Samir Chopra's Blog, page 116

Amazon, E-Commerce and Monopolies

A couple of interesting comments in response to my post yesterday on Matthew Yglesias and Amazon.

First, JW writes:

I’m not sure I agree with your point…I think the reason e-commerce and Amazon are less scary is that it is harder to charge monopolistic prices because entry is so easy. If Amazon starts charging monopolistic prices, Walmart.com will just start running ads that say “Amazon is charging monopolistic prices, come to us, we guarantee our prices will be lower.” When you say “this does not mean customers will not buy elsewhere if the price is right; it is just that with economies of scale, very few competitors will be able to compete with Amazon” then that’s a good thing, no? Amazon is making a profit *not* because they are a monopolist in that description, but because they sell things cheaper than everybody else. We’re not worried about monopolists who gain advantages through cheaper prices, are we?

We are generally in agreement here that monopolists who are essentially taking advantage of lower prices are not a bad thing. But two caveats. Most importantly, the ease of entry into e-commerce markets is overrated. (Its significant that the example JW uses of someone competing with Amazon is Walmart, not a fledgling retailer.) First-mover advantage has not gone anywhere and indeed, thanks to viral effects, might have become even more pronounced; offline capital still counts in an online economy i.e., entry barriers are even lower for those with offline capital to spend. (This is most visibly seen in blogging.) Second, what might make Amazon’s practices problematic is what it might do to competitors in an effort to be able to offer the lower prices it does. These practices are what might attract anti-trust scrutiny. So it is not the end state only that matters but the damage done to markets before hand that will attract the FTC and Justice Department (if things ever get to that pass).

Then, Malcolm S. writes:

I think it is a little more complicated. Amazon is huge, but still small compared with their main competitor. Amazon isn’t going after the small retail stores, they are unintended collateral damage, Amazon is after Walmart. And Walmart still has roughly 7X Amazon’s revenues. That there is finally competition for Walmart seems good to me, but Amazon will have to remain very low margin to compete. We can start to wonder about Amazon gearing up for Monopoly when Walmart has been defeated, until then we are moving away from the pure monopsony that Walmart had become, where they were the only game in town if you wanted to sell product.

Malcolm’s point reinforces my response to Yglesias yesterday: Amazon is interesting in cornering the retail market and not interested in going after retail suppliers. Whether ‘even’ this is viable will depend a great deal on the race to the bottom that lies ahead for Walmart and Amazon. Consumers might do well as a result, but one fears for Walmart and Amazon employees: after all, the biggest savings are always made by cutting corners when it comes to labor. Someone remind me: are their employees unionized?

Matthew Yglesias Does Not Seem to Understand E-Commerce

Matthew Yglesias is skeptical of people who think e-commerce giant Amazon has a creepy, monopolistic plan to take over the world of retail. He quotes

Jay Goltz, ‘

proprietor of a small retail store’ as saying it is ‘impossible to make money competing with Amazon…because Amazon itself isn’t making money’:

Why would a company choose to operate without a profit? Because it wants to provide great value? Check. Because it wants everyone to love the brand? Check. Because it wants to gain market share? Check. Because it wants to put everyone else out of business, so that it can one day flick a switch to raise prices and make a fortune? CHECK!…Gaining market share by not taking a profit makes the most sense if you are planning to raise prices later when you have less competition.

Yglesias acknowledges this Amazon strategy is widely talked about, but still, he wonders:

But it’s hard to see how that plan would work. Part of the genius of the Internet is that it makes it much easier for brands to directly market their wares to people. It’s easy to see how Amazon might put K-Mart out of business, but the only way for them to put Samsung out of business would be to actually manufacture mobile phones and televisions. And if Amazon ever starts trying to charge outrageous markups on Samsung’s products, people would just buy directly from Samsung. Amazon would probably be more efficient at delivering things quickly, but then any price premium Amazon charges would be in effect an upcharge for fast delivery not a monopoly rent. And most of the time delivery speed just isn’t that big a deal.

My guess is that Amazon’s growth-first strategy really is exactly what it looks like—a strategy to pursue growth-first that shareholders tolerate because Jeff Bezos is executing it really well and he has a compelling vision. But “drive the competition out and then raise prices” is very much a meatspace business strategy. In a world where physical location doesn’t matter very much, it’s hard to see how you could pull it off. And even if you could pull it off, you’d still have to just assume that the Justice Department and the FTC would for some reason fail to enforce the anti-trust laws.

There are several problems with this optimism.

First, Yglesias is comparing apples and oranges. The threat from Amazon is not to primary manufacturers but to the retail business. Why would Amazon ever want to put those who manufacture the goods it retails out of business? Amazon’s primary value as a retailer selling everything under the sun is in making it unattractive to shop anywhere else. This does not mean customers will not buy elsewhere if the price is right; it is just that with economies of scale, very few competitors will be able to compete with Amazon. Monopolistic behavior is thus still available to those who practice e-commerce; physical location is irrelevant, here, yes, but not in the way that Yglesias imagines. It does not insulate against the acquisition of monopoly.

Second, suppose we grant Yglesias’ assumption that Amazon would need to hurt Samsung in order to live up to its supposed monopolistic threat. Amazon could still do so by providing a clearinghouse for Samsung competitors and marketing them aggressively, by making Samsung look less attractive (with aggressive markups), by monopolizing retail spaces and reducing Samsung’s distribution capabilities. It is not the case that the ‘only way’ Amazon could hurt Samsung is by manufacturing the same items that Samsung does.  That assertion shows a lack of understanding of Amazon’s capabilities, many made possible by its operational medium.

Lastly, I find Yglesias’ faith in the FTC and Justice Department quite touching.

Jonathan Baron’s ‘Against Bioethics’

I’ve been reading and discussing Jonathan Baron‘s Against Bioethics (MIT Press, 2006) this semester – with the Faculty Discussion Group at the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College. Roughly, Baron’s thesis is that utility-based decision-theoretic analysis would improve the quality and outcomes of decision making in the medical sphere, which is currently bogged down in a morass of poorly understood and specified deontological principles, biases and heuristics.

My disagreements with Baron are extensive, even as ironically, I agree with him that some kind of utilitarian decision analysis might often be useful in some domains of medical decision making. I often find myself experiencing what Baron would very likely dismiss as the ‘yuck factor’ – a cluster of heuristics and biases that make it so that I find certain courses of actions offensive or problematic, even when there appear to be apparently very good consequentialist or utilitarian arguments for them. I agree that the ‘yuck factor’ is often not a useful guide to action and can lead to problematic beliefs – such as homophobia for instance. Still, I wouldn’t know how else to characterize my opposition to organ sales (a topic on which I have written before, here, on this blog, where I worried about whether these would encourage the poorest to sell their organs at very low prices), or to using subjects in poor countries for drug trials.

Here, the objections are familiar: both practices are forms of exploitation; they capitalize on the weak–economic and otherwise–situation of those exploited under the guise of providing them a better life. The responses to these are familiar too; ultimately, what we get is the following:

From a utilitarian perspective, the behavior of the researchers…is still better than not doing the study at all or doing it in a rich country, but perhaps not as good as possible. [Or in the case of organ sales, we get better outcomes with organ markets than we do in a situation with no organ markets.]

If this argument–that the ostensible exploiters are making a bad situation better, not worse, by their ‘exploitative’ behavior–sounds familiar, it should. Because it is the same one used to excuse the use of sweatshops in places such as Bangladesh, which every once in a while kill hundreds of their workers. It should also be familiar because the dichotomy presented in it is an old one: either the exploitative action is taken, or the status quo of poverty–pernicious in all its forms–persists. Perhaps the disruption of the status quo is deadly, but that price comes out in the wash for we have better outcomes in the final reckoning, provided the correct option is chosen.

While the acceptance of the terms of the dichotomy is interesting what is perhaps even more so is the uncritical acceptance of, in the case of pharmaceutical industry, a very particular corporate axiom: if observing the boundaries noted by a particular ethical injunction is likely to effect profit margins adversely (note: not doing away with them entirely) then so much the worse for the ethical injunction.  The deployment of these arguments in the case of drug testing shows how well-entrenched this principle has become.

Rebuilding the Squat, One Set at a Time

Writing lifting reports can be extremely self-indulgent: look at me, I lift weight. But they can also be honest reckonings of weaknesses, failures, setbacks and all the other roadbumps that interfere with our smooth progress towards long-set goals. So I write ‘em; I haven’t done so too often out here but this year, I hope to rectify that.

So, here is the year’s first report. This time on the year’s squatting thus far. As is the case with most who take the squat seriously, it rapidly becomes the centerpiece of one’s lifting; no other lift’s ‘numbers’ matter quite as much; no other lift is tracked so extensively.

I feel especially inspired to write a brief note on my squatting because of having carried out what amounts to a successful reconstruction and rebuild of the lift this year.When the year began, I had lost some contact with a regular lifting schedule thanks to my new-born daughter’s arrival. I returned to squatting in mid-January and completed a cycle of squatting at Crossfit South Brooklyn, spread out over six weeks or so. I missed only a couple of sessions and slowly started to recover some strength, with my numbers creeping back up. I then began a second cycle and early in it, injured my back at the bottom of a squat. I was not squatting very close to a maximum; the week before I had squatted 240 pounds for sets across (three sets of five reps at the same weight), and on this occasion, I had been squatting 225. But the back felt bad and that was that. The next week, after resting, I tried again, and felt the soreness and stiffness again. No bueno.

It was time to deload. I set my work weight all the way back to 205, and recommenced my lifting sessions again. With a difference: this time I did sets of 5, 5, followed by a repout (i.e., as many reps as possible). This way, I hoped to continue to work on strength as well by adding a little volume to my lifts at a sub-maximal load. It worked; the following were my lifts over the next few weeks, leading up to today:

205: 5, 5, 10

210: 5, 5, 10

215: 5, 5, 12

220: 5, 5, 10

225: 5, 5, 10

230: 5, 5, 10

235: 5, 5, 10

240: 5, 5, 10

245: 5, 5, 11

250: 5, 5, 10

At this point, I began microloading in 2.5lb increments, as I was getting close to the maximum weight I have ever done for reps, 260 lbs):

252.5: 5, 5, 9

255: 5, 5, 10

257.5: 5, 5, 10

260: 5, 5, 9

Today, for the set above, I think I had the 10th rep but my back was getting sore and tired as I was waiting too long between reps to catch my breath. When I went down for the 10th, I collapsed at the bottom and couldn’ t stand back up. Still, nine was not bad at all. This session now counts as some kind of personal record for the last time I had squatted 260 lbs, I had done it for three sets of five reps.

These last few weeks of squatting then have been deeply satisfying: when I began them, I was injured, scared, and worried that I would not regain strength, and remain injured and out of action. But thanks to some judicious ego-swallowing and a patient, yet ambitious approach to recovery, I was able to lift my way back into some real strength gains.

Much hard work to be done over the summer (especially on squat technique), but for the time being, at least the squat is back in business.

Orin Kerr Thinks Executive Branch Searches of The Press Are a ‘Non-Story’

Orin Kerr suggests the story of the US Department of Justice seizing AP phone records isn’t one, wraps up with a flourish, hands out a few pokes at anti-government paranoia, and then asks a series of what he undoubtedly takes to be particularly incisive and penetrating questions:

Based on what we know so far, then, I don’t see much evidence of an abuse. Of course, I realize that some VC readers strongly believe that everything the government does is an abuse: All investigations are abuses unless there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt to the contrary. To not realize this is to be a pro-government lackey. Or even worse, Stewart Baker. But I would ask readers inclined to see this as an abuse to identify exactly what the government did wrong based on what we know so far. Was the DOJ wrong to investigate the case at all? If it was okay for them to investigate the case, was it wrong for them to try to find out who the AP reporters were calling? If it was okay for them to get records of who the AP reporters were calling, was it wrong for them to obtain the records from the personal and work phone numbers of all the reporters whose names were listed as being involved in the story and their editor? If it was okay for them to obtain the records of those phone lines, was the problem that the records covered two months — and if so, what was the proper length of time the records should have covered?

I get that many people will want to use this story as a generic “DOJ abuse” story and not look too closely at it. And I also understand that those who think leaks are good things will see investigations of leaks as inherently bad. But at least based on what we know so far, I don’t yet see a strong case that collecting these records was an abuse of the investigative process.

This summation and dismissal of the ‘non-story’ of a major news organization having its phone records seized by the legal wing of the executive branch is remarkable for its straightforward intention to treat the questions above as merely rhetorical: Of course, the DOJ is not ‘wrong’ to investigate aggressively, using all means at its disposal, whistleblowers providing information to the press. It should therefore seek to identify them relying on problematic doctrines of search and seizure of personal information provided to third-parties. These searches should be broad and extensive, casting as wide a net as possible.

In this conception of executive power, there is a visible asymmetry: the threat might be perceived dimly, but the response is clear and powerful, with few limits on its application.

For Kerr, therefore, it is a ‘non-story’ when a massive exertion of executive branch power is directed at a component of the polity vital to its information gathering and reporting functions, one of whose central functions has been exercising vigilance and oversight on that same power; it is a ‘non-story’ when exercises of executive power directed toward dubious ends such as prosecuting whistleblowers might result in an attenuated and impaired  domain of political discourse. This is of little concern to Kerr in his reckonings of whether legal propriety has been kept, of whether there has been an ‘abuse of the investigative process.’ But how could there be one, when the context of the ‘investigative process’ matters so little?

Constraints, Creativity, and Programming

Last year, in a post on Goethe and Nietzsche, which invoked the Freedom program (to cure Internet distraction), and which noted the role constraints played in artistic creation, I had referred obliquely to a chapter in my book Decoding Liberation, in which ‘Scott Dexter and I tried to develop a theory of aesthetics for software, a crucial role in which is played by the presence of technical constraints on programmers’ work.’

Today, I’d like to provide a brief excerpt from Chapter 3, ‘Free Software and the Aesthetics of Code’, pp. 90-91:

Understanding how a particularly ingenious piece of code confronts and subsequently masters constraints is crucial to understanding creativity and beauty in programming. Programmers have a deep sense of how their work is made more creative by the presence of the physical constraints of computing devices. Programmers who worked in the early era of computing struggled, in particular, to write code that would work in the tiny memory banks of the time — the onboard mission computer for the Apollo 11 project had a memory of 72 kilobytes, less than that found in today’s least-sophisticated cell phone. This struggle was reflected in the nature of the appreciation programmers accorded each other’s work. Steven Levy’s ethnography of the early programming culture, Hackers, describes the obsession with  ”bumming” instructions from code:

A certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. Because of the limited  memory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions. . . . [S]ometimes when you didn’t need speed or space much, and you weren’t thinking about art and beauty, you’d hack together an ugly program, attacking the problem with “brute force” methods. . . . [O]ne could recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or two, or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new algorithm which would save  a whole block of instructions. . . . [B]y approaching the problem from an off-beat angle that no one had thought of before but that in retrospect, made total sense. There was definitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could use this genius from Mars technique (Levy 1994).

These programmers experienced the relaxation of the constraint of system memory, brought on by advances in manufacturing techniques, as a loss of aesthetic pleasure. The relative abundance of storage and processing power has resulted in a new aesthetic category. One of the most damning aesthetic characterizations of software is “bloated,” that is, using many more instructions, and, hence, storage space, than necessary; laments about modern software often take the shape of complaints about its excessive memory consumption (Wirth 1995; Salkever 2003). Huge executables are disparaged as “bloatware,” not least because of the diminished ingenuity they reflect (Levy 1994). Judgments of elegant code reflect this concern with conciseness: “I worked with some great Forth hackers at the time, and it was truly amazing what could be accomplished with what today would be a laughingly tiny memory footprint” (Warsaw 1999).

The peculiar marriage of constraints, functionality, and aesthetic sensibility in source code highlights a parallel between programming and architecture. An awareness of gravity’s constraints is crucial in our aesthetic assessment of a building, as we assess its ability to master the weight of materials, to make different materials cohere. While striving to make the work visually pleasing, the architect is subject to the constraints of the requirements of the structure’s inhabitants, much as the programmer is subject to the constraints of design specifications, user requirements, and computing power.

Artists in other genres struggle similarly: creative artistic action is often a matter of finding local maxima of aesthetic value, subject to certain constraints (Gaut and Livingston 2003). These constraints may be imposed on the artist, as in censorship laws; they may be voluntarily assumed, as when a composer decides to write a piece in sonata form; or they may be invented by the artists themselves, as in Picasso and Braque’s invention of Cubism. Whatever the origin of the constraints, “creative action is governed by them,” and “artistically relevant goals,” such as the facilitation of   communication between artists and the public, are advanced by them (Elster 2000, 212). The connection between creativity and coping with constraints is explicit in programming: “It is possible to be creative in programming, and that deals with far more ill-defined questions, such as minimizing the amount of intermediate data required, or the amount of program storage, or the amount of execution time, and so on” (Mills 1983)….Thus, the act of programming, in its most creative moments, endeavors to meet constraints imposed by nature through the physicality of computation, by the users of the program and their desires for functionality and usability, and by the programming community through the development of shared standards.

The Slap of Love: A Mother’s Day Story

I should have 9511 stories about my mother. One for my every day of my life that she was alive. Today, I’ll recount just one of them.

As just-above-waist-high kids, my brother and I used the local park for our evening sports sessions. In the winters, this mean cricket; in the summers, soccer. Play ended when it became dark; in the winters, this dreaded time came earlier than it did in the summers, and because cricket was played with a dangerous hard ball, nightfall was not a barrier to be trifled with. Summers were a different matter; we were playing soccer and kicking and running around with our feet. We could, often would, play well into the dark, testing the boundaries of how long we could stay out without getting yelled at for being late for homework or dinner.

On one such summer evening, our soccer game ran late as usual. The streets around us brightened even as the park darkened and our game continued. Then, the ball was kicked to the sidelines and appeared to run out into the street adjoining the park. My brother sprinted after it, desperate to get it back into play so the game could resume. Unknown to him a strand of barbed wire was strewn across one of the breaks in the park’s wall. In the daytime, this was clearly visible, and those entering the park from that unofficial entrance had gingerly stepped around this bizarre barrier. (Perhaps placed there to stop animals from entering the park).

My brother ran into the that strand of wire at full tilt. As he did so, we saw him lifted off the ground and become entangled, heard him scream, and then, silence. We  ran over, extricated him from the wire, and stood him up. His shirt was torn, his skin was scratched at several points, and ominously, his face was streaked with blood. Horrified, wondering whether my brother had been blinded, I walked him–stoically silent–back to our home, where, terrifyingly, my parents awaited.

My mother’s face blanched as she saw my brother’s face. But she said nothing as she raced to the medicine cabinet and returning with cotton wool swabs, a mug of water, and some antiseptic solution, quickly got to work. She efficiently cleaned and wiped and medicated. And then, one of her swipes revealed that the blood on the face did not conceal a gouged out eye. My brother had not been blinded; he had gotten away with a cut above the eye.

At this point, my mother slapped my brother. It wasn’t a hard blow; but a stinger across the cheek, nonetheless. My brother, quietly undergoing the patchwork till then, stared back at my mother, astonished and hurt. What was that for?

Watching this little drama go down, I wasn’t puzzled at all. My mother must have been petrified when I had brought my brother home late, a bloody mess. She loved us, powerfully, a love that often racked her with deep fears that we might ever be hurt in any way. But she had suppressed every other reaction of hers in favor of immediately providing succor to him. With the most immediate wounds cleaned and shown to be non-threatening, her relief had combined with the anger she had felt at my brother for subjecting her to that terrible anxiety.  That slap followed. I felt sorry for my brother but I felt for my mother too. I knew why she had snapped. And slapped.

The Child’s Photographic Record and Personal Narratives

Like any doting first-time parents, my wife and I went a little photography-batty in the hours and days following our daughter’s birth. We had three cameras: two in phones, and one little Panasonic digital unit. We clicked away madly, recording every little change in expression, ever bodily movement that seemed significant. Those three cameras all allow the shooting of high-definition video, and so, we made little videos too. Every Sunday for my daughter’s first four weeks, I would faithfully transfer the week’s collection of photos and videos to an online repository. And of course, every once in a while, we would place a photo or two of her on Facebook and sit back, absurdly pleased at the adoring comments and oohs-and-aahs sent our way.

As the days went by the number of photos being shot decreased. Days go by and I do not take a single photograph of my baby girl. My wife is less lazy; her phone shows more recent photographs than mine. And I’ve started missing my Sunday dates with the uploader; its been five weeks since I last uploaded a batch of photos and videos.  But all said and done, given that our daughter is only twenty weeks old, there is still an impressive photographic corpus associated with her. And despite our slowing down in the photography department, under the right circumstances, my daughter still retains the ability to trigger a frenzy of clicking in us. A new expression, a new physical ability, a first-time encounter with a friend or family member; these can all do it.

So I wonder about the curious relationship she will bear to this extensive document of her first few years and about the difference that entails between her and those children who did not in the past, and still don’t in the present, possess such records of their pasts.  At the least, I would imagine my daughter’s sense of personal identification with her past selves would be interestingly different; not only will she possess partial memories of her older selves but she will be able to correlate those with photographs and videos. She will be able to see how she moved, sounded, talked, gurgled, crawled, walked, and of course, cried; she will have available, for careful and repeated inspection, a detailed record of many of her most distinctive behaviors. For those of us that grew up with few films or videos of our early days, they remain utter mysteries; we have dim memories of them, but they lack any more definition than that. Our perspectives on those formative times would obviously be interestingly different if they were supplemented by such detailed transcribings. Such records after all, do not just show us; they show those that we played with and were taken care by.

The stories we tell about ourselves have always suffered and benefited from our lack of access to days gone by; grandparents and parents pass away; memories fade; we move homes. But  we might acquire a radically different sense of identity and self construction as we grow up with such an elaborately recorded and archived past, one where our memories are propped up and made more vivid. Perhaps then, a wholly novel art of storytelling, of personal narrative construction will emerge.

The therapist’s couch could look interestingly different in the years to come.

Diego Marani, Europanto, Blinkenlights, and Hacker Neologisms

In reviewing Diego Marani‘s Las Adventures Des Inspector Cabillot, Matthew Reynolds notes his invention of  Europanto, a ‘mock international auxiliary language‘:

Marani’s ability to see humour in his longing for a universal language has flowered in his creation of Europanto, a jovial pan-European language which began in his office [presumably, either the  the Directorate-General for Interpretation of the European Commission, where Marani is currently employed or his previous office at the EU's Multilingualism Policy Unit] and spread to columns in Swiss and other newspapers, some of which have been collected in Las Adventures Des Inspector Cabillot. This book does not need to be translated: Europanto is ‘der jazz des linguas. Keine study necessite, just improviste, und du shal siempre fluent esse in diese most amusingamente lingua.’ Take a framework of English word order, varied with the occasional German inversion, and chuck in whatever vocabulary occurs to you French, German, Spanish, Italian, and occasionally Latin. Don’t worry too much about inflections. Europanto is more capacious than Miles Kingston’s Franglais, and less exacting than Esperanto.

As I read this passage in Reynold’s review, I was reminded of a sample of an older ‘international auxiliary language’, one rich with hacker’s neologisms, and one which produced many, many chuckles in me when I first encountered it in the machine room of the Computerized Conferencing and Communications Center in Newark, NJ, where I worked as a graduate research assistant from 1988 to 1990. I am referring, of course, to the famous ‘Blinkenlights‘:

If that ‘Gothic’ font is a little too hard to read, here is an easier version:

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!

Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mitten grabben.  Ist easy schnappen der springen werk,  blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken.  Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.  Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.

What is it that makes such languages so pleasurable (and funny)?

Well, in the case of Europanto, as Reynolds points out, there is a sense of freedom, of release from syntactical structures and constraints, a chance to relish one’s knowledge–even if rudimentary–of more than language:

There’s a coltish pleasure in encountering worlds like ‘nightcauchemare,’ alsyoubitte’ and ‘smilingante’, and phrases like ‘under der heat des settingante sun’. You do feel momentarily released from the ‘grammaticale rigor’ that immures us, and ready to celebrate ‘der liberatione des lingua van alles rules’

In the case of the ‘Achtung’ sign (which went ‘viral’ in its own way after it first made its appearance), there is something else at play. Besides its straightforward nod to old WWII humor and war comics featuring caricatures of the German military, it’s an inside joke with all the distinct pleasures of that genre; it let the computer-literate enjoy a little dig at those that were on the ‘outside’ and that often, perversely, seemed to mock our literacy as a sign of general social incompetence (was it really such a bad thing to be a computer nerd?). But best of all, even as it made up a new ‘non-language’, those in the know knew that it pointed to a world where the distinct language of the hacker, the geek, the nerd, was spoken.

Graham Greene on Happiness

In a post last year on the subject of happiness, I had cited Freud and Burke–the founders of psychoanalysis and political conservatism, respectively. Their views of happiness spoke of the seemingly necessarily transitory nature of the sensation we term happiness–Freud even enlists Goethe to help make this claim–that happiness was marked by brief, fleeting intensity, by its ‘novelty and contrast’.

Today, for a slightly different perspective, I’m going to enlist Graham Greene, a member of that class of humans with perhaps exceptional insight into the human condition, the novelist. Greene always was, in his autobiographical writing, very frank about his depression, psychoanalytic treatments, and the influence these had on his writing and in the case of psychoanalysis, his understanding of the supposed relationship of the unconscious to creativity; his views on happiness should be of interest here.

During the course of a series of interviews conducted by Marie Françoise-Allan, Greene, in speaking of his childhood says:

[H]appiness is repetitious, while pain is marked by crises that which sear the memory. Happiness survives only in the odd incident. Being happy is almost like making love: One attains a state of blissful ‘nothing’–one does not remember, one remembers only happiness, a state of contentment.

This is quite a mixed bag. First, happiness is described as ‘repetitious’–perhaps it is a mental state which recurs or is more temporally extended than pain, which is described in terms similar to the ones that Freud and Burke used to describe happiness. Here, Greene seems to suggest that happiness is a mental state with continuity, one which acquires its distinctive quality because of its ‘sameness’, its invariance. But then, happiness is described as surviving only in ‘the odd incident’, a return to the episodic state described by Freud and Burke. And lastly happiness is compared to the orgiastic pleasures of ‘making love’, a ‘blissful nothing’ which is perhaps supposed to be like the Buddhist nirvana, but with very few particular features to it, so much so that the subject remembers no details but just the sensation (or lack of it). Happiness is now analogized to a ‘petite mort‘ a little dying, a little flirtation with a state of nothingness. (It should be clear that in these descriptions Greene is taking the side of the philosophical inquiry into happiness that suggests it is a psychological term like ‘melancholia’ as opposed to that which would consider it a ‘value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing’ (Dan Haybron, Stanford Encyclopedia, ‘Happiness‘).)

This does not amount to very coherent view of happiness. Perhaps it is because of Greene is answering a series of questions about the happiness of childhood, and so his memories of that time have suffered the attrition of memory. Indeed, his interlocutor makes a great deal of this loss of memory in this session, remarking on how Greene’s childhood does not play a particularly prominent role in his autobiographies. And Greene’s quickness in ending his answer with a brief ‘We were happy’ also seems to suggest a desire to move on, almost as if the memories of that happiness were too painful to bear. So Greene might have unwittingly left us with at least one more possible facet of this ever elusive phenomenon: happiness might be that sensation, which when remembered later, produces a state distinctly unlike it, a mixture of regret, melancholia, and the fear that that sensation will not be experienced again.

Excerpt from: Marie Françoise-Allan, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.