky" that changed the meaning of this statement (skip to end for the good bit)? 

Silence isn't simply a turning off of the mind.  When the lights go out, we may stop seeing things, but when all noise is shut out, we continue to hear ourselves, and it is perhaps the best time to hear ourselves and in the act recollect ourselves.

I leave you with John Cage's composition 3' 44'', which is pregnant with the composer's intent, as well as the performer's in this unique rendition.

The second season of Mad Men begins tonight on AMC.  If you haven't seen it, then I highly recommend that you do and that you also rent the first season on DVD or through your favorite peer-to-peer network and catch up on this beautiful piece of television.

Mad Men is about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960's, when the 60's looked like the 50's in the same way that what we think of as the 60's is really the 70's.  It is a world in which men smoke and drink, swagger and get things done.  They were veterans of either Korea or WWII, and knew how to accomplish great things.  In the process they created a wonderland that was America at its height, which had within it the seeds of America's decline.  In Mad Men, we are afforded the opportunity to see it all.

There is something peculiar about enjoying Mad Men.  The sleezy misogyny and petty racism of the period is laid out for us to see.  Yet despite this, there is a sense that men were really men back then -- and certainly not Robert Bly-reading tree hugging faux-woodsmen trying to recapture something we didn't realized we had lost.  They are the real deal -- a generation that gave us James Bond as well as a militant communist-hating wing of the Democratic party.  Damn those were the days.

It is, in a sense, an antidote to The Office, the satirical show about office work that makes us feel like we all suck and it's alright -- a show about spin going out of control to the point that the criteria for success and failure are utterly open to interpretation.

In Mad Men, there is no ambiguity about what success and failure entail.  Success means a well-padded expense account, an attractive secretary and a corner office with a bar built into the wall.  Failure means being denied these things.

And yet the world of the mad men have led us to the place where we are now.  They may have been men of character in their own way, but they created a world in which spin matters more than character, and one manages not by example but by personality tests and manipulation.  Perhaps the world of the mad men was no less corrupt, but they attempted to hide it and build something more beautiful, while we tend to cover it up with self-effacing humor ala John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Conan O'Brien, our contemporary zeitgeist-setters whose humor shares the common conceit that they know they are privileged and have no intention of giving it up, but they are more than willing to feel bad about it.

In Mad Men, no one seems to have regrets, and a bold face is the essence of a moral stance.  The warts are all there to see, and they are ugly indeed.  But at the same time there is a sense of style and elegance that we no longer find in the modern office, and it draws the viewer like a slow seduction into something we know is not good for us.

Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay Radical Chic captured a peculiar phenomenon in American culture -- the courting by wealthy New York socialites of political radicals and revolutionaries like the Black Panthers -- people who, in turn, should have despised the socialites trying to cultivate them.  You can read an excerpt here.  Perhaps it was an example of opposites attracting, or perhaps it was merely an extreme exercise in mauvais fois.

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, however.  I mean only to point out that when socialite courtesans like Paris Hilton date the likes of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, we know that the trend continues, but instead of the Huey Newtons of the world, it is nerds who are now being pursued.

It has been a long time since Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards (Louis and Gilbert) showed the world back in 1984 that nerds could sleep with cheerleaders.  This was followed up by Val Kilmer's more testosterone fueled portrayal of the nerd archetype in Real Genius.  All the while, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were busy demonstrating to the world and Wall Street the power of Geek culture, and now we find ourselves where we are today, with nerds making inroads into every area of society, and kids wanting to grow up and be like them.  As Eryn Loeb wrote for Salon:

"The information age has been good to nerds. No longer are they relegated to getting sand kicked in their faces by that other familiar archetype, the jock. We've gotten used to watching Steve Jobs grin awkwardly as he announces the latest hot techie toy, and when it comes to pop culture, nerds like Superbad writer/star Seth Rogen are increasingly in control of their own image."

We've come a long way, baby.  But perhaps not as far as we think.

The only way to truly measure the influence of a sub-culture is to compare it with another one.  This month's Ebony has a feature article on the 25 Coolest Brothers of All Time.  When one peruses the list, one realizes how much the accomplishments of nerds fall short, and how fragile their claim to  chic really is.  The mere fact that Ebony can talk about the brothers is insta-cool.  Many a nerd would give up his pocket protector to be called brother by an actual black man.

Billy Dee Williams is on the list.  Like Barack Obama, who is also on the list, he has cross-cultural appeal and stands out as an icon of both Geek culture and Black culture, though for vastly different reasons.  Ebony mentions Billy Dee's swagger, his confidence and his effortless style.  On the other hand, Wikipedia (in case you ever doubted its firm position as a cornerstone of Geek culture) begins its entry on Billy Dee with this:

"Billy Dee Williams (born April 6, 1937) is an African American actor and writer, best known for his role as Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars film series."

The entry for Harrison Ford, interestingly, begins like this:

"Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an Academy Award- and BAFTA-nominated, as well as Golden Globe-winning, American actor." 

Ford's association with the Star Wars franchise isn't mentioned until the second sentence.

The full list of 25 Coolest Brothers follows, in no particular order.  I find little to quibble about here except for the presence on the list of Obama, with whom I don't naturally associate coolness -- although, like many others, I admire his Dickensian life story.

Barack Obama
Don Cheadle
Billy Dee Williams
Sidney Poitier
Quincy Jones
Lenny Kravitz
Jimi Hendrix
Richard Roundtree
Denzel Washington
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Bob Marley
Ed Bradley
Tupac Shakur
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
Gordon Parks
Muhammad Ali
Miles Davis
Walt Frazier
Shawn 'Jay-Z' Carter
Samuel L. Jackson
Malcolm X
Snoop Dogg
Prince
Michael Jordan
Marvin Gaye