Honouring the Particular
Been thinking lately about industrialism and the erosion of the particular, the enthronement of the generic.
The train of thought is a familiar one but it took on new definition when I was working on the battens for the new sails for my junk-rigged boat (also my home). The boat is steel but the battens are wood. The story of this wood and how it was worked illuminates some strong contrasts between the industrial worldview and what I can only call “reality.”
First, it was hard to find good wood… because all the really good timber has been cut by now: what is coming out of the tree plantations euphemistically called “managed forests” is not timber, but fibre; some of the wood-products companies are honest and call it that. So for a start, to seek decent ship-building timber is to come face to face with the devastation of the forests of the Northwest, a realisation that we are poor now, poorer than people on this same coast in 1950, radically poorer than people on this same coast in 1900. If we had to build ships out of wood today, we couldn’t build anything of a size and utility that used to be quite ordinary. So that’s sobering in and of itself.
But through local contacts I managed to find some grade-B spruce (in the form of a 14×14″ cant 20 feet long). I went to the sawmill and inspected the cant and picked which half of it I liked best (it’s a guessing game, trying to intuit which way the knots run and which half of the cant will be more clear than the other): I drew on the cant end with a marking pen showing where to rip it. Also bought some old hard doug fir that had been left outside too long and (when cut) turned out to be rotten with a fungus called “conk”, or “conky” in local parlance. The sawmill operator did not ask payment for the bad wood; he accepted the risk of a bad sale. The bad wood became firewood. Not much gets wasted around here.
I bought other spruce from a friend who has a small business making oars and paddles. It came in 2×4-like lengths (but full dimension, not Home Depot). It was mostly clear, but a few pieces had knots. It came from different sections of a tree, and from different trees: heartwood varied in density, rings varied in spacing. Some lengths were notably heavier (stronger, denser) than others. In other words, every single piece of wood was individual, unique. I spent a lot of time staring at it and thinking about where best to use each piece: stronger pieces should be used for battens aloft, because those would be exposed when reefed for heavy conditions. Lighter pieces could be used alow (lower down), because they would only be exposed in light air. Each batten would be made of two halves bolted together; the two halves would have to be matched, then.
Some battens were so long that they needed to be “spliced” (woodworkers call this “scarphed”) with a long diagonal glue joint. So each half would have a glue joint in it and be made of two pieces, and those two pieces should be well matched in density and grain. And the pieces should be cut from the original lumber so as to avoid knots and “swirls” in the grain as much as possible.
There was a point where I was surrounded by lengths of spruce, carefully writing numbers on them with pencils and permie-markers, trying not to get confused, trying to figure out whether I had enough good wood for the project… and I thought, “Gee, if I had just used aluminium extruded box-beam, I wouldn’t have to do any of this thinking.”
Because every length of extruded box beam you buy from an aluminium foundry is — failing an industrial accident or QC error — identical. That’s what industrialism promises, that’s what it delivers (with remarkable success too): every unit produced is the same, to within very stringent tolerances, as every other unit. You can count on it! Every length of box beam, every iPod, every McDonald’s cheeseburger, every Toyota Celica, every cowling for a Boeing jet engine of a certain model, every Ticonderoga pencil, every Postit-note… we are surrounded now by what I have just named the warholistic universe, a universe which consists of the identical replication of fabricated objects. You can trust them. They are all the same. You don’t need to think.
Every one of my pieces of wood was an individual. I saw them a lot of times: during selection, during grading and matching (I weighed them in my hands, sorting by density; I examined them for grain, admiring the fine ribbon grain of the best pieces — so beautiful you almost wanted to save it for panelling or cabinetry); during gluing and clamping and routing and sanding and endless coats of sealers (Cetol and Brightside, two excellent marine paints that are made to very stringent tolerances, so that every can is exactly the same; you can trust them, you don’t have to think; but you do have to work hard with a brush for a while). I joked with someone in the yard that I could almost give them all nicknames, I knew them so well. They were not generic. They were particular.
This particularity is the focus of very mixed feelings of gain and loss. The warholistic world offers us a kind of reassurance, so dear to us grabby primates: the other ape’s iPod is just the same as yours. You need not worry that they picked the better one, you need not pick over the bin to choose the best. Every iPod of a given model is the exact twin of every other iPod of that model, and this is quite relaxing — you know just what you’re getting and need not glance suspiciously at the other ape’s papaya to see if it’s bigger and juicier 
We feel comfortable and secure in a reliable universe, where things work predictably, where a Starbucks Cafe Americano tastes the same even when we’re travelling in a strange city. If I buy a wrench from a tool shop, which claims to be a 7/8 inch box end, I can trust that this wrench will in fact fit the hex-shaped heads of perfectly identical cap screws bought in a 7/8 cap size. If it doesn’t, I get my money back: everyone’s expectation is that standards will be honoured and identicality will be guaranteed.
This is in some ways a good thing.
And yet… many people name their cars. Almost everyone names their boats, even production sailboats whose manufacturers are trying hard to reach the iPod standard (a Catalina 27 is a Catalina 27 is a Catalina 27…); a huge aftermarket exists in products to “personalise” (particularise) your iPod, cell phone, car, luggage, and other Taylorised products. There is something we miss about the particular.
Sometimes the assembly line hiccups. Human error creeps in; machine failure does occur from time to time. When this happens to some items in the warholistic world, like a printer’s error in a batch of stamps, it adds to their value: that one print run becomes magically individual, particular, exceptional, collectible. Its very particularity becomes desirable, rare, inspiring covetousness: it gives people a thrill to own one of the stamps with the image upside down or the colours backwards. Rarity is always associated with value, but I suspect there is more to it: I think we are also attracted to the moment of individuation of what is expected to be identical.
The denial of individuation begins to be troublesome when it reaches into the biotic realm. Our expectations have been moulded by the factory system; in the warholistic world, an apple is an apple is an apple, and our agriculture is increasingly oriented to the production of standardised product. A bin full of apples should be blemish-free, no apple better or worse, larger or smaller, than any other apple, all the same shape and colour — just like a bin of iPods. For many shoppers, this is now a baseline assumption: they don’t pick over produce any more, just grab however many generic tomatoes (or whatever) are desired and plop them in a generic bag.
In reality, however, the biotic world is not the warholistic world. There is a world of difference between wood and aluminium: the wood was once alive and still bears the unmistakable fingerprint of individuality, the signature of life and self-organising systems (as opposed to fabricated systems). Not all bunches of celery are the same, even in the supermarket, and the celery this week may not be the same as next week. Weather alters the appearance and taste of produce, as do the seasons.
Our agribusiness nexus has tried manfully (and I use the word with forethought and intent) to emulate the factory system, to prioritise standardisation, to provide generic food items year round, with minimal individuation by variety, locale, or season. More has been written about the unwisdom of this than would be needed to stun a herd of oxen, so I won’t go over all the ways in which this quest has been insane and self-defeating. I merely note that there is a big disconnect between the biotic and the fabricated, and that much of the abuse and folly of our present food system derives from a stubborn insistence on treating animals and plants as machines, farms as factories, food as standardised warholistic Product. By insisting that soil is soil is soil (when actually soil is incredibly complicated, alive, and varies hugely from location to location even over short distances), we have done ourselves and our descendants no favours: our insistence is deeply stupid and ignorant.
The quality of honouring the particular in food and farming is called “terroir” in French, and it’s a lovely word, barely translatable as “earthness” or “landness”, the unique quality of particular, individual earth or land, the flavour of particular grapes from a particular vineyard or cheese from particular milk processed by a particular cheesemaker. This quality of terroir or particularity was once (ironically) universal, something you could count on; if you visited a different county (let alone a different country) you would taste interesting, different, sometimes subtle and sometimes spectacular variations on the taste and texture of familiar foods from home. It is a quality that industrialism has all but exterminated from the world. This is not such a good thing.
The warholistic universe often seems like an extension of the arrogance of privilege, because it is arrogance and privilege that disindividuate human beings (also known as objectifying) — regarding another person as merely a generic “servant” or “peasant” or “woman” rather than a person with authenticity and agency equal to that of the observer/speaker.
The factory provides the same reassuring reliability that force and privilege used to ensure for aristocracy: a chambermaid is a chambermaid is a chambermaid. The live-in help wore identical costumes, enacted identical rituals of deference and service, and were barely distinguished by names unless they rose to upper-servant rank. In my family there is a story — perhaps apocryphal — that when my grandmother was in service as a housemaid, her mistress asked her name. “Lily, ma’am,” she said shyly. “I don’t like that name,” said the good lady of the house; “I shall call you Phoebe.” And from then on, my grandmother had to answer to “Phoebe.” This is disindividuation: my housemaid will always be called Phoebe, regardless of who she really is.
The same disindividuation is notoriously part of male privilege and sexual prerogative. It is a factory mindset that declares “They’re all the same with a bag over their heads,” meaning that sex is generic and it really doesn’t matter what woman you “get it from” — a f*ck is a f*ck is a f*ck. The individual texture, grain, weight and strength of another person within your intimate space (the very meaning of intimacy) is ignored in favour of the predictable aluminium box-beam — the same every time, you don’t have to think. It is a utilitarian or functional view of another human being: as a tool or product, considered only from the perspective of their usefulness to your own purposes. Reliability, predictability, is in this case the opposite of freedom or agency (for the objectified/enserfed person, at any rate): what is expected and valued is their conformity to an imposed standard, their fulfilment of expectation. “They all look the same to me,” is another way of saying the same thing: I am unwilling (too lazy, too threatened, too stubborn) to perceive the particularity of the Other. I insist that they are generic.
The warholistic universe in which we now live is unlike any that humans have ever lived in, other than a tiny sample of humans belonging to the highest elite (and even they, before industrialism, saw more variation and particularity in their food, textiles, etc. than our poor people do today). The precision and replicability which once required enormous human labour and could only be commanded by extreme wealth and power (like a court dress made by thirty lacemakers working for a year, or the ultimately fine and regular linen in which Pharaohs were wrapped for burial), is now commonplace; and what is rare (and now reserved for the wealthy) is particularity: bespoke shoes, fine wines, sole-sourced chocolate, artisanal cheese.
What is a little hard to grasp is that two hundred years ago, the whole world was artisanal. Even factory (manufactory, in those days) products, though fabricated more quickly through the isolation of repetitive tasks and shared machinery, were still manu-factured, that is, made by hand. Regularity, identicality, were very difficult to achieve and highly prized (as in a matched set of silverware, a perfectly matched pair of duelling pistols, a set of perfectly formed porcelain dinnerware, a set of eight nearly-identical dining chairs). A hundred years ago, certain items were industrially produced to tolerances then considered high (some still would be, as in edged-tool manufacturing), with remarkable identicality: but those items belonged to a “machine world”, a warholistic sector that was still fairly small and limited. Steel and iron tools, machinery parts, sewing machines, guns, steel and iron cookware, stamped (affordable) tableware, mass produced fasteners: mostly involving metal. But tooling begets tooling: the replicable tools can be used to make replicable furniture, replicable clothing, replicable newspapers, replicable containers for bulk goods.
As of our time, warholism is ascendant and particularity seems targeted for elimination. Industrialism is radically simplifying whole ecosystems, viciously eliminating variation, reducing species counts; human language groups have been eliminated ruthlessly, cultures assimilated or decimated. Identical replication (replication that is virus-like, in other words) has itself, like a virus, replicated across the globe. McDonald’s has junk-food outlets in Beijing, where a cheeseburger will be identical to one served in Chicago. Agriculture — once fostering a bewildering and glorious, highly particular wealth of national, regional, and local varieties and traditions — has been brutally simplified. Low-cost “cookie cutter” construction methods have rendered dwelling-places into identical replicated units: a suburb is a suburb is a suburb. Much of this reduction of particularity to identicality is hazardous to our survival. Much of it is experienced as loss and alienation, even as the apologists for the process deride this sense of loss as “sentimentality” and “unrealistic nostalgia.”
There is no moral to this story. It’s merely a musing on the cost of the particularity of things — the thinking, the comparing, the evaluating, choosing, knowing, understanding required to relate to a world of individuated things rather than identical things… and the cost of the mcdonaldisation of things, the alienation, laziness, and aching dissatisfaction that seem to lie just beneath the comfort and convenience of the warholistic universe.
It is as if (to me) we found a powerful idea (identical replication, standards, repeatability) — an idea of such power that it self-replicated with unstoppable momentum (didn’t hurt that it was profitable and advantageous for those who adopted it) and overshot its beneficial applications, crossing into negative-returns territory as soon as it invaded the biotic world.
Me, I choose mostly organic produce at the supermarket. I look at each fruit or vegetable before I buy it. I notice whether the celery is dryer or juicier this month than last. I avoid the contra-seasonal fruits flown in from around the world, and try to eat what is available in season (not within 100 miles, I am not that conscientious, but at least on the West Coast and transportable by land rather than air). I notice with pleasure the resurgence of varietal apples (6 or 7 different kinds out of the over 5,000 which used to be grown in N America prior to industrial ag). I seek particularity in the biotic — in my food, in my lover, in the wood for my spars. And yet I feel the comforting predictability of a 7/8 wrench that reliably fits a 7/8 head cap screw. Despite the doomy outlook of e.g. Derrick Jensen, despite my agreement with much of what he says, I still feel somehow that a balance might be struck between the power of replicable fabrication and the realities of biophysics: that the warholistic universe can be shrunk again into a warholistic sector — a small, contained, focussed sector — of a particularised and individuated biotic and human universe.
I am curious to know how other people experience the tension between the replicable and the individual, the generic and the particular, the warholistic universe and the real, wildly variegated, unpredictable, living world.
Michele:
It feels like a viral illness, this homogenization. While it is not at all hard to find local produce in my country of residence, it is disconcerting to see potatoes for sale that are from another country, as potatoes are a primary crop here. It also reminds me so much of what created the financial crisis..that of analogous, derivative value. Which leads me to think of the other ways our interactions have become reduced to substitutions for the “real” thing. We network socially in place of real life relationships. We are paid in plastic that has attached user fees, in place of a paycheck and handling the actual money. We eat food that is manipulated gentically and grown on lands that are artifically maintained due to their infertility due to artificial manipulation that occured in the first place. But such manipulation has afforded us the ability to feed ourselves, (except here, genetically modified seed is illegal in Austria.) And that of course reminds me of trash and the number of days between purchase and discard. i do not like feeling polarized; the choices cannot be so simple..but this is one area where i feel exactly that. It is as though this is a never-ending loop of artifice from which we cannot escape. Thanks for the great post DeAnder; i look forward to reading the responses.
17 May 2011, 10:43 amaskod:
Really chewy stuff.
Since I read it, I have been thinking about the particularisation of the homogene. I know a student who bought IKEA products to use as raw material for home-built furniture (cheaper them buying from the lumber yard), it got pretty cool. But in general particulising your bought homogene product is getting harder and is increasingly banned. Modifying your electronics is piracy (or at least claimed to be), and some home appliances are now sold with EULAs stuck in the box to proclaim that you do not own the product, you have bought a license to use it and you may not se it in any other way then the specified one. Sigh, the iron grip of intellectual property is going to make the guild system seem like a light touch by comparision. The right to produce bestowed by corporations instead of kings and in addition banning the right to tinker.
On a more positive note I have observed the development of Reprap, the open source 3D printers which might one day pretty soon be used to produce single units to industrial standards. As revolutionary as printers or photcopiers but instead things. Maybe Orlov’s russian in Boston will in the future be able to print the bedsprings he need to repare matresses at the local 3D-printers. I think it has the potential to democratise the producer/consumer relationship in the sphere of… well, metall and plastics I guess.
17 May 2011, 2:57 pmskholiast:
“Warholistic” — what a great adjective for the phenomenon in question.
The one time I ever bought anything at Ikea, I had a visceral reaction, something between sick-drunk and panic-attack. All the options to “fit your lifestyle…”, and all the same. The same thing comes over me sometimes in supermarkets and certainly in malls and airports. In such settings, you might expect this. But the damnable thing is that “local color,” even in one’s own life, is now itself a commodity.
There isn’t any escape from it, of course, and I doubt I would want to escape from it if I could– not just by backing out, anyway. I get as much food as I can from the farmers’ market, and I buy my books used from local shops, and my cafe is not named after Ahab’s mate; but there’s no pretending that the pre-Ford era was a golden age or one to which we would want to revert. (I would, however, willingly undo the invention of plastic. Only a hundred and one years ago, everything that was made (even on an assembly line) would still break down; but a plastic gallon-carton for milk today may last longer than Stonehenge. This makes me weep.)
Naturally, your post makes me think of the locus classicus of such arguments, Benjamin’s essay.
17 May 2011, 3:02 pmHenry:
Best book I know in this vein:
“This I believe,” by E.F. Schumacher. Only Wendell Berry approaches him in depth, but not in breadth or in his mastery of the material, owing to his vast practical experience. His essay on Buddhist Economics is one of the great classics. In this book, the essay, “Conscious Culture of Poverty,” is a true masterpiece. A great human being.
17 May 2011, 6:17 pmStan:
I remember as a kid, ever so often my Dad would go trout fishing. I love all manner of fish, mind you, but trout the way he fixed it (he cooked his trout) was something special. Heads and tails on, no scales, and the cooked flesh slipped off the bone with a stroke of your fork. We ate them with a squeeze of lemon, and the tail – crispy-fried and salty – was like the last treat. We didn’t get it that often, because there was work and few trout streams near where we lived. So when he came home with a creel full, it was like a little mini-Christmas.
That describes how I feel when I suddenly open the site and see a new thinkpiece from De. I am always foolishly happy to see it’s there; and the consumption is always extremely satisfying.
Speaking of particular joys… (-:
17 May 2011, 9:21 pmStan:
Tentative and vague (and majorly underslept)responses to what you have raised, De.
Beginning with the world as it is, the fait acompli we occupy… we’ve been dissecting this departicularization issue in its several aspects for a minute now. Probably most of us here (hope I’m not presuming too much) share real concerns about the many different instances of the destructiveness of standardization.
Clever primates that we are, we have a capacity to manipulate the environment that vastly outstrips our ability to forsee the consequences of our manipulations. Add the will to power, shake well, and we have a helluva mess on our hands.
I doubt we’ll stop late industrial capitalism, just as much as I doubt it will continue into perpetuity.
I experience that tension you name as grief in my pessimism and hope in my optimism. The hope lives in some community yet unrealized – where bricolage will hold sway, guided by a particular morality, which can come only from a particular community, in a particular place and time. There’s no hope, as I see it, for modernity (a morally incoherent culture, headed for a Hobbesian nightmare – dependent on the worst and isolated from the best in our natures).
The crux of the problem, I guess I’m trying to say, is not that we lack categorical imperatives for how to deal with this tension; but that we don’t have communities to which we can hold oursleves and others accountable when we confront specific instances of this tension.
What makes this so difficult is not merely our dependence on bureaucracies and tehcnocracies, but that communities themselves are the victims of this more general moral incoherence. There is no shared belief about what human existence ought to be aimed at. This is the great stumbling block. Means there is no account of virtue, and a few of those virtues that need to be recovered include self-restraint, moderation, humility, and selflessness.
17 May 2011, 10:41 pmDeAnander:
We even have prefabricated “communities” (Epcot, for example)…
I’m kind of underslept and overworked myself at present and haven’t much to add, though nagging ghosts of further ideas are floating around. Maybe they will take visible form later
But yes, we don’t have a clear idea of what human life is “for”. Jane Jacobs I believe once said that modern civilisation would lead a detached observer to believe that the purpose of human life is to produce and consume automobiles. A facetious remark in a way, but on the other hand rather deep.
Sometimes it seems that our cultural consensus is that the purpose of human life is to be as lazy and skill-less as possible (to achieve aristocracy, in other words, but without even the specialised refined skills and knowledge once required of aristocrats). Forster summed it up in “The Machine Stops” and it was recapped in the Matrix movie and spinoffs: bored, idle humans lolling about in perfectly comfortable little cubicles/apartments, everything they need delivered 24×7, constantly entertained, kept in luxury by infinite energy slaves. Forster was writing circa 1910, but his fiction seems eerily prescient: today’s “hikkomori” are one realisation of his speculative fiction.
OTOH, maybe speculative fiction shapes expectations, which then select targets for technological effort, which then result in real-world tools and lifeways echoing those from the speculative fiction. Would we have Motorola flip-phones if the characters of the original Star Trek hadn’t used very similar devices?
18 May 2011, 12:47 amStan:
And there is the story/narrative, again. We are the storied primate, adrift….
18 May 2011, 7:01 amaskod:
Feral Scholar » Blog Archive » Honouring the Particular
In a communist setting (that lived up to the name) it would work as an equalizer, but in a capitalist setting it works as an easy tool to identify status differences. Does the other ape have more things or a newer/more expensive/higher status thing then you? If it is mangoes then your single mango might be juicier then the other ape’s two mangoes, so it is a bit tricky and takes geeky knowledge to work out, which also means that it is not a straight up scale as the knowledge and rethoric of the participants enter play. Sour grapes and all of that.
18 May 2011, 2:44 pmrootlesscosmo:
A couple of quibbles (as usual):
Some of the difference between present-day uniformity and (say) C. 18 variegation is a matter of scale. While each piece of wood is different from all the others, they all belong to the class “pieces of wood” and, more narrowly, pieces of [wood species] cut to n meters length,” etc. And each Ticonderoga pencil, examined at a fine enough scale, will turn out to have differences from every other. (The fecal coliform count of McDonald’s burgers, while always distressingly high, no doubt varies, sometimes significantly, from one burger to the next.)
This seems to me to be more than a nitpick because what’s being asserted isn’t simply a distinction between the industrial worldview and “reality” but a criterion of value. I’m uneasy about this, in part I guess because the industrial worldview is reality too; an ugly reality, a reality that depends on the misery of billions of human beings and the irreversible destruction of much besides, but just as real as a jpeg file of a news photo of a cheap print of a Warhol lithograph made from a soup advertisement.
And this reality includes (dialectically enough) a counter-trend, one in which I participated earlier today when I went to the Civic Center Farmers’ Market (non-San Franciscans, this is the un-fancy, not-necessarily-organic, CHEAP one, not the upscale Ferry Building one which I also patronize) and decided on the Moro blood oranges instead of the other kind. The same capitalist logic that pushes toward uniformity also finds, and exploits, small niches; I recently received an announcement of a book signing by this guy
According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google’s change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years-the rise of personalization. In this groundbreaking investigation of the new hidden Web, Pariser uncovers how this growing trend threatens to control how we consume and share information as a society-and reveals what we can do about it.
What struck me was that the same Leftish intellectuals who were alarmed, 50 years ago, by the homogenization of mass culture (see Dwight Macdonald’s book by that name)–everybody watching Ed Sullivan Sunday nights, everybody washing their clothes in a Proctor & Gamble product–are now alarmed by its obverse: not the management of mass desire but the targeting of individual desire with “personalized” commodities.
The point for me is that there’s noplace–not the anonymity of the crowd or the narrow confines of the personal–to hide from ideology. The superiority of capitalism to Soviet-style “socialism” may in the end come down to a choice of which brand of razor we want to cut our throats with–”a minimal human demand,” as an old-time journalist once insisted. But it’s all reality–alas.
18 May 2011, 6:22 pmStan:
not just scale, intent. the variation you describe in micky d burgers is unintentional, an instance of the impossibility of uniformity, but external to the intent of making them in a taylorized way… external to the intent as it creates the scale of giant feedlots, cows fed to death on ge corn mash, ge tomatoes to make millions of tons of ketchup, ge wheat to make the flour to make the buns, etc etc.
there’s an ethical criterion here, not merely a value criterion. no doubt, we metropolitans can choose between a variety of consumer goods (that’s called ‘freedom’); but there is equally no doubt that the number of corn cultivars that exist is shrinking, that biodiversity is being lost to provide these ‘choices.’ so there is an additional objective criterion – tho i spose caring about biodiversity, etc, is normative from our pov
sorry, typing one handed today, so just throwing that out there quick like
not speaking as a leftist, but as a former one
20 May 2011, 5:31 amrootlesscosmo:
Thanks, Stan.
not speaking as a leftist, but as a former one
Noted. I was thinking of Pariser, who’s identified with MoveOn.
I agree intent makes a big difference, especially to our ethical judgment. What I’m leery of is (1) romanticizing the past and (2) making an ethical judgment on the basis of scale, or some other measurable quality, rather than frankly on the basis of ethics. (I don’t mean DeAnander was doing this; I do think it’s tempting for all of us to try to ground ethics in the “objective” or material realm, because in an age of science that seems less challengeable than simply declaring what we believe to be good and bad motives and acts.) As for the past, the guy who said human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (which I’ve always thought sounded like the name of a law firm) was talking about life in 17th century England; I don’t mean this as a way of excusing the evils of the present, just as a reminder that most people, on most of the globe, during most of the existence of our species, have led lives characterized by suffering, fear, and discontent, relieved at more or less frequent intervals by periods of comfort and safety and satisfaction. Many people know that J.S. Bach fathered 20 children; it’s worth remembering, as we lose ourselves in the beauty of the B Minor Mass, that only ten of them lived into adulthood.
20 May 2011, 3:26 pmStan:
See what you’re saying; and never been one to long for the past (a futile exercise in any case). We are headed into wholly new etiologies of suffering now, though, and material generalizations/standardizations are near the root of those new forms, methinks.
Some benchmarks
Plenty of places right now that are suffering as much as 17 C England. Suffering is part of our animal existence; but some kinds of suffering are caused by moral failures – chief among them being the desire for power.
Reading a lot of MacIntyre lately, and his thesis that morality is dissolved in the generalizations of modernism is very convincing to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbmPXXO8jpA
21 May 2011, 10:28 amBruce F:
Robert Jensen posted a video of his recent talk “What Does It Mean to Be a Human Being: The Mistaken Identities of Nation, Race, Gender”. One of his many points that I felt deeply was the idea that we’re a “species out of context”, making our current problems even more difficult to resolve.
21 May 2011, 10:16 pmStan:
Thanks, Bruce. Good find. Recommended, and he employs Dunbar’s number… lots of echoes of those topics we dwell in here.
In critiquing his conclusion, I’ll be critiquing myself, because this was me three years ago. It’s always easier to describe the problem, and he describes the problem very well imo, than to deal with that ‘what is to be done’ issue. I still don’t have an answer, and if anyone knows someone who does, give me their number.
My own dissatisfaction at the point where Bob Jensen ends is, then, as much a dissatisfaction with most thinking on these topics, my own included.
I hope this isn’t hijacking a thread, because De’s point about McDonaldization (generalization of products, with a corresponding specialization of work – deskilling) is still squarely in the middle of any description of historic trajectories in all this. My excursions into questions of morality are not meant as distractions, because it seems there is a moral dimension to the same processes that we are describing with terms like capitalism, liberalism, modernism (in distinctly modernist language on our own parts, I might add… but no one can jump out of her or his own context and report from Mars).
Bob J says a great deal at the end about “empathy,” for example; but it is described as if it were a disembodied universal essence… lacking which we cannot be fully “human,” whatever that means. These are pretty liberal abstractions, imo, that still beg for some account of why anyone in this time and place ‘ought’ to be empathetic or from where we derive this unexplained but assertively normative “humanity.” I can’t fine anywhere else in the animal world – for example – contracts, pornography, or bunko schemes; so perhaps I could argue that these behaviors – more than empathy, which I seem to observe in other mammals with some regularity – are definitive of ‘human.’ On the other hand, certain forms of self-sacrifice are also uniquely human, so I don’t mean this to bend off toward misanthropy. There’s just still something left out here.
The link to MacIntyre at least begins to unpack the distinctions between deontological, consequentialist, and teleological ethics… which maybe makes MacIntyre a good sequel to Bob J… hmmm. There is an incoherent pluralism in our moral thinking that corresponds to the generalization of product and specialization of labor and intellectual abstraction of modernity, that leaves bureaucratic systems as the power default… and if anyone believes (as I do) that bureaucratic systems are a big part of the problem (because they kill accountability), then this is a serious question.
Anyway, gotta go to church.
22 May 2011, 7:02 amCurt:
Good Video Bruce,
I would ike to suggest that it is not Hubris to to set up a diving board and place a wood chipper underneath it and make leading members of the US ruling class walk the plank. I would say an example of Hubris is when the ruling class of the US and other NATO countries try to determine the outcome of power struggles in the third world in general and the Arab world in particular.
Even if the people of the United States or Europe would take action that they thought would guarrantee a positve favorable outcome for what they thought was a majority in an overseas non democractic country the people of the US or Europe will be making enemies of that portion of the society that support the leadership that they have intervined against.
I would not say that such risks (of blowback) by taking sides in an overseas powerstruggle should NEVER be undertaken.
What I am saying is that powerful outside forces can not use a principle for rare interventions to create a policy for interventions. Furthermore many people have perceptions of what is politically neccessary that are very fickle. What a majority in an overseas country wants today may been seen by many of that majority as having been a mistake just 4 or 5 years down the road.
Furthermore most people have a very poor understanding about what has been happening in their own country their understanding about what is going on overseas in even much worse.
I do not think that it is hubris to think that humans can properly manage a sustainable agricultural system for the planet. Of course their is no guarantee. If the conflict of interests can not be eliminated from the management of such a system, to say it would be impossible to sustainably manage such a system seems reasonable to me.
22 May 2011, 7:11 amxenia:
Well, Stan, I find it funny to define oneself as a former leftist and to grant so much space here to Lou Proyect, who surely embodies many of the qualities which you usually rightly criticize in American leftists: self-righteousness, boundless love for technology and gadgets, machismo… I am still rubbing my eyes over the article on that disgusting movie, the Inglorious Basterds, which was published on your blog. I read it twice just to check it wasn’t a joke. And that’s not even getting into his political ideas (pro-Milosevic).
Also unforgettable: his nasty mobbing of much more competent and intelligent Yoshie Furuhashi, of which never a syllable was uttered here. Something does not quite add up.
22 May 2011, 12:24 pmStan:
I don’t endorse everything I put up. The hope is that what goes up will stimulate discussions. Lou and I disagree on a lot more than what we agree on these days, though we still correspond occasionally and are personally friendly (we know each other, and I do not eject people from the circle of common courtesy and amicable exchange on account of disagreements about politics – I’d have no family left if I did); and I’m not in the habit of transferring the disputes of Marxmail to FS (e g, the Proyect-Furuhashie fight about how leftists ought to relate to questions about Iran).
I do scan MM from time to time, as part of my general scan for articles that are not showing up in other places… and I have hat-tipped Lou on those articles I got from him (but that is not the same as featuring his articles or editorials or debates here). I may not call myself leftist these days, but my antipathy to capitalism is as powerful as ever, so it seems inevitable that I’d share some interests with secular leftists. The film piece was in line with an abiding interest that De and I both have in cultural criticism – and was not meant to endorse a particular point of view on Tarantino’s latest splatter film – but to crank up a thread (sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t) on the film itself.
I found that film as ridiculous and offensive as I have found every film of the grossly overrated QT. But what does the film say about the film maker, the industry, US culture… us? Lou’s comments were an example of one person, coming from one perspective, grappling with it.
As it turned out, we got nine comments, mostly to decry having spent money on the movie (Marcilla called the flick “torture porn,” iirc – and that was the extent of analysis), and the hope that it would evolve into something deeper was dashed by reality. Hey, it’s a blog. We make no pretense at being more than that, even if we obviously share some of the preoccupations you point to (gendered power, ecology, cultural tropes, etc).
I don’t see where we’ve granted an inordinate amount of space to Lou P, and when we have it has been in the spirit of discussing ideas (at least on my end)… have I offended you? Not my intent, surely… but this is a curious intervention at this time on this thread. Just asking. Seems you think I have committed a wrong or wronged by omission here. I don’t quite get what you mean by something “not adding up.”
22 May 2011, 12:35 pmCurt:
Bruce,
Another thing about Jensen’s Video, he mentioned that we know so little that we might already have passed a climate tipping point that has doomed us to extinction but just have not figured it out yet. Of course if lots of people come to that conclusion in the future things will get very interesting as some people try to manage the climate to prevent our threatened extinction and others come to the conclusion that the climate managers are more dangerous than what ever the climate will do if humans do nothing to change its course. Such a future might seem tragic to us but to those watching us it is the best comedy show in a vey long time.
I can not wait until the joke is on them.
On another topic. I mentioned above that the USans or Europeans should not be in the business of trying to manipulate the outcomes of power struggles overseas.
Yet I have to in a sense contidict myself again. There are so many ways in which one could potentially manipulate the events. Even talking with say Khameni in Iran could manipulte the events.
Something that someone says to him could cause him to alter a policy for example. This alteration could anger so many important people that it leads to his downfall or it could placate so many advisaries that it leads to taking the steam out of a potentially explosive situation.
So what i guess I am getting at is that it is almost impossible to live and not have at least some tinzy tiny influence on events in distant places. If through your work or social activities a person had contact with a distant place the influence would even be a little larger.
I think paradox is a correct way to understand it. The paradox being that we should not try to influence events that we do not have a high level of expertise in yet we can not help but influence events that we have no expertise in. With this paradox in mínd I asked myself the question, what responsibility, if any will future Iranian (Islamic?) Socialists have in supporting the development of a humane socialist society in the USA?
The leadership of the USSR thought that it was thier duty to support socialist movements around the world. The US often tries to portray itself as the arsenal and the well of democracy for the world. If what we have is good we would of course want everyone to have it, right?
So will the future Iranian Socialists feel sorry about the suffering of millions of people in the USA? Will they send doctors to open clinics hidden in caves in the Appalacian hills? Will they continue to broadcast Press TV to try to inform people in America that life could be better if only they would change? Will they send money to clandestine socialist organizations in the USA to help them print phamphlets and make CDs and DVDs will they attempt to identify US agents overseas and approach them and talk with them, or send them emails, and attempt to ideologically convert them and get them not just to spy but to actually join a movement, controlled by people living outside of the US who are maybe not even US citizens, to take actions that will eventually lead to the collapse of the ruling elite, I mean eliet, or is it eleat, in the USA?
The question of whether or not powerful government forces should intervine overseas to correct the errors of other societies is not easy because those in favor of intervention can always say, how much suffering will you tolerate before you act? Those oppossed to such intervention can always say how low would the level of suffering have to be for you not to act?
Then the question of how an NGO should respond is an even more challenging question. Since NGO can operate not in the name of all of the people in a county but in the name of only some people in a country I think that gives the NGO a greater range of ethical responses. As an explicitly socialist orientented NGO the leadership would not have to concern itself with the question of whether of not a country would be better off with a government led by socialists. That is of course taken for granted. It is the greater flexabity itself that makes the question of what should be done even harder for the leadership of a NGO to answer.
Those favoring a war against Islam dressed up as a war against terrorism often try to portray Muslims as trying to take over the world. Duh! If you thought that something was great you would want everyone to have it. Have not the capitalists taken over the world? Should there be a rule that opponents of capitalism not be allowed to fight back? Hahahahahahaha. Because a few Muslims have fought back these militarist try to paint Islam as an aggressive religion. It clearly has its intolerant strands but I do not see it being any more aggressive than Capitalism or Chrisianity. Do you?
22 May 2011, 3:02 pmNow based on what I just wrote about Socialists supporting their like minded brothers and sisters in far away places, the Muslims and the Capitalists could accuse us, well me anyways, of trying to take over the world. To the leading capitalists I would say surrender now or face my Black and Decker Brand, Paul Bunyan C122234 Model Woodchipper later.
To leading Muslims I would say Socialist goals are not neccissarly in irreconsiable conflict with Islam. Some understandings of Islam are in irreconsiable conflict with other understandings of Islam.
Henry:
Noble Obsession – Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century
By Charles Slack
Description:
Like crude oil, cotton and plutonium, rubber is on the short list of raw materials that suddenly yielded transformative commercial benefits. The turning point was the 1839 discovery of vulcanization, whereby the heated addition of sulfur permits rubber to retain its shape regardless of temperature. Without sulfur, rubber melts or cracks when exposed to heat or cold. Goodyear was the implacable, obsessed true believer who made possible “the great shock absorber of the industrial age.” Slack (Blue Fairways) ably chronicles the inspirations and intrigues surrounding the miraculous substance, which in its day sparked speculation comparable to the Internet boom. Shrewd and meticulous, British rubber pioneer Hancock receives equal billing, but this is Goodyear’s book. Slack is Goodyear’s advocate throughout, judiciously slicing through the self-serving arguments of Goodyear’s adversaries. Countless setbacks, massive debt and perpetual destitution were unable to dent Goodyear’s faith in rubber by all accounts, his wife, Clarissa, was blessed with an otherworldly patience. With his “debilitating lack of business sense” and an “almost superhuman capacity to endure,” only Goodyear was dogged enough to stumble upon vulcanization. Sadly, his discovery brought not wealth but lengthy legal battles to establish proper credit, which he eventually secured. Slack’s portrait of Goodyear is frequently touching, but the book loses focus in its final chapters. This is generally a fascinating portrait of the transitional period in America’s progress from farmland to factory and, eventually, to freeway.
From Booklist
When rubber was first brought to the Western world in the early nineteenth century, it was a mere curiosity. Even with its marvelous properties, raw rubber had one fatal flaw: it became tacky and melted in the heat of summer, and brittle enough to break in winter. It took one man, Charles Goodyear, eight years of almost unendurable hardship to solve the vexing chemical puzzle of how to stabilize rubber, and his vulcanization process changed the world, making automobiles, airplanes, and electricity possible. Like Schwartz’s Last Lone Inventor [BKL Je 1 & 15 02], this is the story of an obsessed inventor and the envious, greedy men who took advantage of him. Goodyear insisted on experimenting endlessly, bringing ridicule, poverty, and the horrid conditions of debtors’ prison upon himself and his family. When he finally succeeded, the vultures that stole from him brought more heartache and an entanglement of lawsuits. Slack brings Charles Goodyear back to life and redeems the man who gave up everything to give his gift to the world. -David Siegfried
22 May 2011, 6:22 pmStan:
Ruminating some on de-particularization, since that was the thread; and a few more things come to mind relating this trend toward uniformity to liberalism/capitalism more generally.
First, I’ll just reiterate that militaries are fond of uniformity, as essential to establish control… not just the control of a human individual be denying him/her visible idiosyncrasies (really a secondary concern that gains prominence only in light of our preoccupations with pop-psychology). In the same way that standardized nuts and bolts can be made to fit together in predictable ways, military doctrine at the scales necessary for modern war requires this interchangeability to assemble operations. Note that special ops and guerrillas do not place the same emphasis on uniformity, because their strengths are not in structure but flexibility (much smaller scale).
Industry took its cues from the military, and public schools took their cues from industry, so we are all in the army now to some extent.
But there is also, seems to me, an idealization of consistency/uniformity/de-particularization that corresponds to its practice, reflected in the liberal penchant for abstraction. Particularity – except in consumer choice, where the desire to reclaim personhood in an alienated world has been sublimated – is antithetical to a regime predicated on principles in lieu of communal ties (rights, for example, that give formal equality that preserves actual inequality). Can’t help but think here about “rights” (want a real can of worms, try to define them) as the first line of defense in the arguments of the so-called “sex-positive” folk on the issue of pornography, that trumps (effectively in liberal society) any description of the content of particular examples of pornography, or the particular conditions under which it is produced, or the particular lives of the people who are in it.
The fact that this is such a quandary reflects the larger problem I’m scratching after on moral philosophy… that ethics have been reduced to discussing hypothetical dilemmas… and moments (hypothetical and otherwise) are divorced from their particular contexts… what is the personal history, the life circumstance, the grid of surrounding social power of that young woman in the porn scene, for example, as opposed to whether that moment constitutes the legal definition of consent.
Yet in a nation of 300,000,000, when there is no agreement on what constitutes character, virtue, morality, what is left but utilitarian bureaucracy; and what defense is there against hegemonic forces that are defined by their amorality taking control of this vast apparatus? Scale matters, as Jensen pointed out, and likewise he suggests scale inheres with its own problems – many of them pregnant with catastrophic consequences.
Dangerous as it can be, I can’t help but think that the action-step in the face of this situation is somehow communitarian… which brings us back to the prickly questions about what narratives form community… I don’t for a second believe that viable communities can be formed on the basis of liberal abstractions like “rights” that assume the liberal definitions of ‘self’ and individual and assume a fundamental lack of trust (contractual as opposed to covenental relations). There has to be some much more fundamental and shared conviction about what people are meant to be, some formative teleology toward which character can be formed and virtue can be practiced and refined in the context of care, of practical friendships.
22 May 2011, 6:32 pmHenry:
Small Is Beautiful: Impressions of Fritz Schumacher
This film is a short documentary portrait of economist, technologist and lecturer Fritz Schumacher. Up to age 45, Schumacher was dedicated to economic growth. Then he came to believe that the modern technological explosion had grown out of all proportion to human need.
24 May 2011, 12:09 pmHenry:
Forgot the URL:
http://www.nfb.ca/film/small_is_beautiful/
24 May 2011, 12:10 pmCurt:
Well that film on Shumacher was kind of interesting. Henry what part of the film did you find the most interesting? Do not ask me that question because if you do I might have to watch the film again.
The Wiki article on Shumacher is thought provoking too. Kind of makes me wonder if he was after all a blessing or a curse for the future.
I wonder if the William Tell Overture was played at Fritz’s funeral. It would have been appropriate then.
I think that it is appropriate now too. The WTO would be played by….guess who……naturally by BTO, which would be immediately followed by Let it Ride.
This is going to cost some money. The whole film crew has to be flown back to the US from Switzerland.
24 May 2011, 2:53 pmThe way I see it now there are two groups of Monks in Purple Robes pulling the CI22234, this time surrounded by sheep. While the WTO is playing, one group is running down I95 in Boston, the Camera pans to a road sign that shows the distance to New York. In addition to the close ups that show their gear is made in Vietnam we will add a close up showing that they are all wearing the Purple Heart. But since we can not show the back of it there will be a little caption that says Yes that too was made in Vietnam. The other group which is also surrounded by sheep, is in Philadelphia moving down the Turnpike towards New York. Again a sign shows the distance to go. Then when the music swithches to Let It Ride the camera shows us Colin Powell giving his war speech to the UN. Towards the end of the song Georgie can be shown giving one of his lying addresses.
Henry will you let that fly, or would it go ober the head of younger audiances?
Henry:
Why would he be a curse?
25 May 2011, 3:26 pmCurt:
Because he thought that Marx was a curse. He thought that Freud was a curse. Finally he thought that Einstein was a curse. That is according to Wikipedia. That is some awfully reactionary baggage to be carring around in my view. Who did he influence with those ideas? Sure Marx and Freud and Einstein are open to criticism but to lay the problems of the world at their feet is something I find way off the mark and unhelpfull.
25 May 2011, 3:40 pmCurt:
In addition there is something that came up in the movie that you provided. It is the machine that sets the fishing hooks so that people can do it much faster. I do not remember now if he invented the device or if this was just an example of a type of device that he approved of. While such a device is not responsible to the over fishing of the oceans it has been an aid in achieving that result. Therefore one could see the device itself as both a blessing and a curse. If it would have been part of a system of responsible fishing then it would have only been a blessing for the fishermen and for the consumers too.
What part of the film did you find the most interesting?
25 May 2011, 3:56 pmaskod:
Regarding Stans’s mentioning of moral philospohers, I landed a couple of years ago in the conclusion that any moral philosopher that poses problems of the kind “who would you save?” works in the frame of a powerful ruler that can pick and choose who he should save based on general traits. That might be good and well for kings, and for moral philosophers trying to land cushy jobs at courts, but should be kind of uninteresting for everyone else.
25 May 2011, 4:32 pmHenry:
Marx, independently of scholarly appraisals of capitalism concretely “inspired” communist Russia and communist China. Two murderous hellholes. Marx is also a materialist, which digs a grave both for human nature and in the last analysis for intelligence–or consciousness. It leads to meaninglessness.
Freud, leads to the reduction the human being to the animal. This is diametrically opposed to the idea that human beings are created in the divine image. Thus Freud effectively undermines religion. Schumacher was a reigious man; possibly you are not.
“By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Einstein, he explains as having a deleterious effect due to ignorant popularization of the idea of relativity. Relativism in any case characterizes modern thought, though oourse Einstein is not behind it all.
As for the label “reactionary”: so what? There is plenty in the world to react against quite legitimately.
25 May 2011, 5:25 pmCurt:
Yes and Marx also inspired the social democratic parties of Europe, and the Euro Communists, and the Democratic Farm Labor Party in Minnesota., as well as anti colonial liberation movements around the world. (Do I need to provide footnotes for those assertions?)
25 May 2011, 7:00 pmThe scientific trends started by Freud and Einstein can not be condemned or ignored just because they have implications that some people consider inconvienent. If the truth is a lemon make lemonaid.
One can look at a materialist, Dogless universe as a nihlistic universe or one can look at it as a universe filled with creative choices to be made.
Of course our current imperial rulers General’s Bevis and Butthead have a lot more tools to wield in this creative process than billions of others who do not sit in their chairs. Yet I think that the ideas that Marx, Frued and Einstein left to mankind can be used to acheive a lot of good. i think that their ideas have placed obsticals in the paths of the Generals.
Anyways the arguement about Marx inspiring the people who founded the Soviet Union or the PRC is like the arguement blaming Christianity (or Religion) for all the murders committed by Christians or blaming Atheism for all of the murders committed by atheists, as if murder was an inevatible action of either of these doctrines.
Finally some kind of label is needed to describe those with extraordinarily harmful views. Should they perhaps be refered to as, The Gang of 3.6 billion? Or maybe even The Gang of All Those Who Often Diasagree wuth Me?
The Gang of Those Not a Member of My Religion? The Gang of THose Not a Member of My Political Movement?
Is it neccessary to call our opponets the honorable, truthful, unmistaken, Ubermenschen?
I think that Shumachers book Small is Beautiful was probably a positive progessive contribution to society. I also saws that He also wrote a book about Buddhist Economics, a subject that I find intriguing. So I would not call him a reactionary. He was carrying reactionary baggage though. I do not wish to imply that all conservative thoughts are reactionary. If a view is widely held by people that call themselves conservatives that is serves the general welfare of society it is a progressive view even if is not understood as being progressive at the time. So yes in a sense wrods like reactionary and progressive are emptied of meaning over time becasue the definitions of these words change. That could even be said of words like American or German.
Curt:
H.H.H. I am not.
25 May 2011, 7:03 pmDeAnander:
Another view of “niche customisation/personalisation” in Internet interfaces…
26 May 2011, 1:17 amHenry:
Think what you please, Curt. This is still a relatively free internet.
There is not a particle of “science” in Freud, by the way. Not if the word is to keep its meaning.
I find your arguments sophistical in the face of massive facts. But really, let’s agree to disagree. I suspect our respective loads of “baggage” preclude an understanding in a finite amount of time.
26 May 2011, 2:23 amStan:
Finally got my used copy of MacIntyre’s “After Virtue,” and I’ve already plowed through a third of it (for my first read… this one will get at least five, maybe more readings, with many marginal notes).
Excerpts will follow, but the thumbnail that pertains to Askod’s point, about ethics being reduced as it is to hypothetical quandaries (is it okay to torture one person if that might save a hundred, eg), goes roughly like this:
One feature of modernity is reaching for abstract universals (in science, but also in everything else, since science is taken to be the only field with an ultimate truth claim, “facts”). These abstract universals are presumably ahistorical – true in all times and places. Based on this fallacy, a couple of things happened.
First, the search for the basis of moral claims (which were separated as a distinct category only by modernity, showing that the taxonomic basis for this reasoning is in fact a feature of a time and place in history) was separated from any account of human nature, and human nature was uprooted from any account of history or community by the emergence of individualism.
Next, philosophers attempted to relocate the basis for both an account of human nature and moral action outside the individual, who had been extracted from the specificity of community. This is as true of Kant as Kierkegaard, as true of Marx as Nietzsche. Kant sought a categorical imperative (universal claim)), Kierkegaard made the pivot existential “choice” (still a universal claim because it was a choice un-moored from specificity), Marx claimed a basis in science, and Nietzsche took a Kierkegaardian stance, albeit with a superman ideal (specifically one that transcended all specificity in his will to power).
In a more Aristotelian scheme (updated of course to our own experience), virtue is a function of character, which is learned through culture or polis, rather like an apprenticeship for life. There is a telos toward which moral action is directed, based on a specifiable account of good, grounded in practices.
De is a “good” sailor, because she does the things good sailors are supposed to do. De is a good partner, because she does the things partners ought to do. De is a good writer, because she does the things good writers do. Step that up a notch, and De does the things that a good person should do, that is, she sails and relates ans writes, but she also keeps promises, cleans up after herself, puts others first.
This account of virtue flows from character, and this character was formed in actual times and places, under the tutelage of actual other people.
With modernity, and the decoupling of the ‘person’ from history-time-place, as well as the decoupling of human nature (now defined apart from specificity, as an abstract universal) from moral action (also dehistoricized), any account of moral action becomes unintelligible and the source of an interminable and unresolvable debate.
Modernity then spawns multiple attempts to describe moral action without any basis at all. Nietzsche’s ubermensch devolves into a consumer, even though that’s not what he foresaw. Benthamite utilitarian consequentialists become corporate leaders as well as Generals. Kantian duty-firsters became lawyers and preachers. But the reality is, without any basis of proof of one POV over the other here, we all become each of these simultaneously, because that is the nature of our culture. Our near complete lack of recognition of these positions, and their contradictoriness, gives them tremendous cultural power, because we can pick and choose from each option as the situation allows, and all of them are modeled in the culture again and again.
In the porn debate, as one example, we hear the Nietzschean freeedom POV and the Kantian first amendment argument, side by side, with no embarrassment about how completely opposite are the premises upon which each orientation is based. That’s because both POVs do actually share something in common – the departicularization of modernity. This is what MacIntyre means by a state of ‘moral disorder.’
Excerpt:
27 May 2011, 7:59 amStan:
Tracked down the essay by Elizabeth Anscombe (c 1958), to which MacIntyre refers as the origin of his explorations in “After Virtue.” Heavy stuff, as Anscombe was wont to write. Here it is for anyone who wants to work the old gray matter and look up a lot of names. Worth the effort. Prefigures MacI’s demolition of modernism.
28 May 2011, 11:40 am(Boer) Tom:
@Stan
Regarding your comment about science, and putting your objection to its (apparent) truth claims aside, have the moral philosophers not always been trying to make scientific (in the modern sense, specifically using scientific method) theories of morality? Have they not always been trying to show that a previous hypothesis of morality was contradicted by a general moral judgement (or otherwise incoherent), and supplied a different hypothesis to remedy the failings of the previous hypothesis to predict moral judgement? The only thing that I can see that makes the modern theories special is that they have relied more heavily on material considerations (e.g. happiness, optimised happiness averaged over a population, etc.). What is interesting to me about the study of morality is that it has remained outside the realm of evolutionary biology (happiness alone doesn’t improve odds of survival), except for one person who attempted to emulate Chomsky, and more vaguely the Russian school to which Kropotkin belonged.
As to Anscombe, I think she is exactly wrong with regards to Sidgwick – he (by her description) was hinting at moral judgements – she wants morality to be logically coherent, whereas Sedgwick was exactly describing the data of moral judgement: “he thinks, for example, that humility consists in underestimating your own merits-?i.e, in a species of untruthfulness” and “He defines intention in such a way that one must be said to intend any foreseen consequences of one’s voluntary action.” Consider her ‘counter-example’ – is the man withdrawing support from the child doing so voluntarily when he goes to jail? In the relevant cases, to say so is ridiculous (what does the word ‘voluntary’ mean?) – perhaps there is some contradiction that I’m not seeing, but Sidgwick’s definition is entirely reasonable to me. To sum up – humility is precisely a form of untruthfulness (does that make it evil? or generally harmful? Could you supply a counter-example?) and we morally judge people on the foreseeable consequences of their actions – perhaps we might suspend our moral judgement when we become more sympathetic to the individual and the decisions that the person had to make, but then we are no longer morally judging – I suspect that the modern moral philosophers want to have the suspension of moral judgement as being within the realm of morality, so that we can (in our sympathetic suspension of moral judgement) find the person “moral”.
Also, judiciary (and law) is immaterial to this sense of judgement – I judge the door on my room to be three feet wide – if I had measuring tape, I could give you a more accurate judgement. Judgement is a mental estimation of the outside (apparently material, and thus including e.g. ghosts, jinns etc. as culturally relevant) world, that is, it is a neural reproduction used for estimation/simulation of what will occur. I morally judge that voluntarily withdrawing your support is baneful (as long as I haven’t suppressed my empathy for the unspecified child).
Morality itself is ill-defined, at least without moral judgement. As moral judgement is the only data available, I’d prefer to define morality in terms of moral judgement – that (act) which is moral is that which is judged moral, without specifying the agents and objects of the action being judged, as long as the judger hasn’t suspended automatic empathy to the agents and objects – morality is then avoiding acts/behaviour that is judged immoral, and taking proactive steps to abide by that which is judged moral. With such a definition, one can let the data fall into place to see to what extent morality is formed by existing institutions, and to what extent it is (epi-)genetic, and how the two interact to form moral judgements. From a biological point of view, I would imagine that it evolved to allow (small) group interaction, although I’m not sure what it is beyond a prohibition on acts that empathy inhibit – data would be needed. Also, one could attempt counter-examples to this definition.
We can then ask if moral judgement is the only consideration that we want in moderating our behaviour – it is powerful and liberating, in that it is readily available without institutions – thus e.g. Chomsky’s writings – but concrete examples would be needed, i.e. do we try to make an issue a moral issue, or find some other way to resolve or constrain it?
As to virtue, it seems even more ill-defined, beyond perhaps what a given culture promotes.
29 May 2011, 3:37 pmStan:
Thanks Tom for engaging on this. I apologize in advance for what may be an over-lengthy reply, since I am working through these ideas myself and haven’t reached that point where I can zip through on my own familiarity with the topics contained in the discussion.
Your final sentence stands out:
I agree on the gist of this, though I think virtue is definable – albeit not in any universalizable way (this is your point, no?). Here is wiki on “virtue ethics”:
This means of determining right and wrong is completely dependent on situation, without falling into the trap of moral relativism. That is how it relates to this question of specificity. Of course, it is embedded in a given culture. So are deontology (Kantian ethics, eg) and consequentialism (utilitarianism, eg), though each makes a claim of unrooted universality (as false a claim as scientism – not science – makes… that it has somehow transcended history.
I don’t object to science, btw, or to science’s truth claims. I object to the idea that science has the ultimate monopoly on truth claims, which is clearly wrong, and arrogant.
Here is MacIntyre in full acerbic flower:
I’ll leave it there, only because my post-op shoulder still hurts when I type, but it is a fascinating argument. And the point is made. As you suggest, moral philosophy, like all philosophy, emerges as responses to past philosophy (often put into crisis by changing circumstances as well as changing relations of power).
Inescapably true in some sense; but the question on the table is whether they succeeded or not… and why? And what this has to do with De’s points about particularity.
The reason moral questions remain outside the realm of evolutionary biology, it seems, is that evolutionary biology – a scientific discipline – is incapable of answering the question to which ethical preoccupations address themselves: What ought I to do, which is a subset of the question, what am I here for? Science – even the kind that I approve of and embrace, which is considerable – is not capable of answering these questions, any more than science can tell me whether I should care about the broken people who congregate around the county social services building down the street.
The main modern theories of morality can be categorized roughly as threefold: utilitarianism (or as you call it, optimization – greatest good for the greatest number), duty-ethics (like Kant’s categorical imperative), and Nietzschean (post modern) – which concludes that the other two are bankrupt, and so places individuals ‘beyond good and evil.’
Utilitarians might conclude that torture is okay in some circumstances, or that mass sterilization can be justified. The claim that immigrants ought to be expelled because they are breaking the law is a Kantian claim. So it appears that Nietzsche is correct, inasmuch as he says these methods don’t even support the rather more conservative claims of their authors… and they contradict one another.
What all three have in common is that they claim to be universal – descriptive of the situation for all times and places and people. This is the failure of modernism – this incoherence, and where it founders is on its own unstudied prescription, ie, that all truth has to be all-encompassing (like natural laws) to be valid.
I’ll come back to this, but I need a break. Again, my typing endurance is limited… and there are some things I have to do.
Thank you again, Tom, for taking hold of this subject. I’ve been trying to get feedback on it since I was in Costa Rica, and I could no longer make sense of notions like “rights.”
*
Back again. Okay,
Not sure which comment you mean, but on the question itself, my answer is no. The scientific method is a pretty recent invention, and moral philosophy – just in western civ – dates back to, what, at leas half a millennium BCE.
On Anscombe & Sidgwick: I think she gives credit by inference to Sidgwick for his own critique of earlier utilitarians, in pointing out that utilitarians had lost – in spite of heroic efforts – any teleological basis upon which to base their ethic. They made moral injunctions that were in the end arbitrary (or, in reality, based on what Anscombe called “survivals,” moral precepts that continued within culture long after the original context upon which they were based had disappeared). In lieu of any teleology, however, Sidgwick fudged the issue with the substitution of “intuitions.” Sidgwick himself did not appear satisfied with this, and said that where he had looked for “cosmos,” in the end he found only “chaos.”
George Moore and Bertrand Russell cribbed Sidgwick, only they spun this state into something vaguely liberating.
(I would disagree with you on humility, and with Sedgwick… this is a description of false humility, which often clothes an agenda. Genuine humility is a genuine recognition of one’s limitations; and the experience of it can be sometimes be very hard.)
Anscombe doesn’t demand that morality be logical… she – like you – sees some reified version of Morality as historically contingent; she wants our language to be logical when we discuss these matters, and she tables the issue of morality in the first few paragraphs precisely because she decries the utter incoherence of language we have come to use to have the discussion.
In the beginning of AM’s book, he poses a hypothetical situation… that some catastrophe has destroyed science… the practice, the organization, the institutions, all of it; whereupon, many years later, people discover artifacts of science, bits and pieces of texts; then attempt to reconstruct science from that in this future milieu. People…
This is the situation that Anscombe and MacIntyre are describing with regard to the field called “moral philosophy.”
more will follow
*
‘kay, here is another blogger on some of this, very helpful.
30 May 2011, 8:28 am(Boer) Tom:
My point about biology is that it seems that moral judgement is rather automatic – to some extent we already know what is wrong – when faced by an execution, but without the pomp and circumstance / cultural justification, i.e. when we don’t have cues to suspend judgement, we know that it is wrong – witness the revulsion at observing an execution in another culture, where you don’t know / haven’t practised responding to the cues. As to what we ought to do, I’d imagine we ought to continue our survival, and watch what patterns in our societies are pathological to survival, and undermine them in ways that produce to our expectation and observation the least additional pathological patterns/processes.
As to the problem of language – did the earlier moral philosophers not try to describe morality by analogy to their institutions? This comes back to the question of apparent scientific method – the different schools of thought arose from describing different aspects of ethical behaviour, with ‘hypotheses’ (OK, stories) to justify them? Not modern scientific method, but each trying to describe (and gaining followers based on the apparent accuracy of these descriptions, in addition to things like state support, fashion, etc.) good behaviour?
As to humility – sure, one can conceal an agenda, or one can put others at ease – if one is used to running into one’s own limitations, a bit of an underestimate tends to keep one out of trouble, and one tends to get along better – ‘I doubt I could do it, but I’d like to give it a shot just to see…’
As to rights, again I prefer descriptions (empirically heavy theories – I acknowledge that there is always much implicit theory) over unmoored philosophy. A right is a customary guarantee to a pattern of social interaction, often enforced by the state (often against the will of the state managers).
Coming back to the question of science, and the hypothetical situation – should they test their understanding of the scientific theories against evidence, basic concepts should re-arise, perhaps under different names, and the same essential theories should be developed, except as arises from our and their errors, unless nature itself has changed in such a fundamental fashion.
My confused thoughts for the morning…
30 May 2011, 11:31 am(Boer) Tom:
As I posted, I saw that you added a link. OK – as to law and ‘ought’ – perhaps I can state the matter differently. If you touch a hot plate, you instinctively pull your finger away. The scholastics tried to describe reality as arising from a series of laws, and science borrows the terminology, but science really describes consistent patterns (laws aren’t consistent patterns – at least the scholastics could coherently understand violations of their laws). So back to ought – if you want to live in a world where empires exist and perpetrate their crimes (i.e. if you’re not a direct victim of an empire and you’ve suppressed your moral judgement), go watch TV and allow the state managers etc. to do as they please. If however you find the reality horrendous, pull your finger away, and oppose them. Parallel to ought then – if you are serious about your goals, you ‘ought’ to take the actions that could in principle begin to achieve them – let’s make the law analogy clear as an analogy: Reality will judge your actions, and if you don’t want to do the time (e.g. live in an imperial world), don’t do the crime (leave the state and corporate managers to their activities). Actually, the pattern is far more brutal than law – a judge can be lenient, but the patterns of reality give no appeals (although certain patterns have quirks). If you commit a murder, someone is dead, irrespective of whether you get caught, as an example.
Likewise with science – if the post-science people bother to stick with their observations (through whatever philosophical meanderings), something similar would arise, and they might even salvage significant portions of science.
30 May 2011, 11:47 amStan:
But what makes an empire’s crime a “crime”? That is a juridical term, so if what is done within the bounds of existing law – even the empire’s law – isn’t the fact of what the empire does – say, plunder a resource, or throw someone off their land – just a fact… and the negative value that you or I might attach to it – whether calling if a “crime” or immorality – just an expression of our own, individual preferences? Same question for “pathology,” a medical term; how do we determine what is pathological without an appeal to some norm; and what is that norm?
-lawyer for the devil (-:
You can go to Haiti and see peasants routinely beating hell out of a mule to get it to work; while a cosmopolitan from hereabouts might feel an instant and deep revulsion at this behavior… a revulsion that might confirm certain prejudices, on the one hand, and that would feel to the cosmopolitan like a natural revulsion (putting one’s hand on a stove), though the peasants in question would have no clue what you are talking about… it’s a mule, that’s what you do when they don’t work! The stove in question doesn’t burn them.
It sounds like you are saying we can find the universal predicate for ethical behavior in science, specifically in “what promotes our survival.” How do we determine that? Who is “we”? Is anyone left out of that “we”? Who gets to decide? Can anyone predict what survival will be based on? Again, it seems you are looking for a universalizable higher authority to which we can appeal in quandary situations… kind of a categorical imperative built on a utilitarian telos determined by science? Jacques Cousteau once suggested that we need to kill off several tens of thousands of extra people a week over a number of years iirc in order to secure the carrying capacity of the earth. How does that suggestion square with what you are saying about “survival”? I don’t believe for a second that you accept that, by the way. And I may not be clear on what you meant.
30 May 2011, 2:40 pmStan:
Thinking on this, and I have to leave for physical therapy in about ten minutes… but on the topics of pornography and media violence, where studies and experiments demonstrate one thing (that these media representations do correspond to changes in behavior), there is a massive reaction against these scientific studies by people purporting to support freedom of expression (a Kantian notion, that of course has been manipulated by powerful folk like media producers, eg, and porn-producers). This is another example, it seems, of moral incoherence (leading to ‘ethics’ seen as quandaries), that leaves the field open at the end of the day to bureaucratic managers and power-brokers.
31 May 2011, 8:22 amMorocco Bama:
*******One can look at a materialist, Dogless universe as a nihlistic universe or one can look at it as a universe filled with creative choices to be made.*******
Excellent point, Curt, and it ties this thread to the earlier thread concerning Kings. It’s not coincidental, that connection, by the way. De, like ourselves, is working through this greater narrative that comprises many eddies of clarifications. Why your point interests me is because I have recently, and when I say recently I mean within the past several years, been entertaining the notion that this reality, and its many sub-realities, are a highly advanced simulation…….an artificially intelligent (and I’m quite willing to concede that artificial used in this context is contradictory, misleading and irrelevant) self-defining program created by an advanced evolution of ourselves in order to make some sense of its origins. Of course, another possibility could be, we are mere entertainment for our advanced evolutionary progeny….think of them as futuristic gamers and we are their avatars in this virtual world that may as well be real.
Considering that, if we were to come to this conclusion as a species, concomitantly, and in unison, perhaps we could begin to program this reality to our benefit since the code is open source and what we make of it. Think of the possibilities….they would be endless. Quantum Physics appears to imply this. As we know, matter, biological or otherwise, behaves differently when we focus on it….meaning we have an effect on it, and let’s face it, matter is what shapes our reality…..it is not only what we are made of, but it’s literally what we live in, and what sustains us…..and we can affect it by focusing on it. I’m not a religious person, rather I’m an agnostic, so I bring the following up not to preach, but instead salvage some, perhaps, positive interpretation from “scripture.” Particularly, speaking of particularization, the passage from Matthew 17:20 that says, according to the version and there are so many from which to choose, “because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” I would interchange knowledge with faith, and provide my own areligious interpretation, and that is that if only we would realize and accept the knowledge that we can make this thing here anything we want it to be, that afterall, it is an exercise that allows for infinite possibilities, and we don’t have to constrain the potential existences with incarcerating parameters that cordon our existence into an endless do-loop.
When I bring this up to most people, they find the concept chilling and repulsive, including my twelve year old daughter, but I find the concept, the possibility, refreshing and empowering. It doesn’t have to be this way……I’ve known that all along, and I’m trying to make sense, just as all of you are trying to do, as to why it is this way. We, collectively, have been limiting ourselves all along. We’ve created a box where none need exist. It’s time for the box to go…..meaning it’s time to evolve into our infinite possibilities.
31 May 2011, 8:44 amMorocco Bama:
Nazi Germany was a Nation of Laws. Law exists to maintain the social order, which in our case, is a codification of the hierarchy and your place in it.
31 May 2011, 8:54 am(Boer) Tom:
With regards to the mule – have they not merely suppressed their empathy for the mule, in order to extract work from the mule to survive? Have our fellow imperial citizens not suppressed their empathy (or developed it in directions that allow them to lie about themselves to suppress their moral indignation, e.g. peace corps/similar white man’s burden etc.) to extract resources from their (our) colonies?
Regarding imperial crimes, crime is strictly an analogy – part of how states secure their stability is by defining acts that are commonly considered immoral, e.g. unprovoked killing, as crimes (acts to be punished), and to develop a schadenfreude culture to suppress empathy for the punished, so that the state has a general freedom of action – anyone thus accused of a crime is thus subject to less empathy, and can be ‘destroyed’ – I’ll quote at length here from an old article by Brian D Maclean (a criminologist, and former armed bank robber here in Saskatoon… Notice how that affects your reading
):
I regard the beating of the mule to be comparably a crime; we can then ask how it compares to e.g. skinning a cat alive without narcosis by dumping it in boiling water [I won't link the video], and ask which society causes more suffering for animals. Calling the violent acts of the powerful ‘crimes’ is a tactic to force people into suspending their (state-encouraged) suspension of moral judgement.
‘Pathological’ as I used it was strictly harmful to long term [survival] – analogy, not relying on a medical norm – the relevant norms of what constitutes harmful to long term survival are biology (including medicine as relevant), chemistry, physics, ecology, criminology (I recall in one of the chapters of “The rich get richer, the poor get prison” a discussion of what should constitute criminology, whether harmful/immoral acts are generally to be considered as opposed to having the field defined by the state’s definitions of the ‘criminal’) – for the society that has lost science, they’ll have to rely on the patterns that they can observe, and will likely do so with whatever ideological superstructure/what-have-you that they are saddled with.
I don’t see why it should be universal per se – you deal with quandaries as they arise, and modify the principle (falsifiable hypotheses and the like) – although I’m not sure that your example falsifies the standards (reengaging moral judgement and seeking survival). Let’s take that example of culling the human population – Mr Cousteau might not want to reduce his comfort level to achieve the same goal (securing the carrying capacity of the earth) – and as a tactic, reengaging peoples’ moral judgement works wonders – Jonathan Swift with a caricature of Mr Cousteau’s lifestyle, and we avoid one abysmal outcome, and we talk frankly about adjusting our lifestyle expectations – if someone isn’t willing to tell people that their prospects are dim, that even if they continue to rape and pillage, they face extinction, give clear and frank moral judgements, use occasional sarcasm and caricature when they make foolish statements, hold their own fraudulent (analogy!) words against them until they change path and confront themselves and give them hope (compost, food, etc.), while taking every effort to ensure that they understand what is being said, I have to wonder if that person really want to avoid that quandary (culling the human population).
But let’s imagine if Mr Cousteau were right – that even with radical changes, no more production of plastics, recycling of human wastes, etc., the carrying capacity of the earth were threatened sans culling. This comes back to my dispute with Anscombe about Sidgwick – she wants to have her cake and eat it: on the one hand, she opposes utilitarianism, or at least consequentialism, but on the other hand, she wants the man who withdraws support from the child to avoid greater immorality to be ‘moral’. If you do your best to behave in the most moral fashion, when quandaries arise and in general, you might be regarded as a ‘moral’ person (optimizing morality), but that doesn’t make your (least) immoral (among the choices you had) moral – the high estimation of your character (falsely stated, your ‘morality’) is from suspension of moral judgement, arising from empathy for your position (facing quandaries) – the child is still destitute. If we have to cull the population, can we do so in the way that involves (by our estimation) the least additional immoral acts, or do we jettison morality altogether?
31 May 2011, 11:29 amm.c.:
Master Status in the U.S. means having money, enough to hire a good attorney if you need one, living in a good upscale expensive neighborhood with good schools, and relatively low crime and/or a robust police force, maybe supplemented by private security. Having good private medical & dental insurance which comes with a pecuniary cost. Goping to a church with a membership high on the socioeconomic ladder, so Sunday mornings are in a way a form of social networking even at the Church softball game or horseshoe pit, not to mention the golf course.
31 May 2011, 12:09 pm(Boer) Tom:
@m.c.
Interesting reinterpretation of ‘master’ status… I think what Maclean had in mind was more ‘primary’ status – i.e. what is generally determinative/has greater influence… I’ll keep that line in mind, though…
@Stan – was the reason that Aristotle’s ethics lacked a sense of duty/obligation/’oughtness’ that he didn’t have a law conception of ethics, or because he was part of a very violent ruling elite that didn’t answer to anyone, and that he addressed himself to fellow members of this elite? He told Alexander to be “a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants”! I see an implicit ought there, if not a moral one.
31 May 2011, 12:59 pmMichael Anderson:
Downloaded the essay and am keeping the reference to “After Virtue” for later perusal. Looks thick indeed. Wiki synopsis mentions “A Canticle For Leibowitz”, which I HAVE read 3 times, the last immediately after 9/11. “Facts” without context becomes knowledge-of-knowledge, which may or may not be knowledge of anything. In “Canticle”, the (Catholic) monks were preserving the shreds of knowledge left after a nuclear holocaust and breakdown of civilization, waiting for a great integrator, one who could take the arcane, mystical knowledge of the ancients and make sense of it. They got what the CIA/JCOS/Corporate alliance had planned for us in October of 1962…again.
A couple of quotes:
“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.”
“Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were there minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.”
31 May 2011, 2:43 pmStan:
I’ll try to get my head around this tomorrow after work, and then I promise to give it the attention it deserves, Tom. Got a meeting tonight, then I gotta faceplant.
Quick reaction here… just ’cause I’ve been picking up Illich again, and studying on the “archeology of ideas.”
Empathy.
Wiki sez Empathy was invented in 1909, by psychologist Edward Titchner – again a medical/psychiatric concept… and as it is used above, failure of empathy might be called Empathy-Deficit Disorder.
Is the Haitian who beats his mule really suppressing anything; or has he simply not been trained by his culture to care about how a mule might feel? There is a difference.
Not being flippant here; this is where my head is at right now. In how many ways have we generalized (including retrojecting in time or transferring across cultures) our own distinctly modern understandings and failed to recognize that we are seeing through an interpretive framework that is every bit as contingent as those we think we’ve left behind?
I’m extremely sentimental with babies; but I know that all people are not, nor have most people always been…
31 May 2011, 5:43 pmDeAnander:
The Self-Inflicted Injury of Emotional Callousness
post-n-run
this is a fascinating thread — whether OT or not
— and I’d like to join in more volubly but am swamped with face-space stuff. more later I hope.
1 June 2011, 2:32 amStan:
quick hit-n-run @ Michael before today’s obligations leave the station…
The so-called Dark Ages were actually marked by a great deal of discovery and innovation: heavy plow, tidal mill, et al.
Science has been practiced long before it became segregated out from life as an academic discipline and a strictly controlled method. The big change toward scientism was noted above in the quote about Bacon.
One of the modern beliefs – mistaken in my view – is that science discovers some principle first, then applies the principle to the development of a technique or gadget. In reality, far more often, the process is the reverse: the technique or gadget is developed; and the principle is ascertained afterward by observing it. What that modern belief supports is an intellectual division of labor, credentialling, educational monopoly, and specialization (the first cousin of de-skilling).
1 June 2011, 5:21 amMorocco Bama:
Certainly one interpretation of the Monk’s function is to preserve the Phoenix so that it may rise from the ashes of the invariable collapses. I know many look fondly upon the institution and purpose of Monks, but I don’t necessarily take such a fond view. Yes, they do sequester much of what is perceived as “good” in culture, but the “good” is determinately joined with the bad, so when the integrator, and thus the integration, comes again, the Phoenix rises and the seeds that sowed the previous rise, crash and burn, are planted and nurtured once again….hence the do-loop. Perhaps it’s time to do away with the Phoenix, and hence the Monks. Can we get off the Merry-Go-Round and break free of this self-imposed do loop once and for all? Can we fly free of this exile of our own creation rather than allowing the Phoenix to do our flying for us?
The is an author, Morris Berman, who has been predicting the fall of this Empire for a couple of decades now. That’s not especially noteworthy since many, if not all, posting here have prognosticated the same thing for at least as long as that, including myself, but what is noteworthy is that he advocates becoming a loose network of Monks during the decline and slide into another “Dark Age,” ostensibly to preserve “high culture” for a time when the Phoenix rises once again. Yes, the secret recipe for Miracle Whip must be safely secured, for it is this recipe that is the pinnacle of Empire’s achievements. Seriously though, no more Monks and no more Phoenix’s. At this point, I consider them anti-evolutionary, and if we are to move onward and outward, we must shed our former skins completely, removing all vestiges of antiquity.
http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/
1 June 2011, 7:21 amStan:
This is, of course, simply not possible. The language we are using now carries many vestiges of antiquity; we are historical beings through and through. We can’t change that any more than we can beam ourselves off the planet.
(I liked your link though.)
*
Even though I need to work, I keep getting drawn back to this conversation in different ways. This one may seem an outlier, but it occurred to me while the topic was interrupting my little job (where I am supposed to be writing something on the different aspects of criminology, ugh).
Dunbar, institutions, etc, again. I know it fits in here somewhere, but I just had to throw this in: someone said once that when you try to understand an institution, don’t look at what it purports to do; look at the conflict for which the institution serves as a site.
That is all.
1 June 2011, 8:17 amMorocco Bama:
********We can’t change that any more than we can beam ourselves off the planet.********
But those with the means to do so, are working on “beaming us off the planet.” Here’s an intriguing documentary I stumbled across in the last year. It’s a little rough around the edges, but that doesn’t detract from the valuable discussions taking place, and those who are in the position to steer the destiny of Human Existence are steering….quite emphatically and dilligently. This is not a Democratic Process. The High Priests of Science, with the full force of Plutocratic support, are charting that course for us, and we should all be aware of that course’s trajectory. The question is, will that technological Ark of Salvation come before the next deluge-like collapse, for the very System that is constructing that “beam us off the planet” Ark, is the very system that manifests an environment that necessitates an Ark of Salvation.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7141762977713668208#
1 June 2011, 8:31 am(Boer) Tom:
With regards to empathy, its reality and suppression, and your baby example, I do think that the concept has a substantial empirical correlative. Take the ‘psychopath’ (purportedly no empathy) again – I’d say that he’s suppressed his empathy, and that it comes out, in his whininess (the whole world is against him, or some actual victim of his action or someone else is trying to harm him, etc.) – maybe mirror neurons, maybe something else – he’s feeling the pain that he’s inflicting. when you say that certain people “aren’t empathetic to babies,” do you mean that it is a bizarre experience to them when a baby laughs or cries, perhaps like observing fish or ants, or do you mean that they are irritated and angered? The latter two are empathetic responses – repression isn’t really accurate (nor is it when I call the psychopath’s empathy repressed) – their empathetic response is callous – my own guess is that a kind response in empathy is baseline for most people, and that they are socialized into a callous empathetic response – one of the others here posted a link some months ago about how Germans would as a general rule respond with callousness to their children’s emotional displays, until well into the 20th century (or perhaps starting in the 20th – I recall that the iron maiden was first used in the 20th).
1 June 2011, 11:59 am(Boer) Tom:
@De
1 June 2011, 12:17 pmThat article sums up an experience I had quite recently. I’ve been moving in an opposite direction to you guys, having become an atheist about half a year ago, and have thus had opportunity to engage in frank discussions with several atheists about political matters. The advantage of moving religion out of the discussion is that non-religious callous people don’t have to pretend to abide by moral standards – they’ve suppressed their moral judgement of their own society and state. I introduced one to the crimes of his state (Canadian) in Rwanda, DRC and Haiti, so his first question was to check that I was in fact morally judging his state – something that seemed doubtful to him. I then thwarted his argument by pointing out that states have no moral capacity, i.e. with the idea that morality is biological. He then implied that I’m irrational, for complaining about the crimes, as they probably improve Canada’s GDP, and that since states have no moral capacity, they should thus not be subject to moral judgement. My response, that the victims are harmed by the acts in question, and that I hadn’t suppressed my empathy to those victims, got him very awkward, and ended the discussion – I’ll have to see what happens…
Michael Anderson:
@ Stan—-acknowledged. Miller was a pessimist (he committed suicide), and probably at that time the book was written (1959)was laboring under the “modernist” view of the Middle Ages, as we were all laboring under Cold War mythology.
Another (somewhat humorous) quote, about our egotism…one, as a musician, I see time and time again:
“There were spaceships again in that century, an dthe ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species that considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speechmakers.”
Easy to get “disconnected” when you’ve had an expensive meal and a couple of drinks.
@ Morocco:
Yup…get the Monks, whoever and however they organize themselves, out of it. That was another of Miller’s points, I think. The whole mad circle/cycle starts over when you keep going back to what was. Ever read “A Life in 5 Short Chapters”? Time to walk down another street.
1 June 2011, 3:07 pmMichael Anderson:
Mmmm…I retract the Monk statement. Morocco, that video scares me. Hubris again…
But not walking down another street. One without hubris.
1 June 2011, 3:33 pmMorocco Bama:
Michael, that video scares the hell out of me, as well. The thought of uploading this Merry-Go-Round to a seemingly eternal virtual world of bits and bytes is a nightmare of cosmic proportions to me.
Somehow, Col. Kurtz comes to mind when pondering all of this. I only mention that because Apocalypse Now was on this week-end along with the countless other movies glorifying war. Apoc Now is the only one I bothered to watch, only because I catch something new every time I watch it, and I get high off its anti-establishment tone.
The Horror. The Horror.
I did think the metaphor of “Burning Man” was apt. I also subscribe to metaphorically “Burning Man” in its current state of existence, which is the same sentiment as walking down another street, because I feel that street will not, and cannot, present itself until the immolation of our former selves is complete.
Stan, I assume your statement implies that you subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which simply put, asserts that thoughts and behavior are determined (or are at least partially influenced) by language. I adhere to the weaker version of that, meaning linguistics does have partial influence, but there other equally important factors to be considered, some of which we have not even yet discovered.
1 June 2011, 3:53 pmStan:
On empathy… thinking now about the parable of the Samaritan, as an example of a pre-modern notion (cuz I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well): the Samaritan feels compassion. In other instances in older literature, one person can feel compassion for another. But “empathy” shows up in the early 20C along with verbiage of psychoanalysis, the Progressive movement, and so on. It is not what one particular person feels for another particular person (or even beast). Empathy becomes a medical term, then later it is incorporated into the language (along with its medical echoes) as a popular term. We now see ourselves as medical subjects, as ids-egos-superegos, or a collection of identities (I’m not Stan, I’m (a) American (b) white (c) male (d) middle-aged (e) etc (d) fragmented), or as immune systems, or a DNA profiles, or as anything except just persons – wholly self-contained. Empathy is an essence that we have or lack… like a vitamin deficiency. Modernity is an out-of-body experience, that we have come to accept because we don’t know anything else. Instead of having (possessive of something apart) empathy, why can’t I just love you, care for you, befriend you?
Had to do one of those content-mill pieces today on violence and the media, and I came across the three predominant and conflicting theories of aggression. iirc, they are cathartic, rehearsal and disinhibition theories. Cathartic theory is the kind that says if you beat up a pillow and scream at it, or if you whack off to violent porn, you are releasing a build-up of aggression (the stream boiler theory, I call it). Rehearsal theory says that what you see and practice most often becomes habitual and easier with each iteration. Disinhibition says that we become more able to do something as inhibitions against it are worn away by practice (or alcohol, etc). Tho DI theory doesn’t say we start with “empathy,” it says inhibitions are trained; though if we begin with the assumption that empathy is a component of a “healthy” person (there we have an impossibly long list of particular definitions as the premise for a supposed universal), then we might be dealing with a modified disinhibition theory.
I tend toward the rehearsal theory; and that applies to violence as well as virtue. These are things that require training and practice, every bit as much as I’d require training and practice to learn to sail a boat or knit a sweater (or practice compassion).
Different cultures train their individuals for different things. Saying there is no coherent universal account of human nature that can underwrite morality is not saying there is no basis upon which an individual can be judged virtuous or not, can try to be virtuous or not. But that predicate is in culture, and the culture is built on a narrative. Now we live in an anti-culture that has thrown out narratives (or thinks it has – it actually drowns in multiple and contradictory ones); and with it we have thrown out any possibility of moral coherence.
When I was a communist, I had in a sense overcome that… because I became part of a culture that had a narrative (historical and with its own mythos). When I was in Special Operations, we had a narrative (also historical with its own mythos). These narratives formed these communities. As a Christian now, I am a member of a narrative-formed community. I can refer to my community and its narrative to know what to do when I walk out into the world every day… to know what virtues are (qualities that will enable me to move toward my telos).
But if I seek to define virtue (in order to figure out how to live) in late capitalist society, here in the US… I have nothing coherent, and no possibility of finding it. It lacks the necessary particularity. It is abstracted, literally disembodied, cut off.
1 June 2011, 5:21 pmDeAnander:
This thread is getting pretty mycelial — branching off madly in all directions — which is fine by me. Let a thousand trains of thought collide!
I’ve been mulling over (in the few lucid moments when I’m not frantically wrestling with mechanical things under time pressure) rootless’ (as ever) thought provoking nitpicks.
One obvious question about the past is, if life was really “nasty brutish and short,” was that because of a lack of technology or because of a presence of oppression? that is, were peasants hungry and miserable because they really needed big tractors (and fossil fuel to run them, and pesticides and herbicides and synthetic NPK) to produce more food — or were they hungry and miserable because the aristocracy taxed them to death, enclosed their land, used them as cannon fodder, etc? We have plenty of literature (and living testimonial) that prosperous healthy peasants considered themselves quite happy and fortunate, and that the exodus to the cities and industrial labour was not exactly voluntary: we wuz pushed.
Our relationship to the past is a troubled one. I take heed of rootless’ warning not to romanticise the past, but I am wary also of what some bright person called the immense condescension of posterity (or wtte), i.e. the smug certainty that we, now, in our generation, are so much smarter and better off than anyone ever before (they were all so deprived and dumb back then). I am reminded irresistibly of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the US grunt in Iraq who, interviewed by the embedded journos, said that he felt really sorry for the Iraqis: they live in this dang desert and hell, they don’t even have Taco Bell.
Anyway, my original meditation was I think about agency, about the ways in which individual perception, the use of the sense, skill, memory and judgment are somehow devalued or re-oriented by the glut of identical mass-produced goods. Many things are reduced to “commodity” (no thought required) and many other things are compared only by means of lists of attributes (factory specifications) expressed in standardised units (shopping for a digital camera for example). Compared to people in a pre-warholistic universe we spend less time handling, smelling, examining objects — particularly biotic materials — and assessing their quality as individual items.
This article, though lightweight, pursues the theme. The author suggests that the experience of food preparation (peeling, crushing, cooking, chewing) contributes to the satisfaction of eating, and that foods requiring no handling are somehow less satisfying; this in turn suggests yet another basis for the modern tendency to overconsume “convenience” foods which (aside from carrying a whopping dose of the sugar/salt/grease stimulus package) require no preparation by the eater.
We seem to be in tension between two ideals of human existence. One we might call the subsistence or peasant aesthetic, in which almost everything is made and done by the labour of our own hands, with the attendant satisfactions of exercising skill, memory, reasoning and the senses. Our shoes fit perfectly because we made them ourselves for our own feet. Another we might call the aristocratic aesthetic, in which everything is done for us and we have only to wave a languid hand and order more grapes, without needing to know anything about them other than that they will be fresh, perfect, and promptly delivered on a silver platter. The aristocratic aesthetic obviously offers some satisfactions also: laziness, convenience, and the comforting sense of privilege or power that goes with the convenience.
A core dream of industrial Progress seems to be to confer the aristocratic lifestyle on all persons, that is, to remove physical effort and the exercise of any physical skill from daily life: energy slaves will do all the work for us, electronic devices will do the remembering, and we will have only to push a button (or in our more sophisticated 21st century version, speak to voice-control circuitry). Part of this process is the reduction of all things to identical commodity items — this relieves the aristocratic brain of the effort of making choices or evaluating quality. The question I’m asking is whether all these skills and activities of which we are being relieved are actually (as our dominant ideology insists) mere drudgery, or whether they have value and satisfaction in their own right. Whether, in other words, we’re actually missing something more than just nutritionally when we face that bin of damn-near-identical factory-farmed Red Delicious apples.
If we eliminated all “drudgery” from life, what would be left?
And what of the billions who labour at insanely repetitive tasks in sweatshop conditions to manufacture the gizmos (energy slaves) that allegedly remove the drudgery from our lives? Is there some law of Conservation of Drudgery, that says that somewhere, for every languid aristo, there must be N labouring serfs? The promise of industrialism was always that all human drudgery would be eliminated, that the work week would shrink, that we would all have oodles of leisure time to cultivate our minds and become a society of great thinkers, artists, and so on. Kind of like the nuke industry’s “too cheap to meter”, the reality has been a bit different. C19 conditions are exported to third world nations, wealth accumulation and consolidation continues at a startling pace, N Americans still have less vacation and work longer hours than people in other “advanced” nations, and we all have oodles of leisure time to watch American Idol and unlimited online porno. And the price of all this utopia is a planetary bankruptcy (biotic, climatic, hydrological) of staggering and terrifying proportions — in other words, an overwhelming dystopia on the doorstep and knocking.
Our relationship to the past is troubled, but so, at present, is our relationship to industrialism and to technomanagerial visions of the future. We seem to swing between romanticising the past and despising it (and romanticising a future that never arrives but always justifies the latest round of abuse and recklessness). I guess I am wondering about the possibility of living in the present, on a break-even basis, a subsistence-plus basis, within our means.
Here is Ted Trainer on a “simpler” narrative of the future. It sounds remarkably attractive to me, particularly as compared to the world being created at Fort MacMurray, Fukushima, in the GOM, in Appalachia, etc.
2 June 2011, 12:01 amStan:
…experts will do our thinking for us, technocrats will do our decision-making for us, stamped-out strip malls will do our neighborhoods for us, general purpose money will do our discrimination for us… seems part of the same process (ref Hornborg)
then our aristocratic indulgences turn us into dependents (who actually work longer each day than the average peasant)
magic
2 June 2011, 7:27 amMichael Anderson:
Been pondering Stan’s comments about science/religion (science AS religion), and remembering from my youth an article in Reader’s Digest (!) about why scientists believe in God (or some sort of “prime cause”). Looked up some links, here presented for perusal:
http://www.livescience.com/379-scientists-belief-god-varies-starkly-discipline.html
http://www.frame-poythress.org/poythress_articles/2003Why.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html?pagewanted=print
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/sep/04/science.research
Speaking for myself only, it would seem intellectually absurd to believe we can know it all, that we can be as little gods (as is frighteningly presented in Morocco Bama’s vid links). We are a PART of it all….creation, that is.
2 June 2011, 1:38 pmDeAnander:
Dependency… in and of itself is not a bad thing — entanglement, community, the web of obligation and gift and duty that made us such a successful species in the first place. We depend upon each other always, as humans… but there’s a new kind of dependency, a dependency on people distant from us who don’t give a hoot about us, that troubles me about our present condition.
There’s food on the supermarket shelves, not because someone wants us to be fed, but because someone wants to make money. The money goes far away, the person collecting it is far away. The food comes from far away. It only gets here because someone is making money selling jet and truck fuel to someone else who is only delivering food (could be delivering anything really, it’s all just commodity) because they can make money. It’s not about food, and it’s not about us. It’s about money. And we depend on all this, this intricate web of abstract money, literally for our daily bread. Absurdly long supply chains, absurdly complex and dishonest financial instruments: a very fragile complexity (as contrasted with the robust complexity of e.g. the soil food web) underlies this supply of a most essential need.
I am not against long-haul trade and the entry of the exotic into our lives — this too is a part of our human story since forever. But the insinuation of long-haul trade and finance (an abject dependency on distant strangers for our bare survival) into the necessities of life as well as the luxuries, troubles me. Any sane household budget secures the necessities first, and only then indulges in discretionary or wasteful spending. We have managed to make our food system surely the most wasteful ever in history, the most fragile, inflicting the most dependency and the most precarity (despite the transient glut of a narrowly constrained variety of generic Food Products on the shelves)…
Sorry, gotta get back to facespace and work. But Tainter and others observe that when complex civilisations fall on their face, the people who generally survive are the peasants at the periphery: they have food security. If we could manage to integrate food security, local food production, regional food autarky, into the city itself, then our civilisation (literally our “dwelling in cities”) would probably have a longer, er, shelf-life…
2 June 2011, 3:16 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Stan
2 June 2011, 5:24 pmI’ll step on your toes a bit longer – I’m saying that any behaviour has biological repercussions – if we define compassion (or empathy, etc.) in a reductive way, we can start to glimpse at our assumptions. As an example, take ‘love’ – Hannah Arendt had some interesting comments on how philos was understood by the Greeks of the time (it was in the anthology Men in Dark Times) – our referents for ‘love,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘empathy’ (side-note: as I understand it, the lack of empathy is Aspergers and Autism, not cruelty – I’m not buying the original concept, but taking from it what I find coherent – I’m grateful though for the background – I never sensed the medical aspect, perhaps because I’m younger, and that sense is being lost to my generation) are others’ descriptions coupled with how we interpret our biological experiences in terms of these concepts (heuristics). If we have sufficiently reductive concepts, we can see what we are trying to describe with our less reductive concepts, and ask ourselves (start searching for concepts and practices that describe) what we want.
(Boer) Tom:
Perhaps just to be clear – the starting (reductive) concepts don’t describe all of reality – even on the assumption that some set of reductive concepts can explain or predict reality, it would not be obvious that we have that entire set (thus the exercise – see what our existing reductive concepts fail to describe), and even when we have the entire set (on the assumption that it exists), the consequences of a given choice need not be obvious, clear, stable, etc.
As to acculturation/rehearsal theory – let’s say that we rehearse for violence and/or kindness. The ‘subconscious mind’ (really subconscious processing capability of the brain) is presumably responsible. It would need to have some referents. Grant reductive empathy (mirror neurons/pain sharing) reality for the sake of argument – the ‘rehearsal’ involves the response to the shared pain (thus the whininess of cruel people, etc, again – the program is dependent on the processor’s structure, to use a computer analogy) – in fact, how would someone be deliberately cruel without (reductive) empathy? Is cruelty the same thing as callousness? Isn’t cruelty precisely using empathy to harm, whereas callousness is a lack of empathy, without intent to harm?
As to rehearsal, I think the rehearsal occurs as emotional programs, a la Shalif – I’m still curious for comment on his method.
2 June 2011, 5:48 pmMorocco Bama:
I’m not so sure about the prudence of embracing “long-haul trade and the entry of the exotic into our lives.” Considering your charge to neither demonize nor romanticize the past, what was the ultimate motivation for, and function of, this trade in human history, and was this “trade” a part of all human history, including the 200,000 years we were Hunter-Gatherers, or was it just the history of Civilization, which is approximately the past 12,000 years?
It seems to me that the motivation was to possess. Is the desire to possess, or what has been described as a “desire,” a biological imperative, or a learned/programmed behavior serendipitously stumbled upon in our evolutionary past? Evolution is often looked upon positively or favorably, but that is fallacious, IMHO. Evolution is merely valueless change, IMHO. The value ascribed to it is arbitrary and subjective……and, I would say, self-serving.
A movie that comes to mind that visualizes what I’m thinking here is The Gods Must Be Crazy. It portrayed the havoc an exotic trinket dropped from the sky played on a “primitive” Bush Tribe in Africa who theretofore had never had any contact with Civilization.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GorHLQ-jLRQ
3 June 2011, 6:55 amm.c.:
I grabbed a good dictionary yesterday. Commiseration is the public display of Compassion & Empathy. The act of showing Sympathy. Kind of their cheaper shallower cousin. It’s also the cheap shallow opposite to Callousness. So when a politician kisses babies but for to gather votes. Nothing wrong per se with the public display of positive emotion but when it masks true intentions it can be deceptive.
3 June 2011, 11:49 amKim Sky:
To Honor: Poet Javier Sicilia and lead spokesperson for the new movement to end violence in Mexico. To quote from an article on Narconews: One of the first actions of this movement was to hang plaques with the names of the dead in the central squares of the cities and towns “to rescue the spirit of every one of the victims of this Rotted State. These victims have names. They are not statistics.”
Reading about this man and his two month struggle to deal with the death of his son has transformed me. Apparently he was good friends with Ivan Illich. Other major influences can be found at: http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4439.html
Very powerful are (highly recommend):
Javier Sicilia’s Open Letter to Mexico’s Politicians and Criminals (April 4, 2011)
http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4346.html
Sicilia to Journalists: “I Think My Son Would be Very Proud” (June 1, 2011)
http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4436.html
From the above link is an introduction to an amazing philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. “…his fundamental work is called Homo Sacer (“The Sacred Man” or “The Accursed Man”). The Accursed Man was a figure that existed centuries ago in ancient Roman Times. He was sacred in the negative sense. He was a man that wasn’t protected by the state, and if he was murdered, it would be treated with total impunity. And in this current piece of omission, with the lack of justice here, all of us here in Mexico have turned into the same kind of Accursed Man. Accursed, in the sense that, at any time, we can be murdered. We can be kidnapped. And these crimes will not be investigated.
Lot’s out there about/written by Giorgio Agamben. Brilliant.
Javier Sicilia also began two magazines: Ixtus launched in 1994 and Conspiratio launched in 2009 http://www.conspiratio.com.mx/
3 June 2011, 12:09 pmKim Sky:
The Word is sacred – Assuming that most of you will not follow the links I posted above I want to include another quote from Javier Sicilia:
QUESTION: I’ve heard you’re giving up poetry for the time being. As many of us are artists in some way, I wonder, is giving up your means of expression, especially during a time of such pain, a good choice?
ANSWER (Javier Sicilia): In terms poetry, I might have to translate this in Christian keynotes. Because I am a practicing believer. I come from a tradition that has an immense respect for the Word. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the world, life, human life, and everything on earth through the Word.
The Word is sacred. All the books of the great religious traditions are poetry and are sacred words. And I always believed poetry in the modern world is a continuation of this tradition of making the word sacred. That sacred word that in my tradition was enfleshed in a man called Jesus. An innocent who was Word incarnated, and was murdered.
And my son was a face of that sacred Word. When they murdered him, when they strangled him, they strangled the poetry out of me as well. And on Good Friday, I decided to turn to silence. And I will await the rebirth or the re-emergence of my nation in order for that word to re-emerge in myself. You can strangle the verse but you can’t shut up the poet. I think that after all, the word that called for this mobilization is the word of a poet. And I think mobilization is a great form of poetry in motion.
Full article for excerpt above:
3 June 2011, 12:29 pmSicilia to Journalists: “I Think My Son Would be Very Proud” (June 1, 2011)
http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4436.html
Stan:
Thank you for this, Kim.
3 June 2011, 2:02 pmMorocco Bama:
You have to be very careful with relying on, and referencing, The Word in these matters. The Word is open to a myriad of interpretations, and has been, and is being, used to justify a bevy of slaughterous activities throughout its relatively short history. Take the Christian Zionists, for example, and their unrelenting support for the Apartheid State of Israel. Their interpretation and application of The Word is used to support and justify the slow genocide of an entire people, just as The Word was used to support and justify the slow, or not so slow, genocide of the indigenous Americans by the European Plunderers.
As I have said before, I’m agnostic, and the reason I’m not Atheist, is because I don’t want to devote that much time and energy to a faith of not-believing in something that can neither be proved, nor disproved. There are more important things in which to devote my life energy….like living life according to my own unofficial, and highly heretical, interpretation of The Word. But speaking of “intellectually absurd,” as Michael said above, it’s preposterous to believe that if a Progenitor exists for this thing we call Reality, that said Progenitor is as the Christian Religion, or any religion describes it. Take, for example, the Abrahamic Traditional notion that the Progenitor, named God, although according to the Abrahamic “Word,” this God explicitly advises not to call it anything or refer to it in any way, but that doesn’t stop the Peeps from having their Exotic Idols to worship, does it? According to that Word, or the interpretation of it, the Progenitor is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient. How anyone can believe, intellectually speaking, that the Progenitor could be anything but a Sadistically insane considering our current state of existence juxtaposed with the Progenitors powers in addition to the interpretation that we are apparently made in “his” image. I put quotes around “his” because no matter how diligently contemporary progressives attempt to fit The Word to a more progressive view of women, and their role in society, or what their perceived role should be, you can’t deny that the Abrahamic Tradition is one of Paternalism where the Woman is continually the scapegoat for all Humankind’s self-inflicted woes.
Based off of my observations of this Reality in which we currently live, including the carnage we see in Mexico, and everywhere across the Globe, the following is easily as an accurate description of a Progenitor of this thing here, as is any other description. It comes from the movie Shutter Island. It’s graphic, but poignant, and while I don’t believe it is a comprehensive description of the totality of Human Existence in its current state, it describes a substantial portion thereof. It’s certainly food for thought.
Or this one from the Devil’s Advocate:
Of course, when you’re down and out, this song from Shutter Island helps validate your feelings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxRp3pqwgo
4 June 2011, 8:12 amStan:
The word most associated with our current conundra is probably “progress.” Maybe, “the future.”
People who critique theology really ought to learn more about it before they write about it. There is plenty to critique, but lumping them all together as an unstudied caricature is not a critique. It’s a straw man fallacy.
4 June 2011, 12:00 pmMorocco Bama:
Do you often erect Strawmen to crticize what you wrongly accuse of being a Strawman? What I posted is not a critique of theology, by any means, nor was it meant to be. If you have a beef with anything I posted, call it out specifically, and rebut it….in your own words, if possible, rather than referring to some egghead who wrote a book about it. For example, do you deny that Judaism, Christianity and Islam share the same root structure? If not, do you deny that these three Monotheistic religious traditions are Paternalistic in nature? Do you deny that there have been myriad interpretations of the various Scriptural Words associated with the Sacred Texts of each of these respective religions? Do you deny that some of these interpretations have been used to justify all manner of violence in the name of “God?” Do you deny that some of these interpretations have been used to keep women in their so-called place and subservient to men within the social hierarchy?
4 June 2011, 12:49 pmStan:
I deny that you can make such generalizations, yes; but I specifically was referring to your account of theodicy. I also deny that you can separate out some category called “religion” from any other category of social existence; and that therefore to lay all that you do at the doorstep of “religion” is both invalid and incomplete. The distinction between “religious and secular” is a fairly recent invention – and it one that corresponds to a period in history where mass violence has been unparalleled by any other. Most of that violence was not “religiously” motivated, even when there were a few attempts to rationalize it through various scriptures. Most of it was motivated by so-called secular visions of The Future, Progress, Civilization, etc, with not a little old fashioned greed thrown in.
The teleology that kills and maims and terrorizes most women in this society, it seems to me, is not the Kingdom of God, but Masculinity. In terms of what people actually commit to follow in practice (and not just in passing), a lot more men are chasing Masculinity with a lot more consistency than they are the Word… in my own faith, the Word is not the Bible (that would be a book); it is the Word Made Flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Not trying to proselytize… I’m just pointing out what that term means to some of us who are not included in your generalizations… and that Word tells us two sure ways to Hell – engage in violence or get rich. Another conviction that was not represented in your account.
I’m not trying to start a flame-fest. I’m telling you that you are misrepresenting me and others.
4 June 2011, 2:48 pmKim Sky:
Morrocco: Wow, what a response to the workings of a man named Javier Sicilia! A kind of accounting of all the big bad things that can be attributed to the One-god religions?
Perhaps any ideology should be evaluated in terms of the context in which it exists — the evolving societies we belong to.
I am an atheist, but am humbly aware that the scientific has been elevated to such a level that we have been cut off from our human histories, and therefore are left with very narrow tools with which to evaluate life. I believe that the life that Javier has lived until this time has equipped him with an ability to become a leader, a voice for virtually all persons in Mexico. Another atheist friend of mine claims that art(which Javier was an expert) and religion are remarkably similar. Using various tools: symbols, stories, philosophies, etc. to craft a piece (poetry/painting etc) to assist in our interpretation of this life/world we walk and live in.
As the dialog of this page is called: Honouring the Particular. I have yet to see a more powerful physical example of this as understood and realized by anyone. Javier – to hang plaques with the names of the dead in the central squares of the cities and towns to rescue the spirit of every one of the victims.
For me, his example is a kind of truth telling that can physically enter and change the very cells of someone’s body. Javier has done that for me. He speaks in a language that I can understand.
To lead by example is powerful, whether some of the ideas come from Catholicism or the Devil makes no difference to me. This fellow is making very real, very beautiful, correct responses to a decaying state. And — he has the audacity to believe the state can in fact know redemption. Wow.
This IS Sacred.
4 June 2011, 3:40 pmMorocco Bama:
Kim, Christianity is the religion, and, I agree with Stan on this and you, therefore, the culture of the Conquerors…in Mexico’s case, the Spanish. I have trouble with any Mestizo who embraces Christianity because in doing so, IMO, is to continue to allow the Conquerors to hold sway, even when they are no longer in charge, they are still in charge by virtue of impregnating the indigenous cultures with their poisonous culture and traditions. It’s an incongruent combination, and it appears to me, for there to be true redemption for the indigenous peoples of Mexico, it would be a return to their indigenous roots absent the poison of the Conquerors. A purging should be in order. I have nothing against Javier. I respect anyone who stands up to Power and Injustice, but I take issue with the whole Word thing. My version of the Word is made flesh through everyone and anyone who stands against Power and injustice and stands for Justice and Equity, among other principles that allow for peaceful and harmonious coexistence.
Stan, I don’t disagree with much of what you said in your past comment, but I’ve been there and done that with the Word made Flesh thing. I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Jesuit institutions through undergrad. I studied it so much, I lost my faith….and I don’t consider that a negative. The Jesuits told us that they would challenge our faith, and we would either lose it, or have a stronger faith as a result of the rigor. I lost it. Yes, there were many who blew the priests off and skated by without giving a rat’s ass….I still know a number of them and they still call themselves Catholics and attend Mass and make sure the kiddies receive their Sacraments, but their faith was not challenged, because they didn’t let it be….they were either apathetic, or afraid.
By the way, it wasn’t easy letting it go. I was plagued with horrific nightmares for several years. Nightmares of Satan and Hell. I woke up from some of these nightmares with what can only be described as demons by my bedside….such was the power of my conditioning. I broke through it, and from it, with no support…..just sheer will. In fact, I was harangued, and am still harangued to this day, for “leaving the faith,” and not raising my children in it.
That being said, I respect a lot of the message, at least how I interpret it, and that interpretation has changed over the years as I have come across material, or had additional life experiences from which to use as benchmarks and context.
What I mean to say is, I haven’t thrown the baby out with the bathwater. There is value to be gleaned, but Obeisance to Authority is not one of those babies. I like the Beatitudes, for example, and I consider this the cornerstone of what the value should be, but for many Christians, and I know many of them, obviously, this is not the value they attain or retain. What I will also say is, there are many paths to enlightenment and personal evolution. The message you attribute to a God made Flesh is ubiquitous despite that concept and despite the Bible or any other Holy Scripture. Any avid reader knows this. The Words of the Prophets Are Written On The Subway Wall. I don’t need to pay homage to an Authority to receive that education. It’s everywhere, if we just use our eyes and ears.
4 June 2011, 4:50 pmStan:
Interesting examples of the idea of narrative from “After Virtue,” as I near the end of the first reading.
Various descriptions, all equally accurate, of two actions.
(1) A man is
(a) digging
(b) gardening
(c) taking exercise
(d) preparing for winter
(e) pleasing his wife
(subplot – it pleases his wife that he is taking exercise, not that he is gardening)
(2) A woman is
(a) writing a sentence
(b) finishing her book
(c) trying to get tenure
Neither singular actions nor sequences of action are intelligible without a narrative.
Now a further point on intelligibility.
You are standing at the bus stop and a person you don’t know approaches you and says “The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.”
The episode may be psychotic and therefore unintelligible (unintelligibility defining it as psychotic).
Or the person mistook you for someone he’d met yesterday in the library, where the question had come up.
Or he just left his therapist who told him to be more spontaneous.
Or he is a spy who has just mistaken you for his contact and given his verbal bona fides.
Narrative… matters.
4 June 2011, 5:25 pmMorocco Bama:
Here’s a link to an interesting, grass roots, honest, wholesome, non-Elitist Intellectual discussion about Liberal Christianity. The comments are interesting, as well, and much of what is being said validates my own thoughts and feelings on the subject. This will be the last I say on the subject, because, as I mentioned, it’s just not worth the time and energy. Been there, done that, and it’s not worth it, to me.
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/04/women-submit-or-so-says-bible.html
Here’s a comment that resonated with me.
5 June 2011, 9:07 ammichele:
Just wanted to clarify a comment regarding the recent invention of differentiation between what is “secular” and what is “religious.” That would be false..one has only to look to the Stoics of philosophy to know that the distinction has been with us for centuries. A primary base for philosophical discourse comes from the dichotomy that on the one hand holds that reason is impossible without divine inspiration, and on the other, that reason is not possible when infused with dogmatic thought. Anyway..i just felt it was important to establish this fact..not my own of course, but factual nonetheless.
5 June 2011, 10:28 amStan:
You miss the point. I’ll take responsibility for that because I didn’t elaborate. I don’t mean there have never been intellectual disputes between the two positions you describe… or other more nuanced ones, for that matter. Modernism is under review here as an an epoch.
Today, for example, most people in society separate secular from religious as a matter of course, and furthermore hold to the idea that, for example, governance is in the realm of the secular and ideas of the sacred are issues of individual preference in a realm (again separated) that is private as opposed to public.
Pre-modern cultures did not understand such a separation of realms, but understood the world as of a single fabric (monism). Cartesian dualism is the philosophical basis of modernity.
Certainly, Plato had his own dualism, but even that was not the dualism of Descartes.
The typical Roman understood his or her gods to be every much a part of the material world as sticks and stones. Same for medieval peasant and her or his beliefs about both the trinity and the soil they worked.
The dualism of modernity has been critiqued by more than philosophers like MacIntyre; both feminist historian Carolyn Merchant and social ecologist Alf Hornborg are cited here frequently, and each has a great deal to say about this as well.
@MO, I am not a liberal, nor am I a liberal Christian. Nor am I what is commonly referred to as an evangelical. These are both Constantinian heretics, imo. You still haven’t represented me in your description, and there are many more like me. I do not want to hijack the thread on theology… but I feel as compelled to cite misrepresentations as I would if someone were generalizing about feminism – as many are wont to do – by only representing its liberal and postmodern variants.
5 June 2011, 2:39 pmMorocco Bama:
Well, that’s a good thing, right? My intention wasn’t to misrepresent you. My stated observation takes the shape of a shoe, and if that shoe doesn’t fit you, you don’t have to wear it, nor do you have to feel a need to defend someone, or anyone, for whom the shoe does fit.
Also, I’ve made no attempt to define Theology. I don’t see how you are arriving at that conclusion, and that is why I say it is you who are erecting the Strawman.
5 June 2011, 4:00 pmKim Sky:
Liberals:
In joining the chorus of slurs against Liberals and/or Christians the eternal other is evolked. To identify specific aspects of the horrible is one thing, to attack whole groups of humans on the other hand is a kind of broad sweep that results in the destruction of the possible.
Nazis, Christians, Muslims, Liberals, Conservatives, Yadda, Yadda. A debate that ends before it begins.
To engage in the greater aspects of life which are dreaming, imagining, identifying and learning becomes a lost opportunity.
5 June 2011, 7:22 pmMorocco Bama:
Kim, to whom is your comment directed, or is it directed at anyone? Who is attacking “Christians?” Who is attacking “Liberals?” The link I provided used the word (not Word) Liberal Christian to mean so-called Christians who were “liberal/forgiving/apologetic” in their interpretation of, and definition of, Christianity. The criticism was concerning the approach.
My initial observation was a critical one, yes, but it was directed at some ideological characteristics, not at anyone in particular, or any group in particular. If a group take issue with that, well, that’s their problem.
I’d be interested to know what you see as “the possible” and “lost opportunity” in regard to the Nazis. I have an image in mind, but it’s not very pretty. Maybe you could change it from a vision of blood and gore to a pastoral scene with purple mountains in the background and endless miles of amber waves of grain.
5 June 2011, 7:58 pmm.c.:
Furthering my riff above on the difference between Commiseration(I’m going to see if I can find any other similar definition of the public display of positive/extremely overdone emotion) & Compassion/Empathy/Sympathy; the Greeks had terms like Bathos(extreme Pathos) & Pathos; which represented what they saw as the daytime soapism of Greek culture/style. What might be defined in the 20th century as Kitsch or Lowbrow. Most pornography btw, I would classify as Lowbrow, as are daytime soaps, comic books, and bad science fiction.
6 June 2011, 2:10 pmm.c.:
Pity is close to Commiseration. It implies the one doing the Pity though is superior in status.
“I Pitied/took Pity on the homeless man. The homeless man in return Envied/looked upon me with Envy.”
6 June 2011, 2:37 pmRichard:
Sorry this is somewhat off topic, except insofar as these things are related….
Twitter study confirms Dunbar:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26824/
7 June 2011, 1:26 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Richard—-first the phenomenon, THEN the scientific confirmation.
7 June 2011, 11:27 pmRichard:
well, yes, of course… my only point in posting it was to show that the phenomenom has been observed with respect to twitter “friendships”, where previously people had assumed, as is common, that technology changed how we interact with people
8 June 2011, 7:48 amm.c.:
This is a little on line with my previous comments above. On some level I feel a little sorry for Anthony Weiner, but if Keith Ellison for example had done what Weiner did, he would already be in a maximum security Prison wearing an Orange Jump Suit & Shackles.
15 June 2011, 4:42 pmm.c.:
This is rather obvious, but Islamophobia/3rd World Inferiority typified by Peter King’s second hearing yesterday of the Radicalization of Muslims in U.S. Prisons(that sounds really scary; many more people die in the U.S. in auto accidents because they didn’t wear seat belts), is an important part of having three simultaneous wars going on in the middle east. Without this part of the PR puzzle the other parts wouldn’t make sense. Kind of like after an expensive and sophisticated TV advertising Roll-Out for Dog Food the dog doesn’t eat the stuff.
16 June 2011, 11:47 amPoor Afghans can’t govern themselves. Poor Pakistanis can’t be trusted to govern themselves with nuclear weapons. Poor Libyans don’t have the means to overthrow a brutal dictator but they do have a lot of oil and NATO needs make-work to perform to justify its big headquarters in Brussels. Of the 28 nations that make up NATO, only the U.K., France, U.S., with token help from Italy and Canada are pitching in. Secretary Gates(as he’s going out the door) in a speech last week singled out Turkey, Poland, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Norway(which is withdrawing its air force from the Libya arena for not pulling their weight.
m.c.:
Whoops! Sweden isn’t a member of NATO. I think it was Denmark.
16 June 2011, 12:12 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Stan
22 June 2011, 4:11 pmRegarding Plato and duty/’ought’ – see Plato’s Phaedo – Socrates (probably with what we would now consider a split personality regarding a mind/spirit dualism) regards suicide as something we ‘ought’ not to do (I’m not sure how it is rendered in the Greek), but doesn’t consider drinking the poison to be suicide (!! – duality…).
m.c.:
A little light-hearted Tidbit and Question.
This week I heard a song “Have Fun, Go Mad” by a British band. From the U.S./British Dictionary: “Mad” to the Brits means Crazy/Insane or sometimes Wild. Most Americans use “Mad” to mean Angry. I’m curious to hear from Irish, Scots, Welsh, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, South Africans, etc. for their take on the usage of the word “Mad.”
22 June 2011, 7:27 pm(Boer) Tom:
Mad for us is insane, or foolish to the point of refusing to observe…
23 June 2011, 5:31 pmHenry:
Fascinating discussion at Guns and Butter:
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/84847
“Comparing Modern Wheat to Ancient Grain” with Robert Quinn, Ph.D. KPFA
20 October 2012, 12:34 am