The word and suffix “phobia” derives from the Latin word phobos for fear. In psychiatry, a phobia refers to any irrational fear. [1] Arachnophobia is the irrational fear of spiders. People who fear heights suffer from acrophobia. People who post at political web sites obviously do not suffer from doxophobia or fear of expressing opinions. Recently, a secondary meaning of phobia has fallen into a too common usage. The new definition of phobia includes not only fear, but also aversion and hate. For example, homophobia has come to mean hate of homosexuals, not just fear of the same. Actually there is a double intended meaning here. Certain activists for homosexuals would like people to believe the aversion to homosexuals is borne of a phobia about personal sexuality. There is no use arguing about the new usage of phobia. Changes in usage happen in living languages.
In a recent article in the Weekly Standard, David Brooks argues that we are encountering a new phobia, a phobia characterized more by hatred than by fear. According to Brooks, this “Bourgeoisophobia” explains why European and Arabs have come to hate America and Israel. [2] Brooks recently wrote Bobos in Paradise on how a unique combination of bourgeois and bohemian values and attitudes characterize the new upper class in America. He has thus spent considerable time studying the history and evolution of bourgeois values.
According to Brooks, the attitude of Islamic fundamentalists iseasy to understand. They hate the values of the “meritocratic capitalist society.” They hate highly commercial cultures and what they are based on: individual liberty for the masses, even women. They hate what free cultures produce: everything from popular music to videos. Most of all, Islamic fundamentalists are “inflamed” by “humiliation.” In the 1960’s and 1970’s, some Arab societies attempted to embrace a modern economy, but wouldn’t allow their cultures to adapt. The lingering and unhappy residue of these attempts is a sense of failure and anger. America represents the West with its bourgeois values and Israel is the foothold of the West in the Middle East. Hence, they both evoke a particular animus.
Europeans both love and hate America. The love American popular culture, while showing a distaste for the idea of American exceptionalism. Europeans embrace bourgeois values at least as much as Americans. How then can Bourgeoisophobia explain European anger with the United States? Part of it is a little jealously of American economic success. Some Europeans view Americans as many of us might view a rich uncle who wears checked suits, sports a $5 haircut, and became wealthy by selling brightly colored Cadillacs. We have to acknowledge the monetary success even while our sense of fairness and justice is assaulted because of our conviction that the uncle is our moral and intellectual inferior. Even worse, unlike the uncle, to Europeans Americans possess a blithe, casual, and infuriating certainty in their own goodness.
As Brooks explains:
“No European would ever acknowledge the category, but America and Israel are heroic bourgeois nations. The Israelis are driven by passionate Zionism to build their homeland and make it rich and powerful. Americans are driven by our Puritan sense of calling, the deeply held belief that Americans have a special mission to spread our way of life around the globe. It is precisely this heroic element of ordinary life that Europeans lack and distrust.”
Once Europeans thought themselves to be the economic, cultural, military leaders of the world. Europe had a colonial empire that extended around the globe. Two world wars and their aftermath splintered off what was left of European colonial holdings while dissipating European self-confidence. American hubris reminds them of what they once were and can be no longer. Retaining a sense of moral superiority by creating the myth of the unsophisticated American cowboy blustering unthinking into the world acts as a mild analgesic to European frustration at self-imposed impotence.
- On-line list of Phobias.
- Brooks, David, “Among the Bourgeoisophobes,” The Weekly Standard, 20-72, April 15, 2002.
Pondering the Infinite
Sunday, April 28th, 2002Pondering the infinite is an activity usually relegated to undergraduate philosophy students, particularly in their sophomore year. Physicists often spend their time reducing physical phenomena that are for all practical purposes, like the size of the universe, infinite to comprehensible descriptions. Mathematicians are perhaps the most facile in dealing with and manipulating concepts of infinity. For a mathematician, it is a simple matter to specify a mathematical surface that is infinite in area, but encloses a finite volume. In other words, mathematicians can conceive of a shape that one could fill with paint, but not paint. It is not until recently, that people in computer sciences have considered quantities and qualities, which if formally finite, may prove to be practically infinite.
In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, extrapolated from the fact that the number of transistors on a integrated circuit grew from one in 1959, to 32 in 1964, to 64 in 1965 that transistor density was doubling every 18 to 24 months. This is the narrow statement of Moore’s Law. The more general statement of Moore’s Law is that computer computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months.
The latter formulation of Moore’s law has been given more depth by MIT-educated computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer Ray Kurzweil. He has tracked back the growth of computer power from electromagnetic punch card calculators used in the 1890 census to Pentium 4 processors that have 42 million transistors. Kurzweil foresees accelerating increases in computer power past physical limits of silicon-based devices as manufactures employ more exotic bio-chemical technologies.
Much thought has been given to whether Moore’s Law can really exceed limits posed by silicon-based technology and the ever-increasing capital costs required to construct chip-manufacturing plants. Additional consideration has been given as to what this increased computer power can be used for. Kurzweil is not shy about predicting a future with machines that are more intelligent than humans and computer implants interfaced to human minds. While increases in computer capacity has proven to be more persistent in time that anyone has a right to expect, predictions about the future abilities of artificial intelligence have a notorious record of over optimism.
What has not received much thought is the rapid increase in data storage. Writing in American Scientist, Brian Hayes explains how recent changes in technology are actually increasing rate of growth is disk storage. A large disk on a personal computer is about 120 GBytes. Technologies in the laboratory presently achieve storage densities equivalent to disks with 400 GBytes of storage.
At the present rate of increase, personal computer disks will reach 120 Terabytes (120,000 GBytes) in size in ten years. Even if the growth rate decreases by 60 percent, the 120 TByte level will be reached in 15 years. What are we to do with this storage capability? Is natural American acquisitiveness sufficiently great to use of this space.
Recently MP3 digtial music files have been filling disks, especially in college dorms. However, as Hayes points out, if you put enough music to listen to different songs 24 hours a day for an 80 year lifetime you barely fill a third of a 120 TByte disk disk. Even this assumes that storage technology would remain fixed over the 80-year lifetime.
Digital photographs are a new source of data filling up disks. Assuming each such photograph require 1 MByte of storage and assuming a itchy shutter finger producing 100 photographs a day certainly a well-documented life less than 3% of the 120 TBytes would be filled.
Fundamentally, storage of video is the only data source likely to fill 120 Tbyte disks. Even so, with growth beyond 120 TBytes over our lifetimes, we likely face the prospect of being able to store more data than we have. It is roughly comparable to having an attic that is growing so fast that we cannot fill it fast enough.
It seems that if we are having problems filling up new disks over a lifetime, the only solution is to increase lifetimes.
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