So it is interesting for me to see people so willingly give up power. One of the ways that I think power is given up is by engaging politics emotionally. And on the inauguration of Barack Obama I found it ironic to see people willingly give themselves up to a man who’s key message is of the dangers of the blind and irrational in politics.

But that is the nature of power. Power requires people to put down their guards and follow. To trust that they will not be marched off a cliff. This is an awesome tool and, I acknowledge, one that is required to accomplish great things. Humans are social creatures and in order for us to work together we must be coordinated. Skyscrapers, cities, republics and empires are envisioned by leaders and dutifully executed by the people. Nothing would ever be accomplished if every order was questioned by every person. On certain occasions we need the collective to act as one. But group-think is also responsible for the worst of humanity; ranging from riots, nationalism and stampedes at Wal-Mart.

So we should take no comfort knowing that Leaders have often used this power to send men off to die in distant lands for issues unrelated to them.

But the times are different and Obama will be a great leader, right? Well, I “believe”, but it is not whether or not we agree with the one at the helm that gives me pause. It’s simply seeing how power is so easily given up and amassed that puts me in awe; like seeing history play itself out in real time.

With that being said, I don’t think that all aspects of life should be engaged this critically. There are many things that I believe being part of the collective is great. For example, dancing is best experienced in a social environment and without thought. But politics is one of these areas in life that I think should always be engaged with a certain level of detachment. Politics is a process and it should remain as so. So when politics and emotions meet, that’s when we should be most cautious.

Utilitarians believe that people should work to maximize total happiness across the population. They believe that the only reason to do something or not to do something is because it will make people happier or unhappier respectively. Thus, whether something is good or bad depends to some extent on people’s preferences — whether it makes them happy or sad.

But this might leads to some odd conclusions in the case of what might be called “perverse preferences”. For example, some members of the Bush Administration say they get very sad when they see others eat ice cream in public. Yet many people like to eat ice cream in public. Should we stop them from doing so just because it makes others sad? Moreover, should they decide to stop doing so if they’re utilitarians?

My understanding of Utilitarianism is that it looks at the sum of all people affected by an action – not just influential groups.

According to Utilitarianism, if eating ice-cream negatively affects more people than not, then maybe we should reconsider eating ice-cream.

And that is why laws vary by peoples. There are cases, which, for historical or cultural reasons, more people of a population consider a specific act as affecting them negatively. So, to impose a historical or cultural justification for an act by a larger population onto a smaller – under the guise of the “greater good”, would be, i think, unjust.

What makes sense to me is to have smaller governing units, which permit for distinct populations to make their own decisions and assert their cultural beliefs (obviously, preserving basic human rights).

Utilitarianism can sometimes be a bit too universalistic and often forgets the most human of all social units: the family – and everything that stems out from family, like ethnicity, culture, nation etc.

Now, you can apply the same insights of John Stuart Mill to smaller social groups and allow for an even greater diversity of people who can be happy.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong-the new technology did often have the effects he feared-but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

A similar concern arose with the printing press:

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

And now, the concern has shifted to the Internet. The Internet allows us to retrieve information quickly, but doesn’t necessarily require us to go “deep” into a topic – changing the way we engage text completely, even offline. And there is a fear that the Internet might cause an epidemic in our culture that results in people being unable to hold a focus long to enough to grasp complex ideas.

If that’s a possibility then there is reason to be concerned. The New York Times, in a piece titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” explains how we are already moving away books and onto screens:

Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.

And the effects – at least in the way we currently test for them – seem to be negative:

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading – diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

While Socrates was right that writing made us lose our ability to memorize, he was unable to foresee (or maybe foresaw, but still did not approve) the rise of engaged and literate societies, which have been responsible for many of the great creations of humanity.

So what type of world are we unable to yet see by high level and data extracting reading that the Internet so easily provides? Well, it’s hard to say, but there is another angle we can approach this to give us an idea.

We have for the past hundred years – aided by technology – seen the rise of the “Multitasker.” Modern life requires the completion of many tasks and in the rush to complete these tasks; we break up into even smaller task, which allow us to incrementally work on many things simultaneously. That is how work is accomplished in the modern world and is also how reading is changing.

But we’re already aware of the dangers of multitasking in various parts of our lives.

A few months ago The Atlantic Monthly published an article by novelist and critic, Walter Kirn, titled “The Autumn of the Multitaskers“, that explains how multitasking affects our brain:

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires-the constant switching and pivoting-energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

This is the great irony of multitasking-that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)

So, in our effort to complete many tasks, we inhibit our ability to complete any single one. And it doesn’t help that the computer is inherently multipurpose. What appears to be happening is that different behaviors are being consolidated into a single tool that by design favors multitasking – obstructing other possible ways to engage ideas.

Breaking up tasks has allowed for the development of the industrial revolution. Physical motions were broken up in simple actions – constraining the individual, but allowing for the “system” to work more efficiently. The computer revolution has also limited physical acts to moving our fingers and our minds too have become compartmentalized – suited to completing simple tasks.

What we find is that this compartmentalization of human minds and ideas can be beneficial to the “system.”

Wikipedia, I think, is a good example of this idea in action and I think can be a glimpse into the way we engage ideas in the future. Individuals are responsible for depositing tiny slivers of knowledge into large pools of information, but no individual idea is valued or acknowledged, while giving a sense of collective progress. But this system also deprives individuals of any deep sense of worth. Similar to mind-numbing factory jobs, I can see lives, thoughts, and entertainment being broken down into tiny plots that are easily satisfied… and never questioned.

Worst of all, when people’s needs are so easily met, few would realize the worth of deep and uninterrupted thoughts.

The laws protecting animals are often well intentioned and the people working with them the most caring. So my issue is not with the laws, the people or great resource that zoos provide; they do what they can under the system we have in place. It is with the basic ethical issue of institutionally stripping animals from their natural habitat and creating an artificial world for them for our benifit. I am questioning the means, not the ends.

Modern ethics tell us that there is something intrinsically wrong with trapping someone, restricting their behavior and performing (physical or psychological) experiments on them. That’s why we don’t have humans in zoos. But even then, it wasn’t until 1974, with the creation of the IRB, that restrictions were applied to certain kinds behavioral experiment on humans…. so don’t count on laws, or even science, to be on par with ethics. We have to all realized it ourselves.

So why don’t our ethical revelations apply to animals? The old argument involved something about animals not having “souls.“ The modern argument morphed into something about animals not being “conscious”, giving us free reign over their lives under the guise that they don’t know what is happening to them anyway. But we don’t have a good idea of what consciousness is so we can’t use that as a fair argument. What we do know is that large animals, especially social ones, have natural behavior stifled by enclosures. The big cats, like lions, leopards and cheetahs often have territories that cover 50 square kilometers. Something zoos, especially urban zoos, cannot provide. So what happens to these animals? They go crazy. They pace. They pull out their hair. They ram into into things. They lash out. And often die.

I found the following quote in Wikipedia:

Historians Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier cite statistics showing that three-quarters of apes die in captivity within the first twenty months, with the overall “stock turnover“ of animals being one-fifth to one-fourth over the course of a year. They further note that this “extreme mortality of wild animals in zoos has always been the driving force behind the massive scale of importations.“

Additionally, many thousands of animals are placed on “surplus lists“ each year, where they are sold to, among other places, “circuses, animal merchants, auctions, individual pet owners, “game farms,“ “hunting ranches,“ and “trophy collectors.“

That system feels flawed.

I am not calling out for the abolishment of zoos, but I think that there needs to be a complete reconsidering of the role zoos play in our society that starts from the bottom and works its way up.

The basic conditions I would feel comfortable with a modern zoo meeting are: First, no “exotic“ animals in urban areas. Zoos should focus on the land’s indigenous creatures. The idea that I should be able to see, even study, a tiger locally unrealistic. If you want to see a tiger, it’s less risky for you to go to India than importing a tiger from India to every major city. Second: focus on preserving, expanding and creating national parks. Let the animals live free and study them at a distance – intervene only when necessary. And third: Limit human contact. Educate the public with films and documentaries, like March of the Penguin and Planet Earth, and tap into that sympathy to build support and expand protection. Modern media technologies, like high definition DVDs, allow us to learn more about our world, while leaving little or no impact on the environment.