something about "Dangling Man" by Saul Bellow

 
Our Dangling Man keeps a journal in which he agonizes over the gaps between his past and present selves. His encounters with people sound largely antagonistic.

The voice of the journal belongs to Joseph, a young man living in Chicago. At this moment in his life, Joseph is unemployed, and 1942 America is at war. Joseph's voice captures truths that are universal (or, at least national), temporal, and personal. Frustration over his compulsion to drill and drill himself for value taint Joseph's reflections. Although determined to unleash these thoughts, Joseph is an unwilling participant in a culture that increasingly casts every self in the lead role.

At the time of his writings, Joseph, Canadian by birth, has been waiting for word on his acceptance into the American army during World War II. He surrenders his personal freedom to end this suffering. He closes his journal with the words,

Hurray for regular hours!
And for the supervision of the spirit!
Long live regimentation!

Notes:
Dangling Man, written in 1944, is Saul Bellow's first published work. I thought Dangling Man had interesting moments, but I did not enjoy reading it.

I don't believe it

How like herrings and onions

The article "Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It's the Only Choice" in Monday's The New York Times discusses results of recent and previous surveys on free will and determinism. Responses showed an acceptance of both concepts, depending on circumstance. While addressing this apparent conflict in opinion, the article quotes a Florida State Professor as saying,

It’s two different kinds of mechanisms in the brain ... If you give people an abstract story and a hypothetical question, you’re priming the theory machine in their head. But their theory might be out of line with their intuitive reaction to a detailed story about someone doing something nasty. As experimenters have shown, the default assumption for people is that we do have free will.

Here, he speculates. But while the author and the surveyors hope to identify majority opinion in this debate, the real story lies in the answer to the following questions: Why and How did respondents develop this binary concept? And why is free will the default?

The article does not address these questions directly, but does mention a correlation between a belief in free will and better job performance and honesty. If the correlation is also causation--if believing in free will leads to better job performance--then consider this: One who believes in free will self-disciplines and self-censors, thereby reducing the will, attacking the will, and deferring to the will of authority. (This civil behavior is not unlike the civil code of conduct proposed by Kant in his answer to What is Enlightenment?) This is mind control.

Later the author, with support from academia, suggests that we're all compatibalists. Then the piece concludes,

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion—a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.

Odd conclusion. Neither the research discussed nor the author offer any "good" reasons". If we follow a few leads, we may conclude that believing in free will benefits power; but that is not a good reason. It seems to me the only people "deluding themselves" are the ones who claim to have free will as they wake to their alarm clocks, go to work and login to their machines.

The article discussed above is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Extra! Extra!

A number of voices call for the legal prosecution of Julian Assange. The permissibility of prosecution on the charge of Espionage hinges at least in part on the question, Is he a journalist? The answer matters because journalistic status summons the Freedom of the Press argument--possibly in addition to other professional protections--and it heightens the claim to Freedom of Speech. Of course, even if he is a journalist, these protections could be turned away in the name of national security or some other interest.

The matter of whether Assange is a journalist of course denotes the larger question, What is journalism? New media and what's called Citizen Journalism force us to re-evaluate the word. We have taken the definition for granted because our immediate, albeit vague, assumptions seemed to provide us clues, if not the answer: Journalism involves print written by reporters employed by businesses whose job it is to sell news and advertising; furthermore, to state slightly less explicit assumptions, reporters are professionals employed by institutions with the authority to confer job titles, thereby defining a class of people with privileges and protections beyond those of Citizen X. To many minds, no longer are these assumptions clear.

But without a traditional institution behind Assange, his status as a journalist is immediately cast in to doubt in other minds; I would image that to these people, his claim to be a journalist is as legitimate a one as a woman’s to be a homemaker. Which is to say, it isn’t, really.