Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Feet of Clay

  I think we are all saddened when an iconic figure stumbles.  I'm not talking about so-called icons of industry or politics, like Kenneth Lay of Enron or Richard Nixon.  We weren't surprised by their downfalls, because we knew well in advance that their pursuits of money or power were fraught with vanity and self-seeking.  I'm talking about people who seemed to be acting selflessly, and maybe were, until it seems maybe they weren't.

  I was thus disheartened when Greg Mortenson fell from grace.  His 2006 book Three Cups of Tea enthralled me with the altruism of the venture he had undertaken.  Starting on a shoestring in 1993, he built schools, especially for girls, in the remotest parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  He overcame daunting barriers: Afghani and Pakistani red tape, dangerous environs, opposition from local mullahs, virtually impossible logistics, and an exhausting hunt for funding.  Yet he managed over the years to build scores of schools.  A second book Stones into Schools continues the story, elaborating a vision of promoting peace through education in Central Asia.

 Mortenson's funding difficulties eased as his program grew.  Silicon Valley pioneer Jean Hoerni, an early contributor, left $1 million on his death in 1997, establishing The Central Asia Institute in Montana to support the continuing efforts.  Money flooded into the Institute after the publication of Three Cups of Tea, including $100,000 that President Obama gave from the proceeds of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.  (Mortenson himself has been nominated three times for that prize.)  Perhaps $60 million has been donated.

  However, cracks started appearing in the façade a year ago with two harsh exposés, one by author Jon Krakauer (who himself had contributed $75,000 to CAI), the other by CBS' 60 MinutesThe first third of Three Cups of Tea describes a lost and ill Mortenson blundering into the Pakistani village of Korphe when descending from the Himalayan peak K2; his being nursed to health by the villagers; his 'rash' promise to build a school for them; and his subsequently raising $12,000 to build it.  Krakauer's conclusion about this story: "a compelling creation myth … an intricately wrought work of fiction presented as fact."  Krakauer goes on relentlessly: "The image of Mortenson that has been created for public consumption is an artifact born of fantasy, audacity, and an apparently insatiable hunger for esteem."  The 60 Minutes segment presented interviews also asserting that many of the "facts" in the book were either totally false or greatly embellished.  Both exposés alleged additionally that the account books of CAI were a bramble of conflicts of interest if not outright fraud, and that less than half of CAI's income goes to its work in the field.

  Significantly, neither probe charged that Mortenson and CAI hadn't actually built many schools, claiming only that the number built and currently supported have constantly been inflated in CAI reports.  Krakauer himself wrote, "Mortenson has done much that is admirable … He's been a tireless advocate for girls' education.  He's established dozens of schools … that have benefited tens of thousands of children."

  Mortenson's supporters stood behind him even after these stunning denunciations. His former climbing partner Scott Darnsey wrote, "Greg is a very humble, quiet man who does not like to be constrained by time and by many of the ways of Western life and business. He can overcommit himself beyond belief … I saw Greg struggle for over seven years to get CAI off the ground.  I visited with him several times in San Francisco, lying on the floor of crash pads while Greg told me of his setbacks.  He has dedicated his whole self to this cause at risk to his family, his friends, and his health. … [T]o call [his story] all 'lies' and 'fraud'?  No way."

  New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Greg is modest, passionate and utterly disorganized. …  I don’t know what to make of these accusations. … My inclination is to reserve judgment until we know more, for disorganization may explain more faults than dishonesty. … I’m willing to give some benefit of the doubt to a man who has risked his life on behalf of some of the world’s most voiceless people." 

  A few weeks ago a report on financial improprieties was released by the Attorney General's office of Montana after a year-long inquiry.  It concluded that CAI had over the years made many expenditures without securing proper reimbursement: $3.96 million buying copies of both books to give away, Mortenson's royalties from which were never donated to CAI as promised; $4.93 million advertising and promoting the books, which cost was never split between Mortenson and CAI as agreed; $2 million for charter flights and promotional costs for Mortenson's speeches, even though Mortenson pocketed honoraria and expense payments from the hosts of the talks; and hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal expenses charged to CAI  credit cards, which Mortenson never repaid.  The Attorney General alleged no criminality, saying: "Mr. Mortenson may not have intentionally deceived the board or his employees, but his disregard for and attitude about basic record-keeping and accounting for his activities essentially had the same effect."  Mortenson has agreed to repay $1 million to the Institute.

  It is a depressing tale.  The net effect of a year of revelations is to paint Mortenson in damning terms.  However, I think a closer look is required, if only because of those glowing testimonials to Mortenson's character by Darnsey, Kristof and others.

  Here's my own take, which is not so damning. If Mortenson was indeed after money or power or even glory, he certainly took a hard route by starting with no resources to build schools in the remote Himalayas.  He has for two decades indisputably made that his life's work, with notable success.  The back story of his efforts still rings true to me through the many fabrications, purported and established.  (For example, even if the account of Mortenson's stumbling into Korphe on his way down from K2 and pledging to build his first school there is a "creation myth," that part of Pakistan does in fact have many schools that Mortenson and CAI did build, including one in Korphe.)  I can even see how, in the mind of a person as work-obsessed and as disorganized as Mortenson, there could be little distinction between personal finances and those of his alter ego, the CAI.  Still, if Mortenson was conscious that he was distorting his story and misusing funds, I don't believe he was being nefarious.  Maybe the very fantasy and audacity Krakauer complains were used in the creation of Mortenson's public image are themselves the essential qualities Mortenson needed to succeed in his nigh-impossible venture.

  What do I conclude?  Only this: Mortenson stands on feet of clay like the rest of us, even Mother Teresa.  The irony is that, while we are willing to weigh most people's characters on scales that balance their frailties against their strengths, we insist on godlike purity in those who would be altruists.  Perhaps we should apply a more nuanced standard to them too.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

A Half-Century Time Loop

   Last fall I was jarred into what I would call a time loop by the onset of the Occupy movement.  A strong sense of dèjá vu propelled me back almost fifty years to relive the days of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, when I was beginning my professorial career.

  The tenor of American society as it entered the Sixties needs some portrayal for those much younger than I.  If I had to pick a word that best captures it, I'd choose "conformity."  In the previous two decades the nation had emerged from the Great Depression and gone through the traumas of World War II and the Korean War.  Veterans of those wars wanted nothing more than to get on with their careers and their families.  The Eisenhower years (1952-60) had brought an era of "normalcy."

  Conformity was reinforced by an anti-Communist hysteria and the blacklisting it entailed. Many around the country, including UC faculty in the early Fifties, had been required to sign loyalty oaths or be dismissed.  Although Senator McCarthy's crusade had ended in 1955 when his attack on the Army was derailed, the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was still a force.  Fear was palpable; I remember my mother in the Fifties hiding away books by Bolsheviks that she had bought in 1920 as a college student.

  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950s book and movie, depicted conformity in business(The title was more than figurative; when I was interviewed in 1956 for a job at IBM I discovered that my friends there wore only solid blue or gray suits, white shirts and "discreet" ties.)  According to a 1950s sociological study by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, the American middle class had become "other directed," being guided more by outside influences than from within themselves.

  I arrived at Cal in 1960 after a stint in industry.  The university I entered was shortly to be styled in UC President Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University as a "multiversity."  (Ironic that, having recently blogged about the universe and multiverse, I should now be writing about the university and multiversity!)  Kerr wrote that the university had become like a huge corporation: so departmentalized, so composed of and beholden to a bevy of competing interests, as to be governable only through a corporate model.  The book is a bit rueful, sensing a loss of something valuable: the university's center had shifted from its faculty to its administration.  "Faculty members," Kerr wrote, "are increasingly figures in a 'lonely crowd.' "  Kerr was of course referring to Riesman's book.

  The milieu I have outlined was the background of most students in 1960.  Yet a rebellion was in the offing, partially informed by the rising, nonconformist "beat" ethic that had strong roots in San Francisco.   Months before my arrival at Cal, some students had been participants in a riot in San Francisco when HUAC had held anti-communist hearings.  Sproul Plaza, the main venue on campus for student activity, was a bazaar of tables where causes ranging from left to right were advocated and organized, among them anti-segregation Freedom Marches to the South.

  In September 1964, the "bazaar" was suddenly shut down because of complaints by conservatives outside the University. The result was the birth of the Free Speech Movement, an explosion of rallies and sit-ins by thousands of students. Hundreds were jailed.  It was a unique occasion in which Maoists and Young Republicans joined forces.

  The FSM quickly morphed into a thoroughgoing indictment of the university itself.  In December, Mario Savio gave a speech that encapsulated the students' alienation.  If the university is a firm, he said, and its president a manager reporting to a board of directors (the Regents), then the faculty are simply "a bunch of employees" and students just raw material to be formed into product and sold to the university's clients.  This was intolerable.  "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part.  You can't even passively take part.  And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.  And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."  (A video of the speech is really worth watching.)

  The FSM's message ignited protests among similarly disaffected students around the world.  It defined the rest of the Sixties as it spilled over from universities to society at large.  These youngsters were saying that everything they saw in the conformist society around them was broken, unresponsive to "working within the system," because it was the system itself that had to change.  And change it they did.  The subsequent years of turmoil produced a new ethos for their and later generations that would have been quite unrecognizable a decade earlier.

  On awakening from this time-loop reverie, I was convinced that Occupy is a grandchild of the FSM.  Two generations later, Occupiers are as alienated from a broken, unresponsive system as were students in the FSM.  In the Sixties the FSM had sprung up in a system characterized not only by the multiversity, but also by a conformist culture,  stifling social mores, and racial segregation.  In the Tens, Occupy's frame of reference is a rapacious Wall Street culture, dysfunctional government, and a greatly inequitable distribution of wealth and income. Despite these differences, Savio's diatribe against "the operation of the machine," if spoken today, would no doubt strongly resonate with Occupiers.  Major changes in the system were then and are now called for.

  The Occupy movement is now restarting after a winter lull.  Last year it greatly increased public awareness of the appalling and growing wealth/income gap in the country (see the chart below).  As it reawakens, I hope Occupy will further focus the public on that gap and other inequities. 

  Some complain that Occupy has no agenda, that it is but an inchoate protest against the status quo.  I would remind them that the FSM had no agenda either, only an irrepressible and well-founded urge for change.  As in the Sixties, we might be in for some years of tumult.  If so, as in the Sixties, our now very unbalanced and unresponsive society will be the better for it.

      Source: New York Times, April 17, 2012


  Late Flash:  As I post this blog entry, I find that The Occupy Handbook, a 560-page compendium of articles about Occupy by noted economists, columnists and others, has been published today.  I have downloaded it onto my iPad  and am looking forward to reading it.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Content v. Distribution

  Today I'm on home territory, the information technologies, returning to it from ground on which I had no right to tread: cosmology, religion, history, psychology, poetry and philosophy.  That might be a relief to all.

  I entered my home territory as a pre-teenager nearly seventy years ago, starting by building radios and phonographs from vacuum tubes, later building a ham radio station and communicating with other radio amateurs around the world by Morse code at 10-20 words per minute.  That's perhaps 5-10 bits per second, and I was thrilled to achieve that speed.  Now I am discontent with speeds of less than 3 megabits per second.  When a gigabit per second is available, enough to download a full-length, high-definition movie in a few seconds, will that be enough?  Who knows?  I am surprised that I now need more than 3 Mbps.  It is wondrous how much the Internet revolution has changed our expectations.

  These personal musings about the speed the Internet has injected into our lives might be expanded in another posting.  (Can our brains handle it?)  Today I'd like to comment on an aspect of the information industry that the Internet has so far not changed: the fraught relationship between content and distribution, even on the Internet itself.  Succinctly put, information distributors always try to control the content they distribute; providers of content always try to control its distribution.  One usually wins.  Will the Internet change that too?

  In 2010, Tim Wu wrote an excellent book covering the topic: The Master SwitchAs his subtitle The Rise and Fall of Information Empires suggests, Wu describes a persistent cycle that has affected a succession of information industries in America: telegraphy, telephony, movies, radio, television and cable.  A critical part of every cycle has been the establishment of a closed system: a monopoly or oligopoly having control of both content and distribution, to the detriment of the public interest.  Here are three examples:

    • Western Union was by 1870 one of the world's largest corporations, having a monopoly over telegraphy in the U.S.  By limiting access to its lines, it was able to wield unconscionable power over content.  For instance, it allowed access for news reports only to the Associated Press, at the time the main source for non-local news for many newspapers.  Both Western Union and the AP were allied with the Republican Party.  In the 1876 presidential election between the Republican Hayes and the Democrat Tilden, the AP telegraphically distributed only favorable stories about Hayes and unfavorable stories about Tilden. This collusion likely tilted the very close election to Hayes.  Here the public lost the integrity of its political system.

    • By 1913, AT&T had acquired scores of local telephone companies and then its largest competitor, Western Union.  In an anti-trust settlement that year, it agreed to divest itself of Western Union; stay out of the telegraph business; and submit to regulation as a common carrier of telephony, giving equal access to all, including access to its long lines to the remaining independent telcos.  In exchange, with the blessing of the government, AT&T grew to be virtually the sole provider of telephone service in the U.S.; it was widely touted as a benevolent monopoly.  For the next seventy years it indeed provided superb service and technical improvements.  Yet it consistently suppressed "disruptive technologies" that could have provided content other  than voice to the network.  Technologies invented in its own famed Bell Laboratories never saw daylight, like a facsimile machine (which might replace lengthy conversations with shorter faxes) and digital subscriber lines (which might replace voice with faster computer communication).  Similar technologies invented externally could not on "technical grounds" gain access to AT&T's lines.  Here the public significantly lost by delays in the advent of new technologies that would have allowed use of the only national network for content other than voice.

    • By the first decade of the twentieth century, the motion-picture industry contained hundreds of small producers.  This maelstrom had mostly coalesced by 1920 into an oligopoly of five Hollywood studios: Universal, MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros. and Paramount.  The only barriers to a completely closed system were the myriad independent distributors and theater owners who refused to relinquish their ability to screen just the movies and stars they wanted from whatever producer, inside the oligopoly or not.  So the studios in the 1920s conducted a blitzkrieg of pressure tactics and purchases, which ended in the elimination of virtually all these independents.  The film business was now completely vertically integrated; if one wanted to produce, distribute or screen a movie, it was pretty much through one of the studios or not at all.  Here, the public's loss was a substantial curtailment of the type and content of movies it could see.

  These three cycles all came to a close, the first by technical obsolescence, the second by regulatory action, the third by court decision.  But cycles persist in other venues, even if not as egregiously.  Cable TV distributors have a hammerlock on pricey packages of video channels they offer their customers, often in monopoly markets; there are frequent outbreaks of warfare between these distributors and their content providers, with blackouts both threatened and occurring.  Television networks have increasingly combined with Hollywood studios in exclusive content-distribution packages. Cellular telephone is almost a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon, each trying to limit the amounts of information that can be downloaded or uploaded, and proposing "fast lanes" for those willing to pay more.  In all of these venues, consumer choice is constrained.

  On the Internet, however, the user is still largely in control.  The interaction between content and distribution is unresolved.  The first major attempt at their fusion, the merger of AOL (distribution) and Time Warner (content), was a spectacular failure.  Neither company understood the nature of the Internet, whose very design gives the user unprecedented power to choose both distributors and content providers. 

  The failure of this merger by no means ended the story.  Wu points to three very powerful forces still at work in the Internet:

    • The pursuit of a closed-system model, not unlike that of the old AT&T.  It is typified by Apple, which says to the user, "Come to us!  We will provide you with an integrated system of hardware, software, applications, movies, books, music--whatever we think you want, but let us be the judge of what you want and how you get it.  We promise that you will be stunned by the orderly beauty and efficiency of our system."   Apple's control of content is exemplified by its refusal to carry books, video, music and apps except on its own terms, to the chagrin of many content providers. 

   • The pursuit of an open-system model, not unlike that of very early movie-industry days.  It is typified by Google/YouTube, which says, "Come to us!  We will provide you access to the entire world in all its chaos.  You be the judge of the content you want to see.  If you create your own content, we will distribute it. You will be amazed at the independent power we will make available to you."  One need only visit YouTube to see this open system in all of its expansiveness.  This blog, hosted and distributed free by Google, is another example.
   • Lurking beneath both are the owners of the Internet's transmission pipes, the underlying digital network that makes the Internet possible.  These are the old, now born-again conglomerates of telephony (the duopoly of AT&T and Verizon) together with the newer cable networks.  They grin wolfishly and say, "Neither the Apples nor the Googles can operate without using our pipes, and we will make sure that they (and the public) pay the piper."  They control the master switches of Wu's title.

  Wu wonders whether either the Apple or Google model will dominate the Internet, or neither.  I say neither. There will be some Apples and some Googles. As now, they will remain co-existing and competing subsystems, not the system,  and the user, still in control, will jump from site to site to get what he or she wants.

  Regarding the controllers of the "master switches," I strongly agree with Wu that they should be subject to "network neutrality" regulation, which would ban selective blocking of individual sites or selective limitation of amounts of data that can be distributed.  That issue is currently being intensely fought out in Congress, the FCC and the courts. 

  I noted at the outset that the Internet revolution has totally changed our expectations.  The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.  The younger generation, unused to yesteryear's limitations on information availability, weaned on and empowered by the openness of the Internet, will demand through their clicks, voices, wallets and votes that openness be maintained. They will not countenance constraint on their choice of distributors or content providers, or their ability to create independent content and distribute it themselves.  They will insist that the underlying network-neutrality question be resolved favorably toward this end.  In short I believe that, at least on the Internet, the perennial cycle that Wu describes has finally been broken.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The Pursuit of Happiness


   I ended my last posting by mentioning my quest for equanimity.  At my age, I seek that quality above all others.  So it was a revelation to me not very long ago to find that my quest is blessed by no less a document than the Declaration of Independence, through its listing of the Pursuit of Happiness among our three unalienable rights.  Of course, different people pursue happiness in different ways.  But I'd like to make a case that the Declaration's principal author, Thomas Jefferson, believed happiness can't be achieved without equanimity, and equanimity is itself part of happiness.

  It had always seemed to me that the Pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration was not of a piece with the other two unalienable rights, Life and Liberty, which have more gravitas.  Happiness struck me as rather hedonistic; but that is likely a product of our own times, where happiness does smack of self-indulgence.  For all it matters now, Jefferson might very well have used Locke's original triad of rights--Life, Liberty and Property--since the pell-mell, self-indulgent acquisition of property seems to be a large part of our society's concept of happiness. 

  Given the Puritanical background of many of the Colonies, it is quite clear that the Founding Fathers could not have had hedonism in mind when they signed the Declaration.  For many of them I think the pursuit of happiness meant striving to reach one's full potential, and perhaps happiness meant reaching that potential.  However, I was drawn into a more precise examination of what Jefferson intended by a passage in Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, which was the subject of a previous posting.  In it Greenblatt asserts that the pursuit of happiness entered the Declaration by way of Jefferson's reading of the Roman philosopher/poet Lucretius.  I thus decided to backtrack to antiquity and then move forward so as to survey what happiness signified for some noted philosophers throughout the ages.

  As one would expect, discussion of happiness has a long history in philosophy.  In the fourth century BCE Aristotle declared it to be the central goal of human life, as did the somewhat younger Epicurus. About two centuries later Lucretius' epic poem taught Epicurus' philosophy to the Romans. When that poem was rediscovered in the fifteenth century it greatly influenced Renaissance writers, including the sixteenth-century Montaigne, whose Essays were widely read.  In the seventeenth-century Locke, also drawing on the ancients, considered the pursuit of happiness as "the highest perfection of intellectual nature" (notwithstanding his leaving it out of his own triad of rights).

  This brief history aside, what did happiness mean to these thinkers?  Although Epicurus' philosophy is now misconstrued by its association with the word "epicure," a synonym for "gourmet," none of them equated happiness with self-indulgence. On the contrary, they equated happiness with the Greek concept of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, attainment of which required first a state of ataraxia, or equanimity.  For Epicurus, equanimity itself was happiness.

  At the end of this two-millennium chain of thought stood Jefferson, a devotee of Locke, an avid reader of Lucretius (he had eight copies in four languages), and a self-avowed Epicurean.  I am persuaded by my survey that happiness meant to Jefferson just what it did to the thinkers I've cited.  He must have believed, with them, that its pursuit requires equanimity, and that equanimity is part of it.

  Then the question is, how does one achieve equanimity?  Equanimity means tranquility, and everyone's path to tranquility is different.  For Epicurus, it meant surrounding himself with disciples and friends in philosophical discourse, all of them withdrawing from the hurly-burly and fruitless ambitions of the world.  Most others, including myself in my younger days, seek it in a more worldly setting.  But I like to think that in my latter days I can follow a model set by Montaigne and Jefferson. In their later lives they found equanimity and happiness in the sanctuaries of their estates, Chateau de Montaigne and Monticello.

  On his estate, Montaigne had a tower especially set aside for contemplation and writing, the "room at the back of the shop" that he advised everybody to have. On its wall was inscribed in Latin

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public enjoyments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins [Muses], where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat, and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.

It is in this tower, which he considered a "solitarium," that he wrote his Essays.  And in his essay "On Solitude" he gives very good advice: "Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there."

  As I said, I like to think I can follow the model set by Montaigne and Jefferson.  My latter-day quest for equanimity and happiness therefore is centered in my own "room at the back of the shop," of which this blog is now a part.