Men Named Douglas

I think I've learned more in my life from books by men named Douglas than I have from anything else. The first of these men is the late Douglas Adams. Of course, many have read and enjoyed his books because of his witty humor, clever science fiction, and his chaotic plots. I, too, of course, loved these aspects of the books, but there was something else--numerous hints that revealed Adams' personal views and made subtle commentaries on society. It should probably be here stated if it was not already obvious that there will, in fact, be spoilers in the text ahead. There were, of course, the more direct statements, talking about how we are but overconfident apes too fond of digital watches to notice the alien race about to destroy our planet, probably because we were the descendants of the telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, and other more useless professionals of some alien race, and despite our pride, our entire planet with everything we know was reduced by some observant aliens in an entry in the most important book in the galaxy (and, indeed, the titular object of the first book) to two words: "Mostly harmless" (the title of another book). My favorite part, however, was how the villains of the series weren't classic story villains--those evil wizards and unseen murderers described in the first entry of this blog. The villains were the Vogons, who were so thoroughly bureaucratic that they would apparently not even bother saving their own grandmothers unless the proper papers were previously filed. Indeed, in our society, attempts to improve things have led to thorough over-legislation to keep society regulated, and in the end constant evils are perpetrated by those under the protection of this bureaucracy. Instead of learning morality and ethics, we learn law, and instead of doing what is right for the sake of doing what is right, many of us obey only the letter of the law, seeking loopholes for frivolous lawsuits or selfish pursuits, with employers exploiting employees, businesses exploiting customers, and politicians and police proving no better than the rest of us. And the poetry of the Vogons is amongst the worst in the galaxy, and if the rest of the parallels between their society and ours are any indication, this is likely due to the creative bankruptcy that underlies it. Moreover, in the Hitchhiker's Guide, the president of the galaxy is given no power, in that, as Adams explains, anyone capable of achieving such a position should by no means be allowed to wield it. Subsequently, this president is merely a celebrity to distract people from what actually goes on in government and society, for people to celebrate in good times and blame in bad. I feel here that I should apologize at this point for drawing so much apparent bitterness from the fantastically comical works of Douglas Adams, and I only wish I could express my dissatisfaction with mankind in as lighthearted a way as he did. In contrast to the mood of my previous paragraphs, it also amused me to learn later in life that objects have been shown to be able to exist in multiple places in once in certain circumstances, first, if I recall correctly, demonstrated with photons but in later experiments it was found that molecules as large as Bucky balls (composed of 60 carbon atoms) could pass through both slits in a duel-slit experiment at once. The first thing learning this made me think of was the infinite improbability drive, and that the works of Douglas Adams were more scientifically accurate in some senses than I would have ever guessed. I also was incredibly fond of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the plot of which was partially adapted from an unpublished episode of Doctor Who, but also I particularly enjoyed how it described the works of J. S. Bach as being not the work of a man, but the music at the heart of the universe and the laws of physics themselves, which, to me, is a remarkably plausible statement. I've often found that the works of Bach parallel certain mathematical constructs in both their beauty and complexity. And here the spoilers will cease, because so will the discussion of fiction, for the complexity of Bach was one of the many subjects discussed in my favorite book by another man named Douglas: Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I had long been a fan of two of the three men in that title when I bought the book, having yet to have encountered anything about Kurt Gödel at that point in my life.
I didn't know exactly what to expect from the book when I bought it.  I only knew that my favorite artist and favorite composer were listed in the title (if I could have chosen a third person myself to group with those two at that point in my life, the logical extension to me would've been my favorite author, Douglas Adams).  As I read the book, it danced across all sorts of ideas, from fractals to fugues, from tessellations to tortoises, genetics, particle physics, Zen Buddhism, and many, many other ideas, often illustrated by logic games and wordplay so that the ideas of the book transcended levels of the text in the way it described epiphenomena transcending their levels of patterns, until, in the end, it made the very mechanisms of consciousness and self awareness seem within reach, being as simple as sentences that describe themselves.
Much of what I discussed in my previous entries has been inspired if not entirely learned from that particular work by Douglas Hofstadter, although his work was essentially entirely free of social commentary.  My interpretations of the strength in numbers of good people, or the epiphenomena of society, verc., have come from elsewhere in my life, but got their start while reading that book.
The ideas of Zen Buddhism expressed in the book in particular suggest an abandonment of egocentricity or a strict perception of self.  Moreover, it suggests that to limit any particular object into a description entirely unto itself is inaccurate, in that everything interacts with everything around it to the point that most borders we dictate in life are arbitrary, but I believe discussion on that particular interpretation is best saved for another time.
It did parallel, however, one of my earliest rants on the flaws of society started out as a complaint to my companion at the time about the various non-engineering elective classes I had to take.  In particular I was bothered by the fact that they all seemed to be tedious history classes with focuses on outdated experts of particular disciplines instead of anything of actual use.  Eventually, though, the conversation took a turn towards the drive people seem to have to unnecessarily categorize things--in particular I was discussing the Psychology 101 class I was taking at the time, about how I didn't feel the categorization of the various psychological phenomena from mental pathologies to stages of development seemed to strictly reflect my experiences as an actual person, whether with regard specifically to myself or what I had observed in other people.
I never liked the phrase, "thinking outside the box".  A lot of things are in the box for good reason.  Other things that should be in the box aren't.  The problem, I found, was the box itself.  We needn't classify things as in or out of the box, but instead take each thing on its own merits when we consider it.  I can understand why we might want to summarize or generalize things that aren't of importance for cognitive efficiency, but when this same approach gets applied to human intelligence and interaction, society, politics, economics, etc., it does more harm than good, and we end up resembling the Vogons, overwhelmed with legislation and bureaucracy.
It was from this conversation I fully realized that education was constructed to parallel the chronology of our discoveries, starting with what we new earliest and building historically, instead of reflecting our current knowledge of the subject as a whole and building from a more intelligent core curriculum.
And so our education is built on memorization instead of reasoning, and we learn to ask "what?" instead of "why?" or "how?".  Our math is memorization of tedious laws and tables instead of the reasoning behind them or the wondrous implications they have for the world (for more of which, check out the works of Vi Hart, who has videos around the interwebs, and who reminds me of a younger, more attractive, female Douglas Hofstadter in the genius ways she connects ideas together).  Our language classes involve memorizing spelling instead of learning the history of words and how they relate to past languages and how all the weird formations of letters have reasons we've all but lost to time, and they involve memorizing grammar laws more based in Latin than our own language because some academics long ago decided that Latin was the language to be like, even if the laws have no meaning in the context of our own language.  Our science classes, even ignoring all their inaccuracies and outdated theories, still fail to cover a number of topics relevant to modern science, such as basic computer logic or electricity, when Ohm's law can be learned by anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics and algebra.
And in our psychology classes we could be teaching about the "lost in the mall" effect, which describes how memories can be falsified, or the Dunning-Kruger effect which is a sort of selfward confirmation bias.  Yet instead we study Freud, whose work may have inspired psychoanalysis (although if he is like other popular historical scientific figures I have looked into, viz. Thomas Edison, I would not be surprised if he gets more credit than he is due for even this), but whose theories have otherwise largely been dismissed.  And yet we do not explore the developments that lead to the dismissal of Freud, or even why we believed what we did.  We simply studied what he did, accurate or not, and moved on.
As one final tie between these men named Douglas, it seems that Gödel's incompleteness theorem which points out the paradoxes that inherently arise from any sufficiently complex system seems to almost directly reflect the inadequacies of our overly complicated and overly formalized government, where legislation and bureaucracy replace reasoning, much in the same way that we've replaced reasoning in our education system with memorization and formalization.  And I am left to wonder, is it the pre-existing mindset of this over-classification and over-formalization that led to the construction of our education around such mechanisms, or did our education system, existing as such, simply drive these ideas into those who later shaped our modern government?  Is there a beginning to this chicken-egg scenario (or, my favorite parallel, taken from Douglas Hofstadter: this ribosome-DNA scenario), or is it simply a feedback loop reminiscient of the kind discussed by Douglas Hofstadter?  Do the Vogons choose to teach younger Vogons to be like they are, or are they just incapable of seeing any deviation from their path?