Sitting in the Starbucks at O'Hare out on a business trip for the first time since my '01 trip to Germany. It seems amazing to consider, I used to travel a ton for a few years, and probably prior to '01 averaged 3 to 4 trips a year. Most of it is "corporate austerity"-in the age of management of all the numbers on a quarter by quarter basis for stock price, every dollar counts. I've been convinced a number of times that it also leads to the phenomenon of "penny wise and pound foolish". We often struggle along with e-mail and telecons when a face to face could really speed things up, but of course that leads to the other reason for less travel. The fact that we CAN travel less. We have the technology. It may not be the best choice, but it can be done. Technology always requires us to be more intentional in what we do-it allows us to do more things, but where and how we make use of it is up to us!
O'Hare hasn't really changed a lot in the 30 years that I've been passing through here from time to time on personal or business travel. The laptops, iPods and high quality coffee are new. The other thing that is new getting into the system of course, the security. Sometimes our system of government really does create the "worst of all worlds". We end up with a government employed, unionized, slow-motion, minimum service TSA cadre of people and EVERYONE has to "go through the system".
It is pretty amazing to see them taking the shoes from a very elderly lady in a wheelchair. The odds against a plane crash are high, but they are pretty much a "dead certainty" compared to the odds that she is a terrorist! Does constant exposure to that level of stupidity corrupt the mind so that the MSM and the "general view" make the common public sheep unable to think critically? It may; it also increases the chances falling into the relativism that would equate something relatively innocuous like "sex sells", or "3.99 seems less than $4.00 more so than it really is", with a complete perversion of logic AND human nature that says "profiling is bad".
From the materialist point of view, the ability to discriminate on predictive patterns is very close to a complete and optimal definition of intelligence! To assert that "discrimination" (profiling) is "wrong" is to subvert everything that we have determined about intelligence in the service of postmodern nihilism. Sadly, most of the sheep can't tell the difference between what IS required (better airport security), and what is NOT required (taking granny's shoes)! The discussion about what is in between can be long and contentious, but at least it would be a RATIONAL discussion, and those are a significant part of what it is to advance as opposed to decline as a civilization.
Since I broached the subject, our world is loaded with countless little idiosyncrasies that we may or may not notice because they are in general "human oriented". No matter how much any of us may believe that we are somehow more observant or more cognizant, or deeper analysts than our fellow man, we remain fully human with all the characteristics that entails. For example, humans are wired to notice sex, and human males are especially adept at picking out a female form from virtually any background. A man was on a news show while I was up fishing had his sight restored after 40 years of being blind. When someone asked him something that he would like to see in another interview, he had blurted out "a topless beach" - which Dianne Sawyer brought up much to the chagrin of his wife.
He was honest about something that our socialization trains us to not be honest about-and this is one origin of the error of Rousseau's and many liberals thinking. We ARE, certainly human, BUT, happiness doesn't result from deciding that all human whims are to be honored. Being blind through adolescence the blind guy no doubt missed out on a ton of socialization training related to bare breasts and thus fell prey to making an inappropriate public comment. Pretty easy to understand and forgive (although it didn't appear that it was quite so easy for his wife).
The socialization works, but the wiring is still there, so marketers take advantage of this.
Similarly, we are "bad with numbers"-- we relate to numeric "milestones" in irrational ways. We don't have as large a celebration for 49th or 51st birthdays than we do for 50, even though given the passage of a half century of time, a year of age is much less significant. We PERCEIVE 49 to be "40's" and because of it, think far differently of 49 vs 50 than we should from a purely numeric view. Likewise, we see "less than $4" as a boundary, even though $3.99 is a lot more trouble than just rounding it up to $4.
The "error" is taking something that "doesn't make logical sense" -- preferring a female form to frog, or seeing $3.99 as more significantly less than $4.00 than it is, and seeing that as "the same" as saying "no profiling". Recognition that we are human and have human thought and emotion patterns is VERY rational at a secondary level.
It is in fact TRUE, we ARE human. Once we know that we are "being taken advantage of" because of our nature, we can decide to be more wary, but in MANY contexts, we will still see "human oriented" as VERY good. It will make products easy to use, because they are "natural". When we think a product is well-designed, it is ALWAYS from the human perspective (the only one most of us have --although those that work with computers also have a pretty decent handle as to what makes sense to a computer, eg. powers of 2).
This discussion quickly moves back to the discussion of transcendence. If human nature is to be "the highest good", then our answers to life are going to be radically different than if we arrive at the view that reason, and potentially spiritual insights can be an IMPROVEMENT on human nature. The line between "rational transcendence" and "social truth" is however a key cleavage to be aware of. Deciding to not profile says that "society" can and should make judgements that are both "anti-human" (they short circuit one of our basic abilities, the ability to "improve our odds" through discerning and applying predictive patterns) and "anti-rational" in that they are simply illogical and ineffective.
Pricing something at $3.99 vs $4.00 is certainly not rational in a scientific or ease of use sense -- but it is very much oriented to how humans see numbers from a marketing view.
Taking the shoes off an old lady in a wheel chair is fundamentally against any human orientation as in "respect for elders", "treating those less fortunate with added deference", and simply that everyone watching at a fundamental human level knows this is foolish! It of course makes no rational sense either; it is ineffective, it wastes the time of all concerned. The only "value" is to the left-leaning elements of society that are able to impose their will in a way that is fundamentally nihilistic in nature. It signals us all that we are under their power and it teaches us to COMPLY.
"We prohibit you from doing what is rational and human in the name of our abhorrence of a natural human characteristic (like prefers like), that we have decided to negate. In the same breath, we choose to honor as supreme many other characteristics simply because they are human".
This is an answer that in the final analysis leads to a decision that "there is no objective truth; all truth is a social construct". This is the cutting edge in post-modernist relativistic thought. Rousseau was one of the seminal thinkers in this foolishness. They believe reality is a state constructed by the mind, not perceived by it, so everyone's "truth" has merit.
There have always been two kinds of thinkers; one sees disorder and tries to create order, one sees order and seeks to create disorder. The nice thing is that the last 300 years especially have shown us that in the end "order always wins", BUT, since we are still human, the "order" has to be put into a "good story" (narrative, "myth"), or we won't be able to really understand it as humans. We are also prone to see order where it isn't and to falsely correlate things that are similar but different, and of course we are very capable of just being wrong.
All that comes with the limitations of our nature, BUT, when we expose ourselves in explicit mass to irrationality, I suspect that the overall effect on the population is quite corrosive.
