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James Green-Armytage Notebook writings and Essays
Goals and Policies, summer 2006 This is an attempt to better organize and express my thoughts about the political-economic goals that I am most interested in, and some policies that might help to achieve these goals. This is a very rough first draft, and constructive criticism and other feedback are most welcome.
Notebook writings, 1994-2004: This is a large amount of text excerpted from my journals in high school and college, originally for the purpose of my senior project. It is awkwardly broken up into the categories "philosophy", "psychology", and "politics" Note: there is an painfully detailed explanation further down the page, which was cut from my senior project's introduction.
There is a lot, a lot of stuff here. It looks like the way I broke down the categories, this is the vast majority of my notebook writing. It's pretty long, but I've indexed it in a user-friendly way so that you can skip about. I guess this is like my personal philosophical journey from age 14 to age 23. It's embarrassing, but at the same time, I think I want people to read it. I guess I'm still hoping that someone will find it interesting, at some point. I edited this page a bit in July 2006, cutting about one quarter of the material. This is the shortest section. It's not even 4 pages... and, it's sort of random. Maybe I shouldn't have split them up like this. Oh well. Perhaps this is the most embarrassing of the three. Looks like a little over ten pages, and it's all rather weird and primitive. It serves as a record of my political development to some extent, but that's probably a boring topic for anyone besides me. If you want something fairly coherent and relevant, I hope that you'll have a look at my goals and policies page instead.
Essays and semi-essays:
Summary diagram of economic/political ideas, December 2005 This is a sort of graphical summary of political/economic ideas. I'm sure that it looks a bit wacky, what with all the arrows and different colors. In case anyone is wondering, the issues in red are ones that I still feel that I don't understand very well, the issues in green are ones that I feel fairly sure about and would be comfortable implementing in the near future. The blue ones are somewhere in the middle.
Statement of Purpose, December 2004 The prototype statement of purpose written for admission into economics graduate programs. In many ways, this is the "political ideas" brought up to date. Anyway, I likes it.
Two philosophical letters: June-August 2004 Not too much here, actually. Basically a couple letters espousing a kind of organic, existentialist brand of utilitarianism, and defending them against nihilistic skepticism.
Epistemology Paper, April 2003 My last paper for epistemology class, during my senior year at college. Less fragmentary and perhaps more reader-friendly than most of the other essays, it attempts to lay out a well-balanced epistemological position.
Political Ideas, spring 2001 Basically just a bullet-point list of political and economic policies which I supported at the time. Some of the ideas are more original than others.
Tassajara Journal, summer 2000 I spent the summer of 2000 at a Soto zen monastery in the Los Padres mountains of California. These were my thoughts at the time, which were heavily influenced by the American version of zen Buddhism.
Existentialism Paper, April 2000 My last paper for existentialism class, in my second term at college. Basically journal excerpts arranged into thematic categories. Very passionate writing.
Metaphysics Paper, December 1999 My last paper for metaphysics class, in my first term at college. Extremely condensed writing style. Four sections entitled mind, experience, life, and freedom.
College Admissions Essay, January 1999 Intended to be a complete statement of my philosophy up to the time it was written, at age 18 in the middle of my year off after high school. I put a lot of effort and care into this essay.
An explanation of all this weirdness:
For my senior project in college, I put a lot of my old journal writings in electronic form, and gathered them together with other writings that were already in electronic form. I also wrote the initial version of the voting methods survey, along with a few shorter voting methods pieces. The project was completed in December 2003, and thus it formed the basis for this web site, which was launched in April of 2004, after I finished my internship at Berkeley Community Media. Since then, I've developed the site on and off, sometimes spending big chunks of time on it when I had time to spare. (The voting methods section was the main focus of development in 2004 and 2005.) So, hopefully that explains why I have such an obsessive amount of writing on this site: the senior project got me most of the way there. Here's the introduction to my senior project, which gives some more background about the material on this "notebooks and essays":
Since I was about 14, I have filled a series of notebooks with
writing (as well as some doodling). In these books I have written down
dreams, events, experiences, and thoughts.
In these pages, I am generally not
including journal-type writings, that is writings describing specific
events in my life. Instead, I am trying to stick to more general
thoughts on subjects like philosophy, psychology, politics, and
economics. However, the writing is clearly personal, in that it reflects
my state of mind at the time it was written.
I am generally presenting these
writings in chronological order, within the three categories
"philosophy", "psychology", and
"politics". The notebook writings are divided into
sections by time period, and in many cases the writings within those
sections are also presented in roughly chronological order.
The writings in these notebooks vary
in length. Often they are fragmentary, and only represent a single
thought which is expressed in a sentence or a paragraph. Sometimes
longer trains of thought emerge.
I also include a few of the longer
pieces that I have written on similar themes. In some cases
these are themselves compilations of fragmentary writings rather than
linear essays, so the format is basically the same as the notebook
material, except for the fact that the fragments have been grouped by
subject.
I think that the fragmentary nature
of this writing makes it both harder and easier to read. I think that
all of this would be essentially impossible to sit down and read straight through. But it is
relatively easy just to read one or two fragments by themselves, since
they tend not to require that you have followed a train of thought up to
that point. In this way, the writing style accommodates people with a
short attention span or who don’t have the energy to follow an
extended logical progression.
One of the interesting things to me
about this collection is its long time span. Things that I have written
several years ago and include here are not necessarily things that I
still agree with, or feel as strongly about now as I did then.
So although it is not an account of
events in my life, there is a sort of narrative, autobiographical aspect
to it, in terms of the changing trends of thought, beliefs, emotions,
values. I hope that some of these gradual changes might come through to
the reader. In that way, the writing is not entirely self-conscious in
that the narrative it forms as a whole is somewhat beyond my particular
awareness when I wrote any of the fragments individually. So, I urge the
reader to look at this not as a manifesto detailing my beliefs on
various subjects, but as a sort of story, one that incorporates change
and self-contradiction.
The chronological ordering of this
writing comes at the expense of my ability to divide it into categories,
and attempt to treat one subject at a time. I generally skip from one
subject to another without much warning, and there are some thoughts
which are repeated a few times over within these pages. Although I am
working to decrease redundancies, it is somewhat difficult. In some
cases I express a similar idea in different sections, sometimes years
apart, yet I express it somewhat differently, in a different context.
So there is something of a
spiraling, restless quality to this collection which again makes it more
like a story than a statement of my beliefs. Actually, one of my main
goals in making this collection is to get more of an overhead view on my
own thoughts. In a way I would like to remember things that I have
forgotten, boil away the redundancies and the things I no longer agree
with until the thoughts which seem to be of further value stand out more
clearly in my conscious mind. This is something of an ongoing goal,
though.
Since there is no biographical
information in the text itself, I should just briefly outline where I
was at these different times. I was born on March 26, 1980. So, if
something says 1999 on it, then you know I was 18 or 19, and so on. (I would
be a little embarrassed if someone thought I had written something in my
twenties that I actually wrote as a teenager.) My family had two
residences in New York City and Woodstock, New York, but I mostly grew
up in the city, and I went to school there, at Hunter College Elementary
School, and later on Hunter College High School. I graduated from high
school in June 1998. I took a year off from school and stayed in the
city, working at bookstores and living in Washington Heights. I started
college in September of 1999, at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs,
Ohio. I was there for all trimesters up until the end of 2003, except the following: In the summer of 2000 I lived and worked at
a zen monastery in the mountains of California. In the spring of 2001 I
lived in Charleston, South Carolina with a girlfriend. In the fall of
2001 I went on a study abroad program to India (and also visited Nepal
and Australia). In the summer of 2002 I had an internship in the East
village of Manhattan and got an apartment with a friend in Brooklyn. In
the summer of 2003 I had an internship with an alternative voting
systems advocacy nonprofit on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.
I should also explain a couple of
symbols that I use in all the writings from notebooks and scraps of
paper. A number sign # indicates that the next thought comes from a
totally different page from the previous thought. I don’t use this
sign if I am continuing the same train of thought on another page;
rather I use it when it is both a new page and a new train of thought. A
slash sign / separates two separate trains of thought which are
nevertheless on the same page. So, both signs indicate a subject break,
but a number sign # indicates both a subject break and a page break.
I believe that all of the footnotes
in this section represent commentary made some years later than the text
was written. Most of the footnotes were written in the last few months.
Sometimes I use the footnotes to explain the circumstances under which
the pieces were written. Sometimes I use them to contradict, complicate,
or otherwise comment on an idea in the text. So in general, the text is
written by my more distant past selves, and the footnotes are written by
my more recent past selves. More recently, I divided the notebook writings arbitrarily into three categories: philosophy, psychology, and politics. Also, I have kept some of the essays and semi-essays as separate documents, to make them easier to keep track of.
questions or comments? my e-mail address is jarmyta(at)antioch-college.edu |
