Transparent Eye

The photographer who took the iconic photo of Barack Obama reused by Shepard Fairey in his poster also has another famous image to his credit

Mr. Garcia has taken at least one other influential image of a president while working as a wire-service photographer. Only months before photographing Mr. Obama, he was with George W. Bush on Air Force One for Reuters, as Mr. Bush stared out at the wreckage caused by Hurricane Katrina, his face lighted by the window’s glow.

That photograph was instantly criticized by some as being propaganda, Mr. Garcia recalled in an interview, because it seemed to depict a president in control and concerned by the post-Katrina suffering. Yet a year later, the same photograph was considered emblematic of exactly the opposite: a president out of touch and unmoved by the people’s suffering — Mr. Bush was looking down on New Orleans, rather than stopping personally to inspect.

Photographs like that one of Mr. Bush, Mr. Sante said, remind him of the photographer as a “highly trained archer, shooting too fast for thought, reliant on instinct and habit to guide him to the bull’s-eye while the target shifts continually.”

Instinct and habit in this case are employing implicit learning, are governed by subcortical structures like the basal ganglia, rather than prefrontal regions invovled in complex thought. Yet consider this:

James Danziger, whose gallery is selling the Obama print, including one to the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, led the effort to discover the original photograph that Mr. Fairey used. Mr. Danziger said that he was not afraid to use the word “art” to describe what Mr. Garcia had created.

“There isn’t a random, automaton quality or motivation to what he does,” said Mr. Danziger, who has held various editorial positions at The Times of London and Vanity Fair magazine, and who now runs the gallery. “The difference between snapshooter and professional photographer is that there are hundreds of decisions to make.”

“The tightness of the framing, the angle and expression that he caught, the decision to have Obama’s face sharp and the American flag out of focus are major decisions,” he continued, “and the greatest test of the effectiveness of the photograph is the response that the photograph gets.”

The use of the word “decision” here is misleading. Garcia took 1000 photos the day of the Obama photo, and this one came out. He relied on his trained intuition. He did not compose this one particular shot, but it is certainly the case that all the decisions he made all along the way of his career contributed to getting this one right.

I highly recommend The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer, the horrifying true story of White Russian calvaryman who became master of Mongolia in 1921, and led a half-Buddhist army on a murderous rampage.

Baron Ungern-Sternberg was a ethnic German who grew up in Estonia, then part of Tsarist Russia. He became a cavalryman in a Cossack unit in the far east of Siberia, leading troops that included a significant number of Buriat Mongols who were subject of the Tsar. A staunch monarchist, after the Bosheviks took power in 1917, Ungern-Sternberg became a leader of the White (anti-Red Army) forces in Siberia. By 1920, the White cause had collapsed, and Ungern-Sternberg led his troops across the border to Outer Mongolia, which had historically been a dependency of China, and only declared its independence in 1911.

Taking over Mongolia with a force of several thousand men, Ungern-Sternberg ordered executions willy-nilly, including the extermination of all Jews in Mongolia (amounting to a couple hundred emigres from Russia). His medical staff killed hard-to-treat patients, and he killed children along with their parents, to prevent them from growing up with revenge on their mind. In 1921, the Bolsheviks, concerned about Mongolia serving as a base for counterrevolution, sent a force to meet Ungern-Sternberg, defeated him in battle and executed him.

While Ungern-Sternberg fought for Russia, he anticipated the Nazis in his genocidal anti-Semitism and in his interest in eastern religion. His near-contemporary, Alfred Rosenberg, was also an ethnic German from Estonia who fled to Germany after the Bolshevik Revolution, joined the Nazi Party, rose to become the Nazi’s chief idealogue, and was executed by the Allies at Nuremberg. The Berzin Archives has information about Nazi interest in Tibet.

The Buddhists of Mongolia practiced a form of Tibetan Buddhism that was by no means pacifist. What seems to have been the case is that Buddhism was grafted on the Mongol’s prex-existing warlike beliefs and did not replace or eliminate them(like the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism in Japan). These included hideous gods of war who needed to be propitiated. Ungern-Sternberg’s dictatorship received support not only from local Buddhist leaders like the Bogd Khan, but from the 13th Dalai Lama, who sent Tibetan troops to fight alongside him.

Ironically, Ungern-Sternberg may be responsible for Mongolia’s continued independence. If not for him, the Soviets would not have invaded and made it a satellite nation until 1990, when it overthrew communism and began to chart its own course. Inner Mongolia, the part within China, has been heavily settled by ethnic Chinese, so that Mongols are now a minority. This is likely to be the fate of Tibet, which unlike Outer Mongolia has been absorbed into China.

Disturbing story that the formerly secular Israeli army is being increasingly influenced by Jewish holy warriors.

A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

Update: More on the story from the Forward.

The Humanist Contemplative has some thoughts comparing Buddhist and Stoic practices.

Unlike the stoic model, in which we work to adjust our perceptions of ‘harm’ such that the negative passion never even arises, Buddhist mindfulness takes place after and during the arising of the passion. Through mindfulness, we seek to stay aware of our passion as it arises, as though we were a third-person witness. Here we are able to both acknowledge and distance ourselves from the passion and thereby allow it to come and pass, without falling prey to it or mindlessly going along with it as a chemical-driven robot.

From what I know of neuroscience, I am skeptical that negative passions could ever be suppressed outright before first going through a process of perceiving them and making a choice about them. When we experience a conflict with our goals, there is activation in our limbic system. If the negativity is novel, something we’ve never experienced before, I’m pretty sure you are going to get activation in the amygdala and cingulate cortex regions. This brings the negativity to consciousness. Then, the prefrontal regions have an opportunity to make a choice about the arising passion.

In mindfulness, the choice is to accept the negativity, to befriend it, which has the paradoxical affect of muting it, making it less alarming. I’m not sure what the Stoic practice would be.

Once such a choice has been made, and in particular, if similar choices are made repeatedly, the reaction may become habitual. Habits work through the basal ganglia below the level of consciousness. When a reaction to a situation becomes habitual, it is possible that negative passions no longer arise and no longer need to be handled mindfully.

As an example, let’s say you are an evangelist for some idea you believe is important. You are going to experience a lot of rejection. At first, when people reject your ideas or even insult you, if you are the average person, you are going to feel a sense of alarm and suffering. Over time, you may learn not to react to the negativity thrown at you. Eventually, you may fully expect it and react to it without any fear or sense of suffering.

Later in the post, the Humanist Contemplative posits that Stoicism has a better practice for long-term matters. I’m not familiar enough with Stoicism to evaluate it’s method of dealing with these long-term issues, but I do think that Buddhism certainly has its eyes on the long-term in its attempt to deal with dukkha, that is, suffering.

From what I know, I see Buddhism and Stoicism as being quite similar, with the exception that Buddhists tend to be pacifist, and withdrawing from the world, while ancient Stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were very engaged in the world, and modern Stoicism seems to be very appealing to the military.

Update: From the same blog, an older post containing a dialog comparing and contrasting Buddhism & Stocisim. I too have found Theravadin practice (i.e. Insight Meditation in the U.S.) to be most compatible with a humanist orientation.

Since planning thoughts are something that are quieted by meditation, perhaps this chimp could gain greater equanimity by focusing on the present

A canny chimpanzee who calmly collected a stash of rocks and then hurled them at zoo visitors in fits of rage has confirmed that apes can plan ahead just like humans, a Swedish study said Monday. Santino the chimpanzee’s anti-social behavior stunned both visitors and keepers at the Furuvik Zoo but fascinated researchers because it was so carefully prepared.

It does strike me that meditation can turns off the rational parts of the brain that are (almost) uniquely human. In fact, when my inner stream of dialogue is silent, I feel more visualy attuned, as I imagine animals that lack language generally are. I assume this chimp was able to plan using his “mind’s eye” to visualize the future as, lacking language, he would not have been planning using inner speech.

New England is not quite turning into Europe, but its moving in that direction.

Quantitative models produce a false sense of precision and safety.

Tom Friedman is thinking that global development is a bubble that can’t be sustained environmentally, and our current crisis is an opportunity to make a major change in direction.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

The recent failure of economic experts also casts into doubt their broader idea that we can continue to grow using non-renewable resources because new technological developments will outpace environmental losses. That has been true for a century, but there is no guarantee it will go on forever.

It takes away her edginess, she says. The multitude of comments are very interesting. Clearly, mindfulness is going through a fad stage and as such, gets distorted. But yes, it may take the edge off people. Not good for a writer, perhaps, but in this world, I think we’re more at risk from the harm we do to each other in words and action than the hypothetical danger of boring each other to death.