Aleksendr Solzhenitsyn and the Decline of the West

The following link is a speech given by the Soviet émigré and author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a man I respect both for his great character and the power of his words.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, it’s quite interesting. Solzhenitsyn’s basic message is that the modern world (which in his time included both the USSR and the Western world, and the first hints of a “Third World” out there) is utterly lacking in spiritual fibre. He discusses the commercial and legal forces of mediocrity in the West, and the lawlessness of the USSR. Solzhenitsyn hammers home the Christian (and specifically Orthodox) message, and hard.

This, to me, was the most moving passage.

“If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”

He follows that up with “Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?”

To Solzhenitsyn, the answer lies in a re-Christianization of the West, a rededication to the “moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” But, as I was reading the article, I was making equal allegories in my own mind. His critiques of the Western sickness are accurate, just as much and perhaps more so now than when he wrote it, but his prescription doesn’t seem to match the sickness. But one could make an equal argument for a re-Romanization of the West, a return to the idea of civic virtue, “civis Romanus sum” and all. Or even a reconsecration of the very values that the Western sicknesses spring from: the values of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

There’s also the tired counterargument to the Christianization of anything, the inherent dangers of Christian morality. I won’t bother repeating them here, this is the Internet, go to YouTube and look up the first dozen or so. Solzhenitsyn’s only comment are a few fleeting references to the physical side of man being “cursed” in the Middle Ages.

And yet, I keep coming back to that passage. There must be something to life other than the acquisition and consumption of material things. Even Charlie Stross seems to think so, although I don’t know about Eliezer Yudkosky. Solzhenitsyn also shows his Soviet heritage there, since a cornerstone of Marxist doctrine is that “liberty” is personal fulfillment, not purchasing power. Elsewhere, he touches on how eerily silent the Western world was, at that time, on personal and spiritual fulfillment. Since the 1960s, I would argue that such concerns have largely been incorporated into the superficial information glut that Solzhenitsyn decries elsewhere in the article.

“Leaving life a better human being than one started it,” is as basic and as concise a description of the non-material, spiritual drive that I can find. Stripped of Solzhenitsyn’s orthodoxy (and Orthodoxy), that is the aim, and one that I believe theist or atheist, humanist or Humanist, could get behind. One must, of course, start defining “better” (and work on defining “human being”), but a basis is there. Solzhenitsyn seems to believe that self-restraint, and a sense of duty, are key elements of becoming a better person. I can’t disagree.

Which brings us to the core of the passage, Solzhenitsyn’s Marxist and Christian assertion that “[life] has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty.” Solzhenitsyn’s whole speech is a critique against freedom outstripping duty in the modern Western world. He rails against the letter-of-the-law nature of Western society, with the sense of a higher duty simmering under the surface. He speaks of the side effects of modern plenty as a timidity to sacrifice; duty hides there, too. During the Roman republic, and the merchant republics of the Renaissance and even into the early revival of republicanism (small-R) by America and by France, civic duty was seen as the companion and balance of civil liberty.

While I do not agree with Solzhenitsyn that the Orthodox Christian God should be the object of this duty, that duty is necessary to make our lives fuller and richer, and our nations, and the world, I can’t find myself contravening. The questions that Solzhenitsyn never asked, but that we must, are “duty to whom?” and “duty to what?”

But, in laying the foundations for such questions, and in establishing duty as a cornerstone of a new approach, Solzhenitsyn is, truly, the man who arranges the blocks.

l’Appel

This is an appeal. An appeal to your sense of adventure, to your whimsy, to your charity.

A few months ago, on a romantic whim, and well-aware that I can only stand China for so long, I signed up for the Rickshaw Run. It’s one thousand miles of India, a couch strapped to a motorcycle, and me and whoever comes along. A one hundred per cent Adventure, straight up, with fedoras and all.

Yeah. One of these.

They just emailed me and told me that I had been accepted for the Spring 2012 run.

And that the 1000 British pound entry fee is due in three days. I can put up a fifth of that.

So. This is an appeal.

The Rickshaw Run, like everything the Adventurists do, is a charity rally. That is, every cent of that entry fee goes to FRANK Water Project, providing rural Indians with access to clean running water. I believe that makes it tax-deductible if you donate, but you’d have to check with a tax lawyer on that one.

Every one of my friends, family, or well-wishers who donates will get a mention in any media I appear in. You’ll get a special shout out in anything I write about the experience…and some of you remember Foreign Devil in China, so you know what my writing’s worth. I will be calling a friend at my local paper tomorrow to see if he’d like to follow up on a previous article he wrote on me.

This is an appeal. For charity, for the love of adventure, for publicity, for tax benefits, for my birthday, I’m appealing to you. Head over to PayPal, and drop a hundred or a fifty or a twenty in my roscoe (dot) mathieu (at) gmail (dot) com account.

I have three days to confirm Team Fedora for the 2012 Rickshaw Run. Help me do it.

Welcome to the Future

Every now and again, you have to stop and just kind of look at the world in awe. I just announced our new magazine, One Weird Idea, at the brand-spanking new Glorious Dawn Press site. The idea is to have a regular publication dedicated to the kind of science fiction that takes an idea, something absurd like thinking machines or environmental disaster or genetic engineering, and explores the implications. The kind of SF you can cut your teeth on.

Twelve years ago, I ran another magazine. I printed Rocket Takeoff in batches of a hundred at the Staples, tossing in everything that struck my fancy: Mike Combs’ The Case for Space, iron-ons, anarcho-capitalist tracts, comics, monologues against censorship. They were pocket-size, in black and white, a straight-up ‘zine. I had to sell each one by hand. I sold them for $2.50 apiece, and I barely broke even.

Now I’m gearing up to sell a magazine for 99 cents, and we’re fully expecting to pull a profit. We’re printing it without paper, selling copies to computers the size of paperbacks that can hold entire libraries. For some of our readers, they’ll be reading each issue on their phone. And I’m marketing it entirely over the Internet, with press releases, social media, and web presence. I’ve even learned to delegate.

I used to have to wait six months to a year after mailing a story to Asimov’s to hear them say ‘no.’ Now, I can get rejected in under a week from Daily Science Fiction. I’m flirting with a woman in Madras, all the way from Shenzhen, after calling my parents in San Luis Obispo, California. My father has hosted government meetings where each person was in a separate city, sometimes separate countries. Miss Madras and I trading movies, books, and music, showing each other things we’ve never seen and expanding each other’s horizons.

My friends are American, Canadian, British, Chinese, Hongkongese, Spanish, South African, Aussie, Kiwi, some are even Republican. And I can talk to all of them, as easily as I can load up a copy of Zork. Which used to come in boxes on massive floppy disks and take up all your CPU cycles, and which you can now download and play for free right now. And after such games were too old and cold and primitive to sell, people took the code, and started to play with it, and a transcontinental community emerged to make a new art form of it. At least one of them lives on his programming, all paid for by people he’s never met who contributed anonymously.

I’m an American, sitting in my office in China, looking out on a city that didn’t exist 30 years ago. China and India, though great poverty still exists, are hopeful for the future. This country was starving when I was born. Now I’m sitting next to educated, erudite, and cosmopolitan young professionals who have never known starvation.

The oil sheikhs of the Maghreb and the Middle East are crumbling and tumbling down, and democracies are blooming like flowers in the desert. They were organized in advance by people who never met each other, over computers connected to one another and running encryption to make Bruce Sterling green with envy. Senators are resigning over pictures put in the data stream by interested parties and amateurs, completely independent of the mass media. America elected a black man. Gays and lesbians can serve in the American military and will soon be allowed to marry the people they love.

Holy hell.

Welcome to the future!

Laying Down my Burdens

Some of you, who read my Facebook updates, know that I broke up with Marissa a few weeks ago. I’ve also been doing school and looking for work. I’ve found some work, and I’m now hustling to get a proper visa together.

This is all by way of explanation: I haven’t been Learning to Think.
I have to conclude that, between romantic misadventures, accounting exams, and job- and paperwork-hustling, my life is too chaotic for something like LTT. I haven’t even been able to update my blog recently.

I know at least one of you is still going strong, and I’m proud of that. Don’t let me stop you. Hell, I’ll probably come asking you for advice when my life is settled down enough to try again. And I am going to try again. But, right now, I have to get bills paid.

I am going to try and update this blog more frequently, starting with an update on Chinese New Year’s celebrations. See you soon.

Why Women Should Not be ‘Burdened’ With the Vote

This guy just says it all, don’t he. “Good to know we’ve come so far in our political rhetoric,” indeed.

Six Tips for Better Mnemonics

Having now spent a few weeks working on my mnemonics, and gotten four lessons into the 21-lesson Memory Master course, I’ve discovered a few things.

1) Be Stanley Ipkiss. Watch old cartoons.
It’s not as easy to come up with wacky links as it looks. Especially if this is your fiftieth of the day, and you’re a bit tired and hungry, and you know you’ve got another forty minutes of work ahead of you before you can even think about starting dinner. Putting it in the context of a Looney Tunes or Animaniacs cartoon (or Terry Gilliam animation) helps. Invoking that kind of spirit in your associations (whatever they are) helps. Trying to use violence or disgusting subjects actually makes it harder for me to remember, my brain seems to shy away from remembering those images. Sex helps, but not as much as you’d think. Comedy, comedy, comedy’s the thing.

2) Write it down.
It’s a quantum leap easier to remember information as I write it down. Yes, with a pen. Yes, on paper. Yes, I know they belong in a museum. It slows me down, seems more real…Initial Awareness, remember? We’re trying to raise it. Writing the list down in a notebook raises it, even if I throw the paper away right afterward (or hand it to Marissa so she can check me). It works much better for me than reading the list (from paper or screen) or hearing them aloud. I am working on making my intake of the latter stronger, so that I can apply mnemonics to things which are not easily written down (people’s names, for example).

3) Walk through the list in reverse.
Even if you don’t (or can’t) write it down, walk through the list backwards after you’ve finished forming all your links. This reinforces all the images, and familiarizes you with what it “feels like” in reverse. And, I don’t know about you, but I find it a lot easier to start at the end and work backwards. I used to solve mazes the same way as a kid.

4) Read this list.
My mother sent this to me (thanks, Mum!). Number eleven is basically mnemonics systems in a nutshell, and number fourteen talks about associations. Although it’s geared towards studying for school, most of them are applicable to other situations as well. Seriously, go read it. Memorize it, if you like.

5) Apply spaced repetition.
Use spaced repetition to really cement associations in your mind. Spaced repetition is remembering the material at longer and longer intervals (after one minute, one hour, one day…). Sounds simple, but according to studies like this one from UC San Diego, it’s a remarkably effective way to keep things in mind longer. I can offer my own testimony, in that I memorized the list of observation exercises through spaced repetition over the course of forty-eight hours, first an hour later, then twelve hours later (over my Five Will Get You Twelve, no less), then the next day…

6) Remember your limits.
By that, I mean, keep a few things in mind. Remember that, by and large, you have been memorizing lists of discrete information. They are data, and not knowledge. Knowledge comes from putting things in context, how your data (or facts) are important or relevant. You need savoir faire, not just savoir. You need to know how to use it, not just what it is. Mnemonics will help you keep facts around, but making those facts relevant and putting them in a logical framework to use later is your job.

Roscoe Learns to Think – The Second Week in Review

I started school this week. I’ve also been running to job interviews, English Corners, and so on. As a result, I haven’t been all that great at budgeting my time, and I’ve found myself squeezing out one aspect or another of Learning to Think all week.

Meditation

I meditated for the first few days in the room, wrapped in a blanket, with my hands covered with the heat pillow. Those were wonderful. For a few minutes each day, I felt the “beautiful stillness.” Then I started running around, and when I wasn’t running around, goofing off. So I took my stolen subway minutes and meditated there, or in the teacher’s lounge, or in the café after lunch, times when I had about twenty minutes and the wherewithal to do something productive with it.

That didn’t really work. I haven’t been able to really keep quiet or sit still in those places, mostly because they are so public and many of them involve necessary distractions (such as the stops being read off on the subway). I need to get back to sitting twenty minutes in my room alone, quietly, each day. Well, thirty, now.

Simulflow

Like last week, I missed a day of sitting with Kahne for an hour. However, I did manage to do some of the drills that day, so it wasn’t a total wash. As I mentioned, I wrote up several lists, and had them all memorized, and had great fun interlacing them and transposing them like we did with the alphabet last week.

But the real gains came in the drills. This wasn’t a terrible surprise to me, it was in the drills that I most felt “stiffness” and the brain-stretching sensation back in Yangshuo. On my last night, as it was clear I had achieved the level of mastery that Kahne demanded (despite my spotty attendance record), I did the drills to round out my hour. I felt stiffness and resistance throughout Drill B, that emerged into full-blown simulflow during Drill C. I again felt the sensation, pure and unmistakable, of my train of thought splitting onto two parallel tracks as I manipulated both sets of words.

I’ve discovered something with both simulflow and mnemonics: They must be taken on faith. I can’t set out or see the whole list or the whole of both words at the outset, I have to trust that I will find my way to the end. I can’t, yet, picture all the provinces I’ve memorized at once, but I can remember one or two and run from there. If I spell out t-i-k and write y-r-d, I can’t necessarily picture the “k” and the “d” when I’m writing “t” and “y,” but I have to trust that they’ll come to mind when I get there.

Have you felt this sensation? The sense that you’re running on parallel tracks, for however short a time?

Petit Perception

I’ve taken to skimping on this one. And I’m sliding back, in terms of being able to see and notice the things around me. Bad form. I still get it one or two a day, clocking a few things or scanning the room, but it’s not enough. Petit perception is difficult, because it’s not something that I sit down and do, like mnemonics practice or Kahne’s course. It’s something that I need to carry with me, running in the back of my mind, all day. And I haven’t progressed enough in Kahne to pull that off yet.

I don’t feel quite ready, or confident, about adding the concentration exercises to my routine yet. But I’m going to press on, if only because I need to memorize some poetry for Kahne’s Double Concentration drill.

However, I want to make note of something. Last night, just after I turned out the lights, I noticed how remarkably quiet it was. The traffic was muted, there were no cries or shouts from the street, the city seemed hushed. I practiced layered listening, listening to the hum of the modem, the trickle of water through the pipes, the muted roar of the city, the honking of the streets below…until I realized, with amazement, that I could go no quieter. I heard the ringing in my ears.

It was a strange moment. I’m glad I was there for it.

Mnemonics

This side of my practice has probably suffered worst this week. No sooner did Marissa and I agree to memorize the provinces of China than we set the list aside and promptly forgot about it. I made a go at remembering the first eight or so (Guangzhou, Guangdong; Fuzhou, Fujian; Hangzhou, Zhejiang; Shanghai, Shanghai; Nanjing, Jiangshu; Jinan, Shandong; Shijiazhuang, Hebei; Beijing, Beijing; Tianjin, Tianjin; Shenyang, Liaoning; Dalian, Jiling; Harbin, Helongjiang; Hohhot, Inner Mongolia) but then kind of dropped off.

I’m not very good, yet, at coming up with substitute words, and I’m not going to get any better without more practice. Therefore, I’m repeating Session C this week, in addition to doing Session D.

However, I got plenty of practice remembering long lists of things that don’t require substitute words (or at least, not very much) in the form of this week’s Kahne exercises, and I can look forward to more, in the form of next week’s.

This Week

This week, Session C (repeat) and Session D in mnemonics. That’s substitute words and people’s names and faces, for those of you playing the Home Game. We’re extending anapana to thirty minutes, and picking up some of the concentration exercises if you’re ready. Exercise III in Kahne, and keep up with the drills when you’ve got a spare moment.

We add Double Concentration this week. However, in this case, Kahne suffers from his age. I can barely remember my own address, much less anyone else’s, for the simple reason of I never need them. And email addresses are too short to cut it for this exercise. Any suggestions on what could replace the four-line physical address, something we’ve all got a small collection of in our heads to work from, that we could write down while reading out bits of poetry?