Haiti (Catch all)

[Tom Kratman]

Hi Marc:

I'm really not using the US or the frozen north as a measure. If I could see some way for Haiti to achieve, oh, I dunno, maybe a quarter or so of what the Dominican Republic has going for it, then I could see some hope. Haiti is probably stuck at the level where hope means, "Maybe things won't get worse so quickly that I can reasonably expect not to starve to death this year. Maybe." That, however, is a measure of "hope" stripped of any positive attributes, which is to say, no hope at all.

True story: About 5-6 years ago I had lunch with the mayor of Delmas, a subdivision of Port au Prince. The mayor was a nice guy, a bright guy, well educated and caring. I had the impression - rarity of rarities - that he was the honest sort, too. He and this retired colonel who was working for a Haiti-oriented NGO had a scheme to take the charcoal tailings that dotted the country and turn them into briquets, selling them at cost. I listened to their little presentation and at the end had to ask, "What have you got when the tailings run out? Besides even more Haitians, who need more charcoal, and have no more trees than they had when you started mining the tailings? What's your end game? How does this temporary partial fix make anything better?"

Of course, it didn't. There was no end game. There was no realistic plan of improving anything, however much they cared and however hard they tried. Everything, as so often, boiled down to saving people from starving this year so that even more of them could starve next year.

The mayor asked me, "Do you see any hope, any way, for Haiti?" Me: "No, not really." Him, with sad sigh: "No."

As for police actually doing what police are supposed to do...you can still color me skeptical. As you pointed out early on, anything but watching out for number one in a place that like is insane. Since none of the cops were reported as foaming at the mouth, I am inclined to think that, whatever they were doing, they had a purely self-interested, and probably short term self-interested, motive for. I would be terribly unsurprised to discover that some NGO, or consortium thereof, was paying them to act the part, because it is easier to collect money when one can show the suckers something that _looks_ like grounds for hope.

Hi Tom,



Nat Sherman Classics? Haven't had one of those in quite a while - same with the Sobranies, although I did smoke the Black Russians for a couple of years.



onomatopoeia. Yeah. It's actually quite fascinating when you start getting into the development of sign languages and creols. If I remember correctly, and it's been about 10-15 years since I was reading this stuff, there was a real move in the 1890 - 1920's or so to see if we could ground language development in onomatopoeia, but that ended up totally falling apart. The final part of that experiment was in the Vienna School of social science which tried to create an exact language - one sign -> one referent; it failed miserably .

Again, and now I'm trying to remember a 15 year old conversation from about 3 in the morning after several bottles of Hungarian red, one of the reasons why the effort fell apart was because of cultural conventions on parsing reality; think about the interminable debates about whether turquoise is blue or green, then put that on steroids. We appear to be able to use onomatopoeia to point towards sensorily accessible processes that are common to humans as a species, but not towards most things in our environment.



Totally agree, and it's a great place to start applying the concepts of accuracy and precision (along with a few others that really PO the PC crowd). So, accuracy can be used as a measure of a sign or symbol to what is being referred to, while precision can be used as a measure of a sign or symbol in a message as to the closest (in Bayesian probabilistic terms) perception by an observer of what they are perceiving (BTW, this last is how we uncover biases, inferential systems, etc. during narrative analysis).

The paradoxes you mention are one of a number of special cases that appear to use their own sets of logic, many of them based on the Syllogism of Barbara (men die, grass dies, therefore men are grass). What this seems to be modelling is an almost intuitive understanding that language systems are self-referential. In some cases, e.g. Zen Buddhist koans, these paradoxes are used to "break" the perceptual limits constructed and reinforced by a language system.



Hmmm, as a metaphor, I would accept that.



This is where I disagree with you, and it gets back to that relational thing I was mentioning earlier. "Hope" actually has little to do with objective reality except as the starting base for an emotional longing / attachment to a future state of objective reality that is currently perceived as being better than the current situation. Even calling the perceptions involved "objective reality" is somewhat misleading since it's all really about interpretation schemas that dominate perceptions.

Hmmm, I get the feeling that I am digging a bigger holes here than I want to . Let's try it this way - if you haven't had any clean water to drink in a week, you can "hope" that you will have in the immediate future and, especially given all of the aid pouring in, you can have a reasonable expectation that you will get some. Some variant of Maslow's hierarchy of needs operates here, even if I have problems with it as a general model.

Anyway, so "hope" can operate as a desire for a status ante quo situation, as well as for any other situation. And, like most emotions, it is only loosely connected with states of objective reality being based on a perception by an individual of what is and compared with a desired situation. Of course, once you get that desired situation, you start hoping for something else....

There's also something that we might call "cultural learning" going on that, I think, is related to your use of the term "reasonable", and is particularly poignant in the case of Haiti. People living in a culture "learn" from experience and stories what is "possible" for them and their culture/society (this, BTW, was one of the key realizations Mao had). Anyway, those "possibilities" construct the "reasonableness" of what is hoped for within the culture.

If we look at Haiti in particular, we can start to see some shifts in the experience and stories of what is "possible". The police actions in this last crisis are an example: sure, some of them buged out, but others didn't. This helps to reset the parameters of what the members of the culture view as "possible", opening up both new opportunities and new lines for a "reasonable hope". In effect, the perceivable "fact" that some of the police didn't bug out and that they stayed at their posts and performed their duties is a difference that makes a difference.

Now, that "difference" isn't much of one from where I sit in the frozen, socialist North . Since my "normal" would be "Of course they will stay on duty !", I would automatically find the fact that some of them did bug out to be the difference that makes a difference, and would probably think that they were hopeless. But it's really not about how I emotionally react, nor about my personal reactive perceptions; it's about how the people living in Haiti react and perceive the actions of the police (amongst other things).

So I try and apply a little verstehen and end up feeling like I am caught in one of those linguistic paradoxes - crappy policing (my perception) is good (their perception). At least, I can see how the (supposed) paradox arises, and why it isn't an actual paradox. For some reason, that makes me feel better....