tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78278462024-03-13T18:46:58.352-05:00u n d e r v e r s eUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-40458783371690552922023-08-12T11:29:00.004-05:002023-08-12T11:29:52.237-05:00Effigy<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipogX-2U77SeI2HV1-HjAXAzX_CBT02HOyCIYWpSsU8ovkhk7YsqFkUEzvH1cas1HzGZHAv4Wwn8Blsf5TeIKemvEnoGcqbPpiq6HD3l4Dj9iQV2hUYeN0Dgafv39k0MMZpPHFNcWlW0zAhMe2-TzHF6iX1EYyoF_fVAK3dmzDOGRB75nK7Omo/s1400/mask5.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipogX-2U77SeI2HV1-HjAXAzX_CBT02HOyCIYWpSsU8ovkhk7YsqFkUEzvH1cas1HzGZHAv4Wwn8Blsf5TeIKemvEnoGcqbPpiq6HD3l4Dj9iQV2hUYeN0Dgafv39k0MMZpPHFNcWlW0zAhMe2-TzHF6iX1EYyoF_fVAK3dmzDOGRB75nK7Omo/s320/mask5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Posting on a blog in 2023 feels a little like posting on a grocery store bulletin board in an abandoned ghost town. <div><br /></div><div>But site analytics tell me that even without any new content here in a decade, even with all the RSS aggregators shuttered, I'm still getting a smattering of visits.
So, whoever you are...<br /><br />...May I interest you in my new podcast?<br /><br />Effigy is a long-form show exploring a single subject per season, with detours. Season One recounts the Colorado Coalfield Wars of the Nineteen-teens, one of the bloodiest labor conflicts in US history. <br /><br />My storytelling approach with this podcast is novelistic, though it involves no fiction. As much as I love history, it traditionally tends to be fairly over-defined and one-dimensional by design. As a non-historian, though, I'm free to add in the non-fiction equivalent of "subplots" as I choose. These subplots begin as rabbit holes, odd threads and connections that I unearth in my research, but I've taken some care to refine them so that they reinforce the main story. <br /><br />Depending on the kind of person you are, you may find this technique rich and resonant, or you may find it bafflingly digressive. If you've enjoyed my work in the past (this blog, or my work with Theater Oobleck), you're probably going to be in the former camp. Give it a listen, and tell me what you think!<br /><br />https://feeds.captivate.fm/effigy/<br /><br />https://www.patreon.com/effigypod<br /><br /><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-25904343383543929852014-09-17T21:32:00.000-05:002017-11-06T17:01:06.032-06:00"Bam, Bam, Bam."I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it is self-evident to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins that they are feminists. This would explain how Harris could write off the response to his statement that "angry atheism" is less attractive to women because it lacks a “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2014/09/12/can-atheist-sam-harris-become-a-spiritual-figure/" target="_blank">nurturing estrogen vibe</a>” as mere “<a href="https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/510875977686085632" target="_blank">pointless controversy</a>.” Pointless, of course, because it is known to Sam Harris that he is a non-bigot. This is a truth in his heart. And why would you not accept the contents of the heart of a good man at faith—excuse me, I mean <i>face</i>—value?<br />
<br />
Likewise, Richard Dawkins finds it patently absurd that his pal Michael Shermer would be a <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2013/08/10/the-web-of-trust-why-i-believe-shermers-accusers/" target="_blank">serial sexual predator</a>, because after all, he’s a good guy, and “<a href="https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/511809523938770944" target="_blank">What decent person is NOT a feminist</a>”? <br />
<br />
From this vantage point—the presumption of one’s own obvious decency—it is easy to see why Harris and Dawkins and so many others like them (and like myself from time to time and probably you too, dear reader) are so quick to interpret any dissent as vituperative. To imagine themselves as the victim of “thought police” and “witch hunts.” In his own defense, Harris goes to great lengths to demonstrate his love and respect of women, as though that should be enough to settle the matter for all to see that what is in his heart is good. And yet he cannot, apparently, recognize the extremely elemental problem with his “estrogen vibe” analysis: that it permits no role for structural sexism. The “I guess women are just different from men” argument is <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/09/sam-harris-the-criticism-of-bad-ideas-and-sexist-appeals-to-biology/" target="_blank">inherently victim-blaming</a>. <br />
<br />
Dawkins has been famously victim-blaming women since the “<a href="http://www.blaghag.com/2011/07/richard-dawkins-your-privilege-is.html" target="_blank">Dear Muslima</a>” affair, and has recently taken to subtweeting former comrade PZ Myers for <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/09/12/dear-richard-dawkins/" target="_blank">calling him out</a> on his rather spotty command of feminist principles. For his part, Myers is hardly known for his fondness for kid gloves—most recently he wrote that Dawkins had been devoured by “brain parasites.” But mockery and name-calling are just the medicine that the New Atheists have insisted from the outset would rid the world of delusion and superstition. Unfortunately it would seem that to resist this medicine one only need inoculate oneself with the image of one’s own reasonable good-heartedness. Armed with such a self-image, no one need engage anyone else’s ideas or experiences with anything more generous than condescension and self-righteous pity.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The global all-time winner of the victim-blaming gladiatorial games has
got to be Jerry Coyne, who wrote in 2011 that Anne Frank would not have
perished in the Holocaust <a href="http://underverse.blogspot.com/2011/04/flatland-of-dreams.html" target="_blank">if only she were not Jewish</a>. But here's another victim-blamer from today's headlines. Sean Hannity, in a segment defending Adrian Peterson's whipping of his infant child, said on his TV show yesterday "I got hit with a strap. Bam, bam, bam. And I have never been to a shrink. I will tell you that I deserved it." A heartbreaking statement.<br />
<br />
It is a remarkable coincidence that those who have no time for what other people find afflicting so often must downplay--if not outright defend--their own childhood abuse. Before I read that Hannity quote today, I wrote on Twitter that it was getting harder and harder to tell Dawkins and Hannity apart, twinned as they seem to be in their incapacity for self-reflection.<br />
<br />
And indeed, Dawkins has written publicly of his own abuse multiple times. The most widely-known remark made the rounds a year ago when he told an interviewer that he thought being <a href="http://www.thewire.com/global/2013/09/richard-dawkins-defends-mild-pedophilia-again-and-again/69269/" target="_blank">groped by his boarding school teacher</a> did him "no lasting harm." Maybe it didn't. But such a denial is the exact form we would expect a defense mechanism to take in a child that age. Overgeneralizing just a bit, children are too emotionally invested in the rectitude of adult authority figures to attribute serious evil to them. When seriously wronged, they tend to either downplay the harm done them, or justify it through their own wrongdoing. The alternative--that the adults who take care of them might be cruel, capricious, or incapable--is too much for the young psyche to take on.<br />
<br />
Here's a Dawkins <a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/3277-children-need-to-be-sprinkled-with-fairy-dust/comments?page=1" target="_blank">quote </a>that got a little less attention at the time, tucked away as it was in the pages of his comment forum:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I remember spending a lot of time
at my [kindergarten] trying to call down supernatural forces to protect
me from bullies. I had a distinct mental image of a large black cloud
with a human face, which would swoop down out of the sky and deal with
the bully. </blockquote>
It's facile to say that children who are bullied grow up to become bullies themselves, but that they often do is, again, no coincidence. I see the seeds of so much of Dawkins' disdain and contempt for religion in this memory, as though the only way he can bear the disappointment and terror of not being saved from bullies by "supernatural forces" is to make sure that everyone else who believes in the supernatural is never, ever allowed to forget how foolish they are. Just as Sean Hannity can only bear the memory of having been violently beaten by the man who should have been his protector by spewing venomous contempt for the weak and ill-favored, night after night, to an audience of millions.<br />
<br />
When we ally ourselves with that kind of hatred and dismissal, when we take ritual glee in the stupidity and cravenness of others, we invariably declare war on parts of ourselves, forcing these parts to live in darkness, without a champion, finding expression only through violence. Sean Hannity was caught in hs own trap last night -- "as a woodcock to his own springe." Maybe the strange reenactment of his own child-beating will break the spell for some viewers. Maybe too the poisoned-sword combatants of the atheiosphere will be prompted to piece together that the mockery and demonization directed at many of them now by their erstwhile deacons and elders were just as shallow, myopic, and reactionary when they were directed at the common enemy of religious adherents. Maybe maybe.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-70603836301595430362014-08-21T12:46:00.000-05:002014-08-21T12:46:50.439-05:00On Where The Time GoesLet's face it, I don't blog here much, and when I do, I don't write the kinds of things I used to write.<br />
<br />
The basic reason is that in 5 years I had run out the dilettante leash as far as it would go. I needed to either metamorphize into a full-fledged thoughtful, informed commentator, or get out of the game. Anyone who has followed me here over the last few years knows I chose the latter, even taking the extra step of archiving a lot of my earlier posts for being simply too deficient in circumspection, erudition, and reasoning to be of much value to anyone.<br />
<br />
I don't think I'm done with blogging or essaying for good, but lately other projects have won the campaign for my time. Most notably, this strange musical project I've hitched my wagon to: Theater Oobleck's <i><a href="http://baudelaireinabox.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Baudelaire In A Box</a></i>, for which I've written and performed something around 30 songs by now, from my own translation of poems from Charles Baudelaire's <i>The Flowers of Evil</i>. <br />
<br />
I had thought there wouldn't be much crossover between the audience for that project and my audience here, but I was shown the wrongness of that yesterday when I came upon this wonderful review of the Baudelaire project at <a href="http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2014/04/23/hellish" target="_blank">Ordinary Times</a>. It was written by "Chris" --no last name -- who I'm going to presume is the erstwhile writer at <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/" target="_blank">Mixing Memory</a>. Chris, if I knew how to get in touch, I'd thank you more directly.<br />
<br />
The rest of you, if you want to keep up with what I'm up to, I'm pretty good about keeping my Twitter feed active. I'll still post here when I can. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-26911051596180293882014-07-29T14:06:00.002-05:002014-08-21T12:40:47.296-05:00On Ethnic Cleansing In Gaza (A Pipe Dream)In my dream, someone smart writes "A Real and True Historie of Human
Pathology," a genealogy of fuckedupness right down to each woman, man,
and child in recorded history. Nate Silver and all the other data geeks
make charts out of it, tracing patterns across time, geography,
political history, fashion, and pop culture, and it is laid bare that
all hurt and hate and fear and resulting dehumanization is a defense
against a trauma whose origins are long forgotten.<br />
<br />
Little pocket epiphanies begin to emerge among those minds minimally
prepared by acts of ordinary kindness and small sacrifice, and when they
do, they make that popcorn-popper lip-smacking sound from the Seinfeld
theme. Seinfeld himself is awakened to the true nature of suffering,
which is such an extraordinary event, all the network and cable news
desk devote the full evening broadcast to covering it.<br />
<br />
Even people whose minds are clouded by hate and greed and
self-righteousness are able to recognize that something important is
happening, even if they can't understand it. They try to pass it off as a
distraction ginned up by whichever Outgroup they most despise, but are
not themselves as fully convinced by the maneuver as they are
accustomed, and an edgy malaise begins to take hold in their glands and
fascia.<br />
<br />
Some very angry people are made so uncomfortable that they commit acts
of violence against members of the hated Outgroup, or just innocent
passers-by, but there has been just enough of a shift in consciouness
among law enforcement, the media, and the chattering classes, that these
outbursts are instantly seen as part of a long human chain of
inhospitability reaching back millennia. This recognition deepens and
spreads the epiphany, until more and more it becomes the standard frame
for understanding cruelty, revenge, and demagoguery.<br />
<br />
Social scientists resign their posts in droves to atone for having
contributed to such an erroneous public understanding of human behavior.
Hamas and the Israeli Knesset both dissolve themselves without ceremony
and call for new elections. Security walls are torn down, but there is
an overwhelming sense of courtesy and respect for the other's
sovereignty and space that each population has to practically beg the
other to join them in cafes, homes, hospitals, wedding banquets and
funerals.<br />
<br />
New peace talks are immediately opened, and just as immediately put on
hiatus due to the nearly constant bouts of weeping over the other's
misfortunes. It is decided that the negotiations will be replaced in the
short term by a period of mourning, with weekly grief ceremonies
spontaneously taking over all the official government buildings
throughout Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.<br />
<br />
The notion spreads. Soon, Greeks and Turks are weeping, Shia and Sunni. Even the Russians are weeping. Even the Russians.<br />
<br />
Then I wake up.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-43195004689826390962013-12-18T13:27:00.000-06:002019-12-12T20:05:17.131-06:00There Are No Santa Deniers In Foxholes<i>[My piece for the War on Christmas edition of Write Club ("The Yulening"), at The Hideout, December 17th, 2013. The bout was </i>Santa vs. Jesus.<i>]</i><br />
<br />
Dear Margaret,<br />
<br />
Tomorrow I ship out for my 5th tour of duty in the
War on Christmas. I’ll be stationed somewhere near a place called
Altoona, Pennsylvania. I doubt I could even find it on a map. Ha ha.<br />
<br />
I’m being assigned to a creche removal and neutralization unit, and
we’re being told that we shouldn’t expect to see too much heavy action.
Which is good, because my PTSD definitely isn’t getting any better. It
takes just a single sleigh bell on a car commercial for me to break into
a cold sweat, as my hand instinctively reaches for my service revolver.
They said this war would be a cakewalk, that every grinch and scrooge
would come out of the woodwork and greet us with chocolate and flowers.
Instead we got candy canes and boughs of holly, and some of the toughest
fighting any of us have ever seen.<br />
<br />
On my last tour, one of the guys in my unit was telling me that
there used to be just twelve days of Christmas. Just Twelve Days! You put
your wreath on the door on Christmas Eve, and you took it down on
something called “Epiphany.” Then life went back to normal, I guess.
They called it Christmastide, and they had a big feast on each day. At
first I found all this really comforting. I loved that the word for the
Christmas season was “tide” — it made me think of listening to the surf
coming in and out at that cottage I used to rent, the one out on Nasketucket Bay.
I’ll tell you, that’s a nice memory to have when you are pinned down in a
damp foxhole for days on end. And I got to thinking how time really is
like a tide, how one event flows into another, like day turns into
night, and how there’s really a time for everything. And that made me
realize that the idea of having a War on Christmas was a <i>horrible
mistake</i>, that it was basically like having a war against time itself,
and that Christmas was really just like an infection that would go away
on its own. And that idea was really comforting. <br />
<br />
But one thing war gives you is a lot of time alone with your
thoughts, and that can be a dangerous thing. It didn’t take long for me
to remember that we don’t have twelve days of Christmas anymore, we
have—well, I can’t even count them. It used to be that Thanksgiving was a
bulwark against Christmas’s terrible insatiability, but now with all
the big box stores opening at midnight on Thanksgiving eve, it’s like
nothing can stand in Christmas’s way anymore. Instead of Christmas-tide
it’s like we have a Christmas <i>tsunami</i>. And that just scares the hell out
of me.<br />
<br />
This same Sergeant in my unit who told me about the twelve days of
Christmas also told me that in England in the 17th century, the Puritans
had their own war against Christmas. Cromwell even succeeded in having
Christmas criminalized in 1647, which is far more than we’ve been able
to get Congress to do. When the Royalists took power again in 1660,
Christmas was restored, but the sense that all that merrymaking was too
uncouth for true Christianity never really went away. And by now you
had Puritans fleeing to America by the boatload.<br />
<br />
By the early 19th century, Christmas had just run out of steam, at
least according to my Sergeant. His theory was that the industrial
revolution made twelve days of feasting impractical. “Dark Satanic Mills
have no patience for the liturgical calendar” he told me one chilly
October morning, as we warmed ourselves by a bonfire of plastic reindeer
we had just seized from a group of singing children. 3 days later he
was killed by an improvised explosive device made out of discarded tree
ornaments. They found a little wooden Tyrolean elf wearing lederhosen
lodged in his medulla oblongata. Death was instantaneous.<br />
<br />
I think the point Sarge was trying to make was that Christmastide
was traditionally just a big two-week party, with drinking and feasting,
the Lord of Misrule, and all that. Once the logic of industrial
capitalism took all that away, there just wasn’t enough substance in the
Nativity story to pick up the slack. I mean, think about it, once you
get past the virgin birth business, there’s just not that much to talk
about.<br />
<br />
At the same time, you have this mythologized folk version of Saint
Nicholas floating around the periphery of the culture in Dutch New York.
It’s right after the American Revolution, and people are desperately
searching for a cultural heritage that is not British. Introduce St.
Nick in the mass media at just the right time, and you have the perfect
vehicle to transform Christmas from a rowdy Bacchanal to a wholesome,
pastoral children’s holiday. And that’s just what happened. You have
these propaganda pieces that start showing up—Washington Irving giving
St. Nicholas a major role in the “Knickerbocker’s History of New York,”
and Clement Clark Moore, who was this slave-holding real estate baron
from Chelsea, adding the reindeer in “A Visit From Saint Nicholas” —
that’s the one that starts “Twas The Night Before Christmas.” And all of
a sudden, Santa is off to the races. <br />
<br />
When I look at everything that Santa has been able to accomplish
that Jesus never could—it’s like when Lincoln replaced General McClellan
with Ulysses S Grant. Just, game over. Santa Claus is scaleable in a
way that Jesus never could be. Jesus’s big weakness is that he’s just
too sacred to be commodified. Like McClellan, Jesus never really changed
his tactics in 2,000 years. <i>Get born, lie down in a manger, get visited
by the magi</i>. Santa is constantly changing his tactics. He starts with
just stockings, then, over the next few decades he adds the reindeer,
the chimney, the elves, the List. The List! In all of military history,
no one who has kept a list has ever lost a war. <br />
<br />
Well, it’s getting late, Margaret, and I should probably wrap this up. I’ve
got a long journey to Altoona ahead of me in the morning. I hope I
haven’t darkened your spirits too much. Sarge could be kind of a
crackpot, frankly, and I guess we should take what he said with a grain
of salt. All I know is that we’ve lost a lot of good men in this war,
and Christmas just keeps getting bigger. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-66525552223696120982013-12-08T14:06:00.000-06:002013-12-08T21:21:04.686-06:00The Gene SupernaturalThe neo-Darwinian old guard has come out hard against David Dobbs' (admittedly inflammatory) article in Aeon, "<a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/why-its-time-to-lay-the-selfish-gene-to-rest/" target="_blank">Die, Selfish Gene, Die</a>," which summarizes some
recent and not-so-recent <strike>objectives</strike> objections to gene-centric "modern synthesis"
evolutionary theory. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne devoted <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/david-dobbs-mucks-up-evolution-part-i/" target="_blank">two</a>
<a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/david-dobbs-mucks-up-evoution-part-ii/" target="_blank">posts</a> to demonstrating how "muddled" Dobbs' piece was, and Richard "Selfish Gene" Dawkins
himself <a href="http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/12/6/adversarial-journalism-and-the-selfish-gene" target="_blank">responded</a> on his site that nothing in Dobbs' article contradicted the theory that he laid out in his landmark book <i>The
Selfish Gene</i>. Steven Pinker went so far as to use the opportunity to
characterize all science journalists as "congenitally" sensationalist.<br />
<br />
But PZ Myers, erstwhile ally of the aforementioned gentleman and
scholars in their struggle against theism, has come out with <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/12/03/higher-order-thinking/" target="_blank">two</a> <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/12/07/the-reification-of-the-gene/" target="_blank">posts</a> at Phayngula strongly defending Dobbs' basic argument that the gene-centric "modern
synthesis" is no longer fully supported by molecular biology.<br />
<br />
Five-odd years ago, I was engaged with <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula" target="_blank">Myers</a> in a brief but bitter squabble, after I dubbed his "Courtiers Reply" argument the "<a href="http://underverse.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00:00:00-06:00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00:00:00-06:00&max-results=7" target="_blank">Lout's Complaint</a>." He replied that I was "clueless" and that he was "proud to be a hooligan." I got a flurry of comments from his readers calling me soft-headed, and then it was over.<br />
<br />
When it comes to religion, Myers is still a <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/12/07/another-attempt-to-rationalize-religion-by-equating-it-with-philosophy/" target="_blank">hooligan</a>. (Sorry, Paul!). But I was extremely pleased to see him strenuously and heterodoxically critique the gene-determinism that has erupted among some of his celebrated colleagues.<br />
<br />
Dawkins' "selfish gene" is a beautifully elegant theory. It is near-impossible to argue with the logic of its central premise. To read it is to be utterly convinced that nothing but the gene could ever possibly be the unit of selection, and it is extremely valuable in helping to overthrow popular misconceptions of natural selection, such as that "traits survive for the good of the species." <br />
<br />
The problem, as Myers shows with relentless detail in his post, is that genes don't operate in anywhere near the idealized fashion that Dawkins describes. I would propose that this is because in nature, "genes" don't actually exist. We can get a sense of this observing the way that defenders of gene-centric theory alternate between incongruous definitions whenever their theory comes under attack. In Chapter 3 of<i> The Selfish Gene</i>, Dawkins famously defines the gene as any portion of chromosomal material that persists long enough to serve as a unit of heredity. A little bit later he expands on this when he tells us not to worry that a complicated trait (like the mimesis pattern on a butterfly) seems too complex to be controlled by a single gene: we can just redefine the gene as whatever cluster of DNA is responsible for the pattern. (He later proclaims the triumph of his tautology: "What I have done now is <i>define</i> the gene in such a way that I cannot help being right.") <br />
<br />
Then, rather astonishingly, he goes on to say that his concept of the gene is not definitive in an absolute yes-or-no way, like an electron or an elephant or a comet, but relative, like size or age. A gene may be more or less gene-y, compared to other genes. Dawkins is very explicit that his mission here is to rescue Mendelian genetics by expanding the concept of the particulate unit of heredity to whatever scale it needs to be for the theory to work. <br />
<br />
Perhaps ironically, this is the same slipperiness that gives fits to anti-theists whenever the topic of God's causality comes up. What is the nature of God? Whatever it needs to be to explain the perceivable world around us. What is a (Dawkinsian) gene? Whatever it needs to be to explain the transmission of a corresponding phenotypic trait. Little surprise then, when critics poke holes in the theory, drawing on recent (and not so recent) findings in molecular biology, that Dawkins is able to reply, "Why, my definition of the gene can account for that too!"<br />
<br />
Among molecular biologists, the gene was for many years typically defined as the portion of the genetic code (also called a <i>cistron</i>) that carries instructions for the manufacture of an individual enzyme. In Crick's phrase: "DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein, and protein makes us." The mechanics here are much easier to observe than in the Dawkinsian usage, but even here the definition is not as clear as it would seem. DNA sequences often need a lot of "editing" before they are converted into RNA sequences, and there is in fact no one-to-one correspondence between cistrons and proteins. Some proteins get built from an RNA sequence that has no equivalent in the DNA. This presents some pretty tough challenges for any theory that proposes that heredity is strictly a "genetic" phenomenon, unless we are prepared to count as "genes" any number of factors that are not stored in DNA, and whose manner of hereditary transmission, if it exists at all, is unknown. (Note how Jerry Coyne--who Dawkins calls his "goto guru on population genetics"--bases his entire <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/david-dobbs-mucks-up-evolution-part-i/" target="_blank">rebuttal</a> on the notion that regulatory factors "must" reside in the DNA, which seems to indicate that theoretical population genetics has become seriously unmoored from molecular biology).<br />
<br />
There's much more to the story: epigenetics, evo-devo, genetic assimilation, and genetic redundancy, much of which you can read about by clicking on the Pharyngula links above. The point I want to make is that we can go one further than David Dobbs and the scientists whose work he summarizes. It's not just that "Selfish Gene" biology is overly gene-centric and deterministic. It's that the central metaphor of that paradigm is based on a spook. The "gene" is barely even a coherent concept, let alone a natural entity that could have causative powers. For a century it has convoluted the way we think about morphology and heredity. If we were feeling especially uncharitable, we might even be tempted to call it ... a Delusion.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-12715987453749375102013-08-11T13:03:00.000-05:002017-12-17T21:03:14.792-06:00On Ears Of TinSpeaking of quasi-Racists, Richard Dawkins' new career as Twitter troll is progressing brilliantly. Brandon Watson at <a href="http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2013/08/those-toes-must-taste-good.html" target="_blank">Siris</a> says pretty much everything I would be tempted to say about Dawkins' latest moustache-twirling, but I want add a couple of additional comments.<br />
<br />
As with the Hedy Weiss flap in my prior post, so much depends on the notion of race. After his original tweet on the topic of Muslim Nobel Prizes, Dawkins defended himself against charges of racism by observing, correctly, that "Muslims are not a race." This is not a particularly satisfying response. Jews are likewise not a race, but this fact did not prevent numerous historical attempts to banish or exterminate them on grounds of "racial" purity. But the fallacy goes much deeper than this. Not only does racism not require a "race" to operate upon, but in fact it is required to operate in the absence of one, given that <i>there is no such thing as race</i>. Race is an outdated, pseudoscientific 19th century concept with about as much scientific validity as the four humors (probably less.) <br />
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Someone must have raised this point with Dawkins after tweeted about it, because in an FAQ-style collection of "<a href="http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/8/9/calm-reflections-after-a-storm-in-a-teacup#" target="_blank">calm reflections</a>," he admits that race is a "controversial" topic, and then, in response to the objection that race is a sociological, not a biological phenomenon, begs to differ:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I have a
right to choose to interpret “race” (and hence “racism”) according to
the dictionary definition: “<b>A limited group of people descended from a
common ancestor</b>”. <b><br /></b></blockquote>
Of course this just further obscures the fact that no such group exists on earth. Shall we pause here to recall that Dawkins is regarded as one of the world's most prominent biologists? He continues...<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sociologists are entitled to redefine words in
technical senses that they find useful, <b>but they are not entitled to
impose their new definitions on those of us who prefer common or
dictionary usage. </b>(my emphasis)</blockquote>
I don't how to read that sentence except as a defense of folk <strike>etymology</strike> lexography over actual scholarship: "Yes, I realize that there is broad consensus in both the humanities and the biological sciences that race is a cultural, not biological phenomenon, but look here in the dictionary!"<br />
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The word "racism" remains useful to us, despite the non-existence of a biological substrate on which to rest it, because all the substitutes available to us seem too watered down: bigoted, ethnocentric, prejudiced--all sins, to be sure; but only "racism" conjures the requisite degree of wild, animal hatred. Without going too deep in the weeds, we can safely redefine racism as tribalism, with all the paranoid fantasy that attends to it: those people, the ones who are colored differently than us, who dress differently, talk differently, who keep to themselves, those people are not to be trusted. <br />
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So, while it's true that Muslims are not a "race," neither are "blacks," neither are Amerindians, Rom, Arabs, Hispanics, or Asians. (Neither are Caucasians, or "Aryans.") Where does that leave us? We can still, in all those cases, and so many more, project complex traits onto these socially-defined groups based solely on adherence to the tribe: stupid, lazy, thieving, murderous, warlike, fanatical. And indeed, Dawkins does veer closely to this kind of characterization when talking about Muslims (though he's nowhere near as bad as his comrade Sam Harris, who has literally stated "you just can't reason with these people.")<br />
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Look, for example, at the original tweet on Muslim Nobel laureates:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College,
Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.</blockquote>
In case the context weren't clear enough, Dawkins elaborates in his calm reflections:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I certainly didn’t, and don’t, imply any innate inferiority of intellect
in those people who happen to follow the Muslim religion. But I did
intend to raise in people’s minds the <i>question</i> of whether the religion itself is inimical to scientific education.</blockquote>
What jumps out right away is that the hypothesis is instantly self-refuting. Until around the 13th century these very same Muslims led the world in scientific exploration. There are many competing theories for why this embrace of reason did not persist, but it's clear that the only way we could blame the religion itself for the decline would be to infer that 11th century Islam was significantly more enlightened than the variant practiced today. Any takers?<br />
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So the "question of whether the religion itself is inimical to scientific education is," at best, staggeringly ignorant. At worst, it's race-baiting. I can't peer into Dawkins' heart to say where he falls on that continuum, but there are no commendable options.<br />
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Brandon writes that Dawkins' bafflement (at how anyone could characterize his discourse as less than perfectly reasonable) seems perfectly genuine. This is not incidental to the question of how damaging his remarks may be. Like the old patriarch at the dinner table who doesn't know, or can't accept, that it's no longer acceptable to call women "skirts" anymore, and opens old wounds with each utterance despite his insistence he "didn't mean anything by it," at a certain point innocence becomes a mask for a lack of empathy, which all-too-predictably slips into a narcissistic martyrdom. "You're the real racist!" (Yes, he said this.) <br />
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And is it really just a "tin ear" that adds insult to injury by following on the heels of his calm reflections a tweet musing on why Jews are so disproportionally represented by the Nobel Foundation, then linking to Steven Pinker's 2005 address to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on studies that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ than other groups? Whether the studies have merit or not, they can only be relevant at all by undermining Dawkins' earlier insistence that "Jews are not a race" (at least when it comes to Ashkenazim), but no apparent cognitive dissonance ensues. (And surely it is just an unconscious slip when he invokes the image of a global cabal in a follow up tweet that says "I want to know their secret in case we can copy it.") <br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-81563229141341862442013-03-30T14:38:00.000-05:002015-01-04T17:01:47.258-06:00On Commending One's Spirit<i>[Originally written for the September 18th 2012 edition of Write Club, where I soliloquized on “Finish” against Ian Belknap’s “Start.” Mine was the moral victory. In any case, a fitting post for Easter.]</i><br />
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When I was a child of 11 or 12 I was given, by my parents, the soundtrack of <i>Jesus Christ Superstar </i>for Christmas. Even though I had already decided by this young age that there was no god or heaven, I was still obsessed by one particular section, very near the end: Jesus is moaning on the cross, his senses bewildered by all sorts of buzzes and cackles and demonic chanting, until finally he says “It is finished. Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.” And there the track abruptly ended, buzzes and cackles and all. In the sudden silence it felt a little as though the whole world had ended. I was fascinated and terrified by the magical finality of this ending. He said those words, and then ceased to be. I would lie awake at night convinced that if I too were to utter those same words, then I too would cease to be. My non-existent soul would be claimed by this non-existent Father, just as non-existent Jesus’s was. I was even a little afraid I might say the words by accident. In hindsight, it was probably a bit of wish fulfillment, as most fears are.<br />
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When we talk about being finished, we’re talking about being dead. Or not <i>being</i> dead, rather—you can’t actually <i>be</i> dead; to be dead is to not be. There is no aspect or quality of “being” called deadness. You can’t exist in a deadish fashion, deadily. Our grammar just breaks down if we try. We can’t even say that “so and so died.” Dying isn’t something that you can do, because, it’s the end of “you.” By the time you get to the end of the sentence the subject is already gone. You start out with an Abbot and Costello routine—<i>Who</i> died? And you end up babbling like Vinny Barbarino: What… Where … I’m so confused!<br />
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We are compelled by language to think of death as just some new state of extreme inactivity. <i>I’ll sleep when I’m dead</i>, we say, when our death doesn’t actually seem so close. <i>I will miss you</i>, we say when it does. We just can’t get it through our dumb dying heads that there will be no<i> I </i>or <i>we</i> to sleep or miss or even to not sleep and not miss. We will be finished, except no we won’t because if you are, if you are being, then you are not finished. It’s called grammar. Just go ahead and try to argue with it.<br />
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Meanwhile, for every single thing except for us—except for you and me and everyone else that couldn’t be here today—we have this law of conservation of matter and energy, so that nothing ever ceases to be, it just turns into something else. For every single thing except for us, nothing is ever finished. The story of every single thing except for us can never end; there’s always something more to say, some story within a story. For a while it looked like the universe was ultimately headed toward a state of entropy or heat-death, but now we have these “multiverses”, an infinite number of worlds—each with its own conditions of suspended disbelief. And that makes even our heat death universe just a little bit more suspenseful. Because maybe we’re actually in the universe where everything crawls to a complete standstill for eons and eons, and then one day a bunch of balloons and crepe streamers fall from the sky celebrating our one trillionth millennium of the perfectly distributed stasis of all matter and energy. I mean you just can’t know.<br />
<br />
Speaking of crepe streamers, I am reminded that roughly around the same time I was lying awake making sure not to accidentally Commend My Spirit, I was attending an elementary school whose students carried on a tradition of flying crepe streamers out the window of the bus on the last day of school. Not the last day of school—there’s still such a thing as school, school still exists—but the last day of the school year. In all my life I have probably never participated so fully in a ritual as I did flying those streamers out the window of that school bus. To this day crepe streamers have a mystical quality to me, archetypal and primordial in their perfect, tightly coiled state of origin. The dry, rustle as we unfurled them out the window to catch the mild June afternoon breeze seemed to be an involuntary gasp of anticipatory joy, and for the entire bus ride home the streamers’ fluttering, like Tibetan prayer flags, seemed to liberate us from time and everyday reality. The whole bus, and all of us in it, had become a benevolent dragon from some Madeleine L’Engle book. School was over and what lay before us was the eternal forever of summer.<br />
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And then summer ended and school returned, and there were a few rituals for that too, new school clothes, new school books, new sharpened pencils for writing on clean white new school pages, we were starting over, being reborn, but not entirely convincingly. It nagged a little that what we had so triumphantly put behind us three months hence was back, unvanquished after all, undead, like that Jesus guy. School, like that Jesus guy, had <i>something more to say</i>, and it was good news only in the way that Brussels sprouts were good, or good manners were good, which is to say very, very bad.<br />
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Only we can ever really end, only you and me and everyone else that couldn’t be here today. Everything else just goes on, or turns into something else, is reminded of some new important thing to do or be or say, and it’s a fearsome thing, to be finished with something that’s not finished with you. This is what maybe was so memorable about that scene from Jesus Christ Superstar—the dude just winked out like a light. And it was really finished, except no it wasn’t! he came back, and did more stuff, and according to John of Patmos at least, he’s going to do even more stuff later. And we have to keep hearing about it. It is so manifestly not finished…<br />
<br />
<i>At this point Scheherezade lapsed into silence. Her sister Dunyazade said to her, “what an unusual and entertaining story, sister. If you are not too sleepy, will you tell us what became of this strange, unsatisfied man and his oratatory contest?” “With the greatest pleasure” said Scheherezade. “But this story is nothing compared to the one I will next relate: The tale of the three wise judges…”
</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-62919703964103807102013-03-30T13:20:00.004-05:002016-12-20T17:52:14.923-06:00Adelaide's Fork<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>[I read this piece at the <a href="http://raystapreadingseries.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Ray's Tap Reading Series</a> on March 16, 2013. The evening's theme was "Manners, Please."]</i><br />
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It is said that at meals the Holy Roman Empress Adelaide would hold aloft her fork midway between palate and plate. It was the custom in 10th century Europe for those dining with the King and Queen to stop eating when their Sacred Imperial Majesties set down their utensils. Adelaide, who had the appetite of a sparrow, knew her guests would starve if she indicated she was done eating prematurely, so she would pantomime in this manner, her fork extended in the air, as though posing for a painting.<br />
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Adelaide died in the year 999, and thus was not able to attend--or strike a pose at--Judy Chicago's 1979 installation piece, <i>The Dinner Party,</i> now on permanent exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, a piece featuring place settings for 39 women from history and folklore: Sappho, Judith, Ishtar, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, and 34 others. Adelaide did, however, somehow connive to have her name inscribed on a porcelain tile on the floor on which the banquets tables rest, the “Heritage Floor,” bearing the names of 999 women in all, also drawn from history and folklore, and chosen to contextualize and support the 39 guests of honor.<br />
<br />
Adelaide was canonized by Pope Urban II in 1097, but before she was Saint Adelaide, or even Empress Adelaide, she was just plain old "Addie from the Burg," Adelaide of Burgundy, named for the Kingdom where she was born―and, not coincidentally, of which her Dad, Rudolph II, was King. Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939. It was the custom at that time for children to take the family name of their fathers. In 1959, she took the name Judy Gerowitz, upon marrying her first husband in California, where it was the custom for women to take the family name of their husbands. When she remarried in 1965, instead of taking, this time, the name of her new husband, she took, in defiance of custom, the name of her city of origin.<br />
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It is the custom in the city of Chicago in 2013 not to deceive those who have entrusted us with the privilege of delivering our orations unto them. Great was the gnashing of teeth and rending of raiments when performance artist Mike Daisey tried to use "poetic license" to justify bending the facts for rhetorical purposes in his one-man show <i>The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs</i>. (The title of which being a play on Irving Stone's 1961 biographical novel of the life of Michelangelo.) The popular radio program <i>This American Pledge Drive</i> devoted an entire hour atoning for the social transgression of excerpting the show, crooked facts and all. So I would like to pause here to acknowledge that it was not actually a fork that Adelaide extended in the air, but a knife. Though the table fork was used in the 10th century by nobles in Persia and the Middle East, it was not customary in Northern Europe until as late as the 18th century. To eat using anything but ones fingers in the time of Adelaide was just in bad taste. I said fork, earlier, because it fits our social sense of what the facts should be better than a knife would have. But I want you to know, it was not a fork. It was a knife.<br />
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The custom of naming children according to the paternal family name is a troublesome one, and--second wave feminism notwithstanding--it would be no less troublesome if the convention was exchanged for its matrilineal equivalent, since in either case the family name of one of the parents must be effaced from history. We speak of names and bloodlines as though they were the same, but blood and words do not follow the same rules. Biology and culture do not follow the same rules. Some might say this is why we have culture in the first place―to liberate us from the shackles of biology, of the blood, that realm wherein nothing can be named, but only experienced, in a pulsing crush of now-ness. Each parent gives each child half of its genetic confabulation, but this does us little good when it comes to saying who each of us are. Sure, we're all children of the mitochondrial Eve, but try writing that in your next artist's bio. Try telling that to the person behind the counter when you renew your drivers license <br />
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It is the custom today in certain parts of Brooklyn, New York, to try to circumvent this problem by naming one's child after both parents. So Sally Smith and Tom Jones have a baby girl, who they name Eliza Smith-Jones. But what happens when Eliza Smith-Jones grows up and marries Ebenezer White-Brown? According to custom, their child will take the name Smith-Jones-White-Brown, and when little Jedediah Smith-Jones-White-Brown grows up and marries Bryce Miller-Rodriquez-Anderson-Sanchez, well, you can see where this goes. This is a custom that, to quote my good friend, Michael of Brooklyn, just doesn't scale.<br />
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We can easily reconcile the conflict of blood and bloodline, of culture and nature, as Judy Chicago did, by simply abandoning the whole concept of of genealogy, a concept whose social value may have outlived its usefulness. After all, who really cares who David Bowie's parents were? Or Amiri Baraka's? Or Marilyn Monroe's, or Madeleine Kahn's, or Louis CK's? However, my purpose here is not to solve your problems but rather to exacerbate them. I seek to raise blisters. In the realm of ideas--which is to say in the realm of customs, of manners--we accomplish very little if we are not prepared to exaggerate. A name cannot convey everything that we are. It conveys one thing only, with terrifying reduction. If we're feeling clever, we can employ a portmonteau, whose secret code points in two directions, like <i>Texarkana</i>, or <i>spork</i>, or <i>sexcapade</i>. But only two directions. Sometimes three, as with <i>flounder</i>, which is a collision of <i>flounce</i> and <i>blunder</i>, with an echo of <i>founder</i> for good measure. But even here, pointing in three directions, we are talking about a number so many fewer than infinity. In fact, if my math is right, three is infinity fewer than infinity.<br />
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You see the pickle we're in, the predicament, the <i>predicklement</i>. We cannot stop the world without names. We cannot transcend the muteness of the ever-flowing now until we implant something in it with just a little staying power, lodging it into the endometrium of the eternal ever-flowing now. And from this implantation grows everything we have ever known and everything we will ever know: language, law, economics, ethics, art, religion, theater, ads on buses, book jacket blurbs, facebook memes, reading series, mustaches... which is to say all the different kinds of manners our species can devise. But just how real can any of it be? Compared to the infinitely ever-flowing now, just how profound, how true, can something as one-dimensional as an identity, as a name, ever hope to be?<br />
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Bronzino's famous painting “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time” is notable for, among other things, the use of the figura serpentina, that twisted and extended presentation of the human form into a spiral pose. Long before cubism, Bronzino and the other mannerist painters used this and other exaggerated techniques to show that which could not be represented with the techniques of classical naturalism. Torsos with both breasts and buttocks simultaneously vectored toward the viewer. Background figures with no fealty to classical perspective or unity of light and shadow. The mannerist painters knew that the word “grotesque” has its roots in the greek word <i>krytpe</i>, the hidden; the concealed. In order to display what was real and true, they had to portray those things which would never emerge in the natural, phenomenal world, not even given a thousand eternities. Things that may only come to be when they are contorted, extended, stretched, embroidered, masked, mocked.<br />
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That story I told of Adelaide, with first her fork, then her knife, then. I really don't know what utensil she used, don't know if that bit about having to stop eating when the Queen stopped is true, don't know if when she held her knife or fork aloft in the air, she also twisted her torso so her breasts and buttocks were pointing in the same direction, don't know, don't much care. I do care, just a little, that someone just told you a story about it, and that someone happened to be me, whoever that is.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-76453937849870361162012-12-31T16:57:00.000-06:002013-03-30T14:56:46.106-05:00Constitution: A Ghost Story<style><!--
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</style><i>[Written for <a href="http://www.luckypierre.org/" target="_blank">Lucky Pierre</a>'s </i>America/n<i>, a "13-hour Election Day discussion/performance of the Constitution" at Chicago's </i><span class="fsl"><span itemprop="location"><span class="visible"><span class="fcb"><i>Defibrilla</i><wbr></wbr><i>tor Gallery, November 6th, 2012. All of the presentations from the event were later published in book form by <a href="http://halfletterpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=20_4&products_id=299" target="_blank">Half Letter Press</a>. ]</i></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So many of the basic concepts associated with our history
were presented to us at such a young age that it can be very difficult for us
to see them afresh. For example: Who were the authors of Constitution and
Declaration of Independence? Some fellows called The “Founding Fathers,” we reflexively
utter. To the extent we give it any thought at all, most of us take this term to
indicate those men who founded, built, or established, a new nation, conceived
in liberty, and so on and so forth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But I’m afraid we have fallen victim here to a bit of folk
etymology. Sometimes the obvious definition is not the correct one. For
instance, our word to “buttonhole” is a misrendering of “button-hold,” a little
loop that holds down a button on a garment. And in the context of pinning
someone down with your scintillating conversation, it makes much more sense
this way, despite the etymological corruption. So too in the case of these men
we call “Founders”: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Sam Adams, John
Jay, Roger Sherman, Patrick Henry—the whole lot, were actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">foundlings</i>, abandoned by their mothers
and left to die of exposure, only to be rescued and raised by wolves. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Happily, the proper recovery of this term can give us important
new insights to help understand this most essential of foundational documents,
from which so much of our national philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence springs
forth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of the main functions of a constitution is to locate
sovereignty. We’ve deposed the Prince, the traditional residence of sovereign
power, necessitating a new home for it. In searching for this home, the first
question we may ask is whether our sovereignty is <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unitary</i>
or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">federal</i>. Unitary sovereignty is
centralized; federal sovereignty is distributed among states or provinces. (This
can be a little confusing to those of us who paid attention in history class,
because the original Federalists—people like Alexander Hamilton and James
Madison--actually opposed the “federalist” model, which they felt was
inadequate to the job of effective governance. The first American government,
promulgated under the Articles of Confederation, was too decentralized, they
argued, while the Anti-Federalists—in other words those who supported the
federalist model—argued that placing too much power in a centralized unitary
government would only lead to a resurgence in the kind of tyrannical oppression
the Revolution had just thrown off. Monarchy again, in all but name.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Where, then, is our sovereignty located? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it in “The People,” in the several states,
in the Federal government, in the foundling document itself?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The typical wolf litter is around 5 to 6 pups. A female wolf
has around 8 to 12 breasts. It is rare thing in nature for a wolf litter to
number higher than the total amount of its mother’s breasts. But it is also a
rare thing in nature for a group of human infant boys to simultaneously be abandoned
by their mothers and left to die of exposure, only to be rescued and suckled by
wolves until they are strong enough to fend for themselves. We owe our origin
as a nation to a very unique historical event, precipitated by Oracular
pronouncements that these infant boys would cause great upheaval (as they did).
We don’t know exactly how many She-Wolves there were on hand to suckle the
Foundling Fathers; that has been lost to history. We do know that at a certain
point, the feeding of the Foundling Fathers was supplemented by woodpeckers and
other birds. Nothing in the historical record indicates that any of the
Foundling Fathers were lost to malnutrition or starvation. But it seems fair
enough to surmise that—at least at first—the Foundlings experienced a great
deal of anxiety over the impression that there were just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not enough nipples</i> to go around—a pathology universally glossed
over in the many myths and fairy tales of Foundling heroes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We can see the remnants of this anxiety reflected in the
debate, in the pages of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Federalist
Papers</i>, and later at the Constitutional Convention itself, over whether or
not to enumerate a Bill of Rights. Hamilton felt that the presence of enumerated
rights would imply that any unenumerated rights would be presumed not to apply,
which would lead to Tyranny. Anti-Federalists, in turn, argued that enumerating
no rights whatsoever would guarantee Tyranny from the start. In both cases it
is important, for our present purpose, to mentally substitute for the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rights</i>, the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nipples</i>; and for the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tyranny</i>,
a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deprivation of Nipples</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is our founding document. We should know the minds of
the men who wrote it, what their concerns, preoccupations, and even obsessions
were. What we discover is that they were so fixated on whether or not there
were going to be enough nipples that they never really got around to solving
the problem of where sovereignty resided in our system of governance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Orthodox historians will tell you that
the lack of a clear solution owes to a stalemate between the opposing
philosophical views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, but this view
overlooks what all the Foundling Fathers had in common—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that they were foundlings!</i> It is much more parsimonious to suggest
that they were spending so much energy on nipple anxiety that there wasn’t
enough left over to creatively solve the problem of where sovereign power lies.
So they fudged it, as in Amendment 10:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;">The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In other words, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i> sovereignty is delegated to the States, or possibly to the
citizens of those states (to whatever extent these constitute a separate
political entity), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">except</i> that more powers
may be granted back to the central government at any time by constitutional amendment,
which may be proposed by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">either</i>
Congress or a majority of states. Are we clear?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At the heart of The Constitution and Bill of Rights is this
paradox: If Sovereignty resides in the People (“popular sovereignty”), then
what do we even need government for? Isn’t need of a structured legislative,
executive and judicial branch all the evidence you would require for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">absence</i> of sovereign power? A mob is not
sovereign, nor is any random collection of people in a subway car. On the other
hand, if Sovereignty resides in the Government, then what do we need Democracy
for? Why should the “will of the people” be any more germane to our welfare than
it was to the divine emperors of China or the Holy Roman Empire? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A corollary paradox: if the People who reside in the Several
States are the same People who reside in the United States—as they must be—and
Sovereignty resides in the People, then how can the states and the Federal
government be at cross purposes? After all, each is the political expression of
the same sovereignty. Why even have a debate over Federalism at all, if we are
taking any of this seriously? Furthermore, if there really is such a thing as
“The People;” if we are, as the Preamble says, a unitary “We the People” and
not a collection of many peoples or persons, then again I ask what the point of
Democracy is. One People, One Vote? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In that one first phrase in the Preamble, “We the People,”
are so many confusions sown. Being united is, you will notice, something that
we can’t stop talking about. We’re obsessed with submerging our selfhood into a
greater whole, like reverse mitosis. To be united, after all, is more than to
merely be allied, or in league, or in solidarity; it is to be fused, like two
neighboring vertebrae that have insufficient cartilage between them to continue
to function independently. Good fences make good neighbors. “United We Stand,
Divided We Fall” is the motto of the codependent family, terrified above all
that one member will stand up for herself in a healthy way, disclose the family
secrets on Wikileaks, expose the damage, call for accountability. “We must all
hang together,” said Benjamin Franklin, “or we will assuredly hang separately.”
Well, speak for yourself, Ben.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is just the kind of confused pathology one would expect
to emerge out of the trauma of being abandoned and left to die, then being
suckled by an indeterminate number of she-wolves, and fed by woodpeckers who
never seemed to come around often enough, but it never seems to be the right
time to bring this up, even now, 233 years after the fact. There’s always some
emergency, and if it’s not being abandoned and left to die it’s being taxed
without representation by the Imperial British monarchy, or being attacked by
Indians, or Spaniards, or the Kaiser, or the bomb-throwers in Haymarket Square,
or, Somebody just blew up the USS Maine, or launched Sputnik, or embargoed our
oil, or, Violent extremists have taken over the Civil Rights movement, they
want to steal your car radio and screw your daughter, or, Somebody just tried
to detonate his underwear. There is always some kind of urgent crisis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And so we eternally fail to confront the fact that we are
living in an incomplete, unidimensional political landscape. It all sounds good
until you get outside the bubble and start to realize how much doesn’t add up,
how much is missing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We got the One For All
part, but we left out the All For One part. We got “From each according to his
abilities” but we left out “To each according to his means.” And this makes it
inordinately difficult to see actual hardship, privation, or injustice when it
resides in an individual citizen or household. We can’t see the trees for the
forest; the persons for The People.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Foundlings need to survive, and to keep from going crazy they often need to make up elaborate fantasies. But once these fantasies serve
their purpose, they tend to just get in the way. At a certain point, these
fantasies become useless fictions. Ghosts. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of the ways you can tell that the Constitution is a ghost-filled
place is that the Supreme Court is always trying to have séances with it. It’s
common practice when the Court convenes for Justice Scalia to actually drag out
a Ouija board and try to contact the Spirit of the Original Intent of the Words
of the Constitution. Scalia, like all originalists, believes that the We The
People Ghost of 1789 is real, and trods the earth in chains, like poor Jacob
Marley. (Little known fact: Before every session of the Supreme Court, Scalia
makes sure to have an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, and a fragment of underdone potato for dinner the night before.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As easy as it is to expose this position to the mockery it
deserves, let’s not forget that the opposite interpretation, the “Living
Constitution” of the loose constructionists, is just as spooky and
supernatural. In 1920, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the words of the
Constitution</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">have <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">called into life a being</b> the
development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted
of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had
created an <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">organism</b>… The treaty in
question does not contravene any prohibitory words to be found in the
Constitution. The only question is whether it is forbidden by some <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">invisible radiation</b> from the general
terms of the Tenth Amendment. </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(my emphasis)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">We have on the one hand, the
originalists communing with the One True Spirit who knows the Letter of the Law,
and on the other hand, the loose constructionists Kabbalistically poring over
the letter of the law in hopes of raising the Spirit that resides there. We
are, in each case, spooked, haunted by our Constitution, forgetting it is an
artifact of our own imagination, forgetting it was written under extreme
duress, bordering on madness. Like those letters we would write to our friends,
fresh out of college, right after we got dumped by the love of our life, and we
were heading to Wyoming to become fire watchers. There was some good stuff in
those letters, some good, wise, courageous stuff that holds up even today. It’s
a good thing we saved them! But--we forget at our peril--we, the writers of
those letters, were bonkers. Just like those Foundling Fathers.. We should humbly
and sincerely thank them for what they have given us. But we should also
consider that the custom of revering a political philosophy created by men
raised by she-wolves and fed by woodpeckers may be due for gentle revision. We,
the Parented, the Well-Fed, the Nurtured, the Sane, the Confident, the Hopeful,
the Unhaunted.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-40376715615691798782012-05-30T16:48:00.002-05:002013-03-30T14:05:59.499-05:00On Empire<i>[Written for <a href="http://writeclubrules.com/">Write Club</a>, a monthly reading series in Chicago that pits writers against each other cage wrestling style. In this bout I presented for "Empire," against "Revolution."]</i><br />
<br />
Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am honored to welcome you to this convocation, and gratified that so many of you were able to make the long journey. As most of you arrived here tonight by means of secret underground tunnels, you may not be aware of the increasingly dire situation outside these very doors: a throng of humanity numbering in the thousands bearing torches and pitchforks. They await the outcome of these august proceedings. <br />
<br />
The question of the hour, as testified by every broadsheet headline, every drawing room conversation, every sermon in every pulpit: should we shut down <i>Write Club</i>?<br />
<br />
That is the resolution that stands before us. You all have your ballots. Now let me begin by saying that of all the many charges levied against <i>Write Club</i>: that it is uncouth, that it is lewd, that it is corrupting of morals, that it curdles milk, that it causes genital warts, that the Overlord is implicated in the illegal trade of rhinoceros horn--against all these charges I resolutely defend <i>Write Club</i>. But there remains one accusation that we must take seriously here tonight. That is the charge that <i>Write Club</i> is an instrument of Empire. <br />
<br />
Before I move on to the formal charges, an aside, to that faction among you who are hoping for me to address the charge that <i>Write Club</i> is an instrument not of Empire but of Revolution: Let me dispense with your anxiety by assuring you that the two are in fact one and the same, in that both have aims that are total. Revolution is merely Empire dressed in rags. You can dispel this problem from your minds and be troubled by it no longer.<br />
<br />
OK then, <i>Exhibit A: Hegemonic expansion. </i><br />
<br />
Chicago, Atlanta, Athens, San Francisco, Los Angeles. The overlord might be inclined to characterize these as “chapters” of a “consortium” or “federation” of <i>Write Clubs</i>. He may call them as he will. When the first of these chapters elects to experiment with an 8-minute bout, or when they instruct their audiences to tell six to nine friends about <i>Write Club</i>, well, we will be eyeing the Overlord's reaction carefully.<br />
<br />
<i>Exhibit B: The Loving Cup of Deathless Fucking Glory. </i><br />
<br />
The phrase is from Walter Scott's poem: “Soldier, wake ― thy harvest, fame/Thy study, conquest; war, thy game.<br />
<br />
<i>War thy game.</i><br />
<br />
That brings us to:<br />
<br />
<i>Exhibit C: Violence. </i><br />
<br />
Day versus Night. Country versus City. Land versus. Sea. Head versus Heart. Life versus Death. Man versus Machine. Pride versus Prejudice.<br />
<br />
Philip K. Dick wrote that “Empire is the codification of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.” Let's look at one recent <i>Write Club</i> bout, staged this very evening at Chicago's Hideout Inn, less than 100 miles from our present location: Lock versus Key. Now in nature, you might observe that Lock and Key exist in a state of harmoniousness or complementarity. Keys exist that they may lock and unlock―without them locks are eternally fixed, functionless, ossified. And locks exist to consummate keys. A key without a lock that fits it is no key at all; it's just more idle detritus to clutter up some dish of mismatched buttons and old subway tokens on your bureau. To pitch lock and key in combat against one another can only result in one of two equally futile outcomes: a world of lonely, petrified locks, or a world of lonely useless keys. Which shall we have? It hardly matters. <br />
<br />
<i>Empire imposes its insanity upon us by violence</i>. It is the essence of Empire to look around itself, observe everything that is other, and be filled with the relentless desire to replace that other with itself. And what it cannot replace with itself, it induces into combat by proxy― The Gladiatorial games. Bread and Circuses. It is momentarily cathartic, this discharge of tension between matched pairs, between foes, so-called “opposites.” But when it is over, the fallen are fallen forever, never to be re-animated. Among the corpses in Empire's long trail of dead, how many languages, how many species, how many songs, dances, visions, philosophies, how many men, women, children. It is discourse―conversation―that leads us to truth, but these corpses will never again speak. <br />
<br />
Our way seems clear, then. By our love of truth, and dialogue, our love of multiplicity and diversity, we must oppose <i>Write Club</i>. And yet, this paradox. The very act of opposing an institution of opposition―of combat―constitutes a tacit endorsement. As Dick wrote, “whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement.” <br />
<br />
And so, my fellow members of the secret Illuminati, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Knights Templar―we would seem to be an impasse. What can be the stance toward a rank evil which can be neither countenanced nor opposed? As a secret society, we have always been known by our deeds, not our words. Tonight we must do the same, taking our cue from the infinite Godhead itself, which permitted the creation of the cosmos only when it contracted its infinitude, allowing finite actuality to condense out of infinite potentiality. Only by withdrawing, making space for what is Other, can the world come into being. It is the only meaningful anti-Imperial act, to make space for what is Other. And in that spirit, I contract my remarks here short of my allotted time. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><br /></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-45563698362309127292012-05-04T12:16:00.001-05:002013-11-02T13:08:23.965-05:00Langer III<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Because the prime purpose of language is discourse, the conceptual framework that has developed under its influence is known as "discursive reason." Usually, when one speaks of "reason" at all, one tacitly assumes its discursive pattern. But in a broader sense any appreciation of form, any awareness of patterns in experience is "reason"; and discourse with all its refinements (e.g. mathematical symbolism, which is an extension of language) is only one possible pattern. </blockquote>
From <i>Feeling and Form</i> (1953)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-91155557233783535302012-05-02T17:31:00.002-05:002013-11-02T13:08:38.355-05:00Susanne Langer II<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Physics did not begin with a clear concept of "matter"--that question is still changing rapidly with the advance of knowledge--but with the working notions of space, time, and mass, in terms of which the observed facts of the material world could be formulated. What we need for a science of mind is not so much a definitive concept of mind, as conceptual frame in which to lodge our observations of mental phenomena. </blockquote>
From <i>Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Volume One</i> (1967)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-21616084599833741552012-05-02T17:25:00.002-05:002013-11-02T13:08:58.991-05:00Susanne Langer I<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Any natural mechanisms we credit for the functions of life and try to trace from their simplest manifestations in a culture of <i>Neurospora</i> to human brains conceiving poetry, must be great enough to account for the whole spectrum of vital phenomena, i.e. for our genius as well as for the mold on our bread. Theories that make poetry "merely" an animal reaction, favored by "natural selection" as a somewhat complex way of getting a living, really prove, above all else, that our basic philosophical concepts are inadequate to the problems of life and mind in nature.</blockquote>
From <i>Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Volume One</i> (1967)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-9792617512511932132012-04-22T14:19:00.000-05:002013-11-02T13:22:17.522-05:00Law of the Jungle (re-post)<i>[Here's a re-post from 2009. I'm posting it again because it gets at one of the big problems raised by the "hard-determinist" or "incompatibilist view that free will is an illusion: If our thoughts are not something we actively and consciously engage in, but rather the pre-determined "effects" of prior genetic and environmental causes, then how are reason and morality even possible? I've made a few slight revisions to the original post, and elaborated on a couple of points that were earlier unclear.]</i><br />
<br />
In working toward a definition of human nature and intelligence, Kant drew a distinction between <i>the actual</i> and <i>the potential</i>
-- that is, the world as it is, and the world as it might be. Even
allowing for some porosity between humanity and other species, it should not be controversial to suggest that such a distinction does not exist
in any developed form in non-human intelligences. (I exclude so called "artificial intelligences," which are really just extensions of human intelligence by other means). So far as we know, only humans have "oughts." To whatever extent
non-human organisms choose their behavior, they do not so do by
reasoning among choices, for this would require a symbolic thought
process they do not possess. (An exception may be the cetaceans, but
we'll leave that aside for now).<br />
<br />
The appearance of
humanity's faculty to envision potential alternatives to "what is" marks
the origin of (among other things) morality. Without a
system to order our possible choices as preferences, we would either be reduced
to paralysis, or forced to return to the realm of pre-conscious behavior. This is to say that the world of actuality (as described
by biology, for example) is, for humans, transected by a realm of thought not confined to its borders, and often in opposition to it. Indeed, one of the main functions of language is to discourse on things that do not, but might, exist. Highly
ordered metaphysical schemes like those of Plato or of Christian
theology are specific manifestations of this kind of transcendence, but
no system of thought is completely free of it. Even supposedly amoral
"anything goes" philosophies, like Nietzsche's or Sartre's, stand in
opposition to an "actual" state of affairs they wish to disparage, such
as traditional Christianity, or "bourgeois" values.<br />
<br />
The
question that emerges for an ethical system that purports to be
"naturalistic" (that is, explained entirely in biological terms) is this (very old) one:
Given our ability to imagine multiple possible worlds (if not, in fact,
our inability to <i>refrain</i> from imagining them), what is to be our
rationale for choosing among them? Any answer that appeals to biology
alone will fail to account for moral reasoning (if not culture altogether), since the distinction between "is" and "might" cannot be found in genes or neurons. It is a property only of minds, which is to say of intelligence experienced subjectively. (We can dispense with the silly objections about dualism here, I hope.)<br />
<br />
Before it is proposed that no moral philosophy
would ever try to explicate an ethos in strictly biological
terms, let's look at a famous article by the Australian philosopher J.L. Mackie (1917-1981), titled "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=AY2py-g7PGUC&pg=PA165&dq=mackie+law+of+the+jungle&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SkSUT4zqGoPpgQeAusnwCA&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mackie%20law%20of%20the%20jungle&f=false">The Law of the Jungle</a>," and published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Philosophy</span> in 1978. This paper was one of the first philosophical responses to Richard Dawkins' <i>The Selfish Gene</i>.
Dawkins himself was careful in that book not to imply that biological
"selfishness" (that is, the persistence of successful traits throughout
time) justified <i>psychological</i> egoism. Mackie's take was far less cautious.<br />
<br />
The main body of "Law of the Jungle" is a fairly innocuous exploration of a type of group selection that Dawkins overlooked in <i>The Selfish Gene</i><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>. But he closes with a palpably ethical conclusion:<br />
<blockquote>
What
implications for human morality have such biological facts about
selfishness and altruism? One is that the possibility that morality is
itself a product of natural selection is not ruled out, but care would
be needed in formulating a plausible speculative account of how it might
have been favoured. <b>Another is that the notion of an ESS may be a
useful one for discussing questions of practical morality</b>. (my emphasis)</blockquote>
ESS, as readers of <i>The Selfish Gene</i>
know, stands for "Evolutionarily Stable Strategy," which is a type of
biological homeostasis worked out by game theorists. ESS theory is
called upon to demonstrate why "reciprocal" altruism exists in
populations where we might expect a brute selfishness to prevail: Since a
pugilistic stance is thought to require a huge outlay of energy (having
constantly to defend oneself in fights), the smart strategy would be to lay low and live in harmony until that harmony is
disrupted by another member of the population.<br />
<br />
Following
Dawkins, Mackie cites the example of bird grooming behavior, which ESS
theory divides into three types: Sucker, Cheat, and Grudger. The Sucker embodies the extreme of complete altruism, removing ticks from other
birds without reservation. The Cheat embodies pure selfishness,
allowing other birds to remove its ticks but never going out of its way
to return the favor. The Grudger bridges the difference, grooming all other
birds with the exception of those who don't reciprocate.<br />
<br />
Game theory predicts that the Grudger "strategy"
of reciprocal altruism will spread through a population, displacing the
less sophisticated strategies of pure selfishness or pure altruism. And
so it may. And we might pause to notice, as Mackie does, that there is
an echo in this strategy of our own concept of fairness. ("Do unto others...")<br />
<br />
This
is not a problem as far as it goes. Birds have been employed as symbols
of justice and wisdom as at least as far back as Athena's owl. We find
the flock-as-jury in Farid Ud-Din Attar's allegorical poem <i>The
Conference of the Birds</i> from the 12th century, and Chaucer's <i>Parlement
of Fowles</i> 200 years later. As valuable as modern ethology is, it is nothing new to demonstrate that we share with birds certain social norms.<br />
<br />
But this is a far different thing than asserting, as Mackie does, that <i>because</i> some birds have evolutionarily developed behaviors which are "healthy
in the long run" and which resemble our own notion
of fairness, our notions of fairness are thereby justified. Other far
less savory bird behaviors, such as eating the young in a neighboring
nest, would appear to be just as "stable" as grooming behavior. Are they,
too, to be adopted as preferred human behavior? <br />
<br />
After
the standard disclaimer that "there is no simple transition from ‘is’ to
‘ought,' no direct argument from what goes on in the natural world and
among non-human animals to what human beings ought to do," Mackie goes
on to promote <i>exactly that argument</i>. After linking reciprocal altruism to our
modern common sense notions of fairness (although it bears a much closer
resemblance to older modes of justice like the vendetta or blood feud--"An eye for an eye"), he associates
the "Sucker" strategy with the philosophies of Jesus, and Socrates, who
advocated, he says, "repayment of evil with good." Then, switching back to ESS
theory, he writes:<br />
<blockquote>
[A]s Dawkins points out, the
presence of suckers endangers the healthy Grudger strategy. It allows
cheats to prosper,
and could make them multiply to the point where they would wipe out the
grudgers, and ultimately bring about the extinction of the whole
population. This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsche’s view of
the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian type.</blockquote>
This
attenuation between discussions of biological stability and moral
programs happens so quickly it's easy to miss Mackie's move, in this
paragraph, of using the "is" of biology to justify ("provide fresh
support for") the "ought" of the Nietzschean moral structure. But it's
there, in very clear terms: Always retaliate. It works for birds! (Note also there is no historical evidence that Nietzschean morality is more "evolutionarily stable" than Christian morality.)<br />
<br />
(It's important to mention in passing that Mackie is wrong on the science too. According to ESS theory, if the cheats prosper and wipe out all the suckers and grudgers, we are left with a stable population of cheats (until the rise, through variation and selection, of new grudgers, which would re-dominate the population.) It would be no less "healthy," in biological terms, than an all-grudger population. We can hypothesize that there might be more sickness through tick infestation, but whether this is sufficient to threaten extinction is not captured in this particular model, which only measures the relative effectiveness of the three strategies within a closed system.<br />
<br />
What this suggests is that Mackie has unwittingly added a moral dimension to the grudger strategy among birds where none belongs. At the same time he is employing the example of bird populations to demonstrate why Nietzschean morality is better than Christian morality, he is simultaneously using our own human concepts of fair play to valorize the behavior among birds. Everyone knows an all-cheat population would be "bad," after all.)<br />
<br />
Mary Midgley, in her famous response
to Mackie, which kicked off her ongoing feud with Richard Dawkins (a "Grudger," in temperament, if there ever was one),
points out the fairly obvious shortcomings of such a linkage between
evolutionary stability and ethics. Like the birds in the game theorists'
model, we appear to already be congenitally prepared by our genes to retaliate against
transgressions against us. We need no special help from the world of ideas --the realm of the possible--to remember to do harm to our enemies when transgressed upon.
As Midgley puts it, "The option of jumping on one’s enemies’ faces
whenever possible has always been popular." She does
not, however, follow Mackie's lead in suggesting that the only other option is to make a wholesale replacement of the strategy of
retaliation with a strategy of saintly restraint. She suggests that the
ethos of the paying good to evil arose as an <i>intelligent</i>, reasoned--not dogmatic--response to the limitations of our emotional makeup:<br />
<blockquote>
This disregard of the essential emotional context reappears in Mackie’s idea that the <b>undiscriminating</b>
‘sucker’ behaviour is one recommended by Socrates and Christ. Neither
sage is recorded to have said ‘be ye equally helpful to everybody’.
Both, in the passages he means, were talking about behaviour to one
narrow class of people, with whom we are already linked, namely our
enemies, and were talking about it because it really does present
appalling problems. (my emphasis)</blockquote>
She goes on:<br />
<blockquote>
Of course charity and forgiveness have their drawbacks too, <b>especially if they are unintelligently practised</b>.
As Mackie rightly says, there are problems about reconciling them with
justice, and justice too has its roots in our emotional nature. There
are real conflicts here as both Socrates and Christ realized. (my
emphasis)</blockquote>
In other words, in the moral realm we are dealing with considerations here far beyond the ability of game theory to effectively model. The issue now becomes one of flexibility and
versatility, which are dramatically multiplied in the human capacity to
represent things symbolically, and of intelligence--the ability to hold multiple variables in one's consciousness while working out a problem. There is simply no way for specific usages of complex reason to be genetically encoded or learned by rote: there are far too many unknown contingencies to account for. Game theory is unlikely to predict the pythagorean theorum, the Critique of Judgement, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, the Parable of the Talents, or even "The Law of the Jungle." (Mackie's article, not Kipling's maxim, though probably that too.) Fortunately, we need no more than what we already have: a formal, methodical study of reason and symbolic representation. As soon as we stop letting fears of "dualism" drive us into the arms of an untenable "naturalistic" understanding of human thought and behavior (which is really just a zombie version of that old hard-to-kill doctrine of Behaviorism), we can return to an actual, meaningful study of the human condition.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-53008902945998657482011-12-31T16:17:00.000-06:002016-12-20T18:45:23.677-06:00Just a Fluke<br />
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<br />
A fluke (or flounder) is a kind of flat, bottom-feeding fish that is, according to lore, so easily caught that one may bait it with the most rudimentary tackle or technique. (In Gunther Grass's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Flounder</span>, the titular fish jumps right into the fisherman's arms). Over time, the fluke's disregard for the angler's competency loaned its name to a type of billiard shot, by which a shooter, having no good options, sinks a billiard ball by improbable or near-random means. Without trying, in the usual sense. Eventually the term took on the meaning, common today, of a happy accident, unrepeatable and beholden only to the undisclosed vagaries of chance.<br />
<br />
A fluke is also a type of small, flat, parasitic worm, one variety of which, the lancet liver fluke, has been employed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett to illustrate his theory of "memes," an improbable, near-random hypothesis that Dennett has had the happy accident of getting many otherwise intelligent people to subscribe to. The lancet fluke spends its adult life cycle in the liver of sheep and cattle. It gets inside these creatures by first getting itself incubated inside a type of snail, and then by hitchhiking aboard a species of common black ant that feeds on the snail's slime trail. Some of these flukes then make residence near a ganglia of nerve cells, where it is proposed they are now able to--somehow--alter the ant's behavior so that it spends the cool, dewy portions of the day perched high atop blades of grass, instead of going about its normal business at a safer remove from the teeth and gums of grazing livestock. Ants thusly hijacked by flukes are called, in the literature, "zombie ants."<br />
<br />
A "meme" -- a fancy word for an idea originally coined by biologist Richard Dawkins -- is supposed to be similarly parasitic, spurring its host (a human mind) to behave, zombie-like, in ways diverging from rational self-interest. Deviation or distraction from such self-interest under the influence of memes may lead, the theory goes, to fantastic cultural achievements, such as cathedrals and sonatas and elaborate cuisines. Or, it may lead to tragic cultural afflictions; harmful ideologies and superstitions. In either case the critical detail is that the minds hosting these memes are not free to consciously accept or reject them; rather memes are "selected" by Nature itself, on the basis of their effectiveness, according to Darwinian logic. The phenomenon of the meme-parasite is thus enlisted to explain all manner of apparently irrational behavior, and to prise open the beliefs that purportedly underlie them. <br />
<br />
I want to limit myself now to this question: If meme theory <i>were</i> true, if there were such things as discrete, mappable gene-like memes colonizing our minds, how could we tell? How can we know that our thoughts and values, whatever they may be, are really <span style="font-style: italic;">our</span> thoughts and values, and not the duplicitous effect of some kind of parasitic infection? How can we effectively protect ourselves from "bad" memes, when the whole strategy of bad memes is to appear to be good?<br />
<br />
To explore the answer, I return to our parasitized ant. What might the perception of a zombie ant might be as it dutifully climbs a blade of grass to await mastication? How might she understand her strange and deviant mission? Would she, for example, feel guilty for abandoning the important tasks of the hive, but remain impelled to climb the grass-stalk all the same by some quasi-instinctual engine--like a gambling addict skulking shame-faced to the casino? Or might she feel something like glory in fulfilling a higher purpose than was selected for the normal members of the community, much as a human martyr might feel? <br />
<br />
In either case, we who observe the ant's attempts at self-reflection and rationalization, privy as we are to the <i>true </i>reason for its climb--a hijacked nervous systemp would have to call such reflections pointless, since the very apparatus of reflection has been usurped by an outside agent with plans of its own.<br />
<br />
I don't imagine meme advocates would have any problem with this thought fable, as far as it goes. Dan Dennett, in his 2006 book on the etiology of belief, <i>Breaking The Spell</i>, acknowledges that many religious people go seemingly freely and gladly toward fates that strike outside observers as absurd, just as the zombie ant seems to do. The trouble arises when we exit the metaphor and ask, in the case of humanity in general, who is equipped to act as the "outside" observer? Who has the perspective to say definitively that any of us is or is not foolishly pursuing an absurd fate? Having analogized human belief about our own motives to the poor, deluded zombie ant, on what foundation can we say we truly understand any of our thoughts or actions at all?<br />
<br />
Dennett's answer is that rational inquiry and the scientific method can evaluate various beliefs and behaviors and demonstrate which ones are left wanting. His entire project in <span style="font-style: italic;">Breaking the Spell</span> is an appeal to open up allegedly "sacred" beliefs and practices to scientific investigation, so we can <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span> if they make any sense or not, or have any good in them at all, rather than relying on custom or faith, which are far more prone to self-deception.<br />
<br />
But here the knot tightens. In his earlier books, such as <i>Darwin's Dangerous Idea </i>(1995), and <i>Freedom Evolves</i> (2003), Dennett has proposed that the mechanism underlying both genes and memes--natural selection--is a "universal acid" that corrodes through everything. Anything which purports to operate by some other process is, in Dennett's coinage, a "skyhook"" a clunky and unnecessary explanation<i>; </i>a<i> deus ex machina</i>. If rational inquiry is to break the bonds of blind belief--which according to meme theory is the product of a process so universal it melts away all competing explanations--then how are we to explain the faculty of reason? It must be either that it is, on the one hand, somehow impervious to the corrosiveness of natural selection, making it just another "skyhook," or, on the other hand, itself a product of natural selection, making it, at least potentially, just another meme, with nothing to privilege it above any belief, delusional or otherwise.<br />
<br />
Given how self-evident it seems to us that reason itself is a powerful instrument of truth, the idea that examined, reasoned, and empirically tested beliefs are no less reliably true than those born of custom or superstition strikes us as absurd, but meme theory permits no other conclusion. If the zombie ant's faculties of perceptions and reflection cannot be trusted on the grounds that they permit no examination of its actual compulsions, than how can ours? How are we to know that our sacred values of truth, reason, inquiry and democracy (which Dennett hopes will supersede the old sacred values of faith, tradition and "belief in belief") aren't themselves "bad memes," serving interests antagonistic to our own? How do we know that free and critical inquiry, free from fetters and taboo, is not our own seemingly purposeful climb up the blade of grass? Against what do we test our sense that rationality is ... rational? How could we know for sure that our most prized and cherished ideas, values, theories and methodologies are not just <i>flukes</i>?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-33987075532435719082011-11-07T22:51:00.001-06:002013-03-30T13:56:20.243-05:00Notes on The Afghanistaniad<i>[Written for <a href="http://www.luckypierre.org/">Lucky Pierre</a>’s “What We Don’t Talk About,” a 12-hour continuous presentation on the War in Afghanistan, in Chicago, on November 5, 2011.]</i><br />
<br />
If the basic story of the <i>Afghanistaniad</i> is to be believed, the facts are as follows: some 3,200 years ago, in October 2001 by the old Gregorian calendar, a prince of the Kingdom of Wilusa, named Alaksandu, came over the seas to a land called <i>The United States</i> to claim the lesbian daughter of the Viceroy Dick Cheney. This daughter had been promised to Alaksandu by the goddess Ishtar, or Ashtar, in exchange for a golden apple, the present-day whereabouts of which are currently unknown.<br />
<br />
Thus began a bloody 14-year war that claimed many of the most promising warriors and princes of both sides, laying waste to vast and ancient olive groves and opium poppy plantations, and driving terror into the hearts of villagers and townspeople across the Hindu Kush. Terror became a fact of life, perhaps the defining fact of life, perpetrated by a people trying to put up a barricade against their own terror, the terror of having a Babylonian goddess give away your daughters for no reason--or worse than <i>no</i> reason: for vain, reactive, thoughtless reasons. The terror of vicissitude, of bad luck, of immortal sociopaths who can neither be stopped nor succored. <br />
<br />
Today you have heard many stories from that epic war, how George Bush, the son of George Bush, sacker of cities, poured salt into the furrows of his mesquite plantation, so that the war council would surmise he was unfit for battle, How the boastful General Stanley McChrystal pouted in his tent for days after Barack Obama, deadly archer, seized for himself the war prize slave girl Briseus. You have heard of the conversation that strong-greaved Pat Tillman had with his horse, Xanthus, before leading the Myrmidons into battle, during which Xanthus prophesied the warrior's death from friendly fire, and how the Furies punished Xanthus by striking him dumb on the spot. How in the battle of Wanat, the Waigal River became so affronted by the number of dead piling up between her banks, that she personally appealed to the United Nations for relief, forcing David Petreus, son of Sixtus, to order the destruction of the United Nations with Hellfire missiles launched from rosy-fingered drones, killing everyone inside, including the Waigal River herself. Once considered fanciful, these tales are today regarded as perhaps the best historical document of this period. And yet, even as history, these stories must be given a kind of context. Why should we care—we, with our teleportation machines, our rocket ship public transportation systems, our single unit washer and dryers, our climate controlled pantsuits, our tricorders and phasers—why should we care what happened in a war that ended over three millennia ago?<br />
<br />
A contemporary writer from around the time the <i>Afghanistaniad</i> was composed, <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDIQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.virginia.edu%2F%7Ejdk3t%2FWeilTheIliad.pdf&ei=PrS4TtjpCu74sQK6nNC3CA&usg=AFQjCNGfsIlgF4JEUPgUCkwPPMaxyng2NQ">Simone Weil</a>, who we believe may have been a Queen or regent of a state called either “DeGaulle” or “Bon Appetit,” had this to say. Please note that while we don't know with certainty what this work she calls "The Iliad" refers to, the best scholarship suggests it must have been some kind of precursor to the <i>Afghanistaniad</i> that all of our children know so well today. Queen Simone writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The true hero, the real subject, the core of the <i>Iliad</i>, is force. That force which is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man’s flesh cringes. The human soul never ceases to be modified by its encounter with force, swept on, blinded by that which it believes itself able to handle, bowed beneath the power of that which it suffers. Those who dreamt that force, thanks to progress, belonged henceforth to the past, have been able to see its living witness in this poem: those who know how to discern force throughout the ages, there at the heart of every human testament, find here its most beautiful, most pure of mirrors.</blockquote>
(If I may enter a side note from my own research: later in the text, the Queen refers to a book or series of books she calls "The Gospels." These, too have been lost to us, and while most scholars today regard “The Gospels” as some kind of sex manual or pillow book, it is our belief that these manuals were never actually written down at all, but were rather a loose, orally transmitted song cycle, performed by wandering bards and troubadours, each of whom added his or her own signature feats of sexual congress to the recitation.)<br />
<br />
The text continues:<br />
<blockquote>
The progress of war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though only a few hours before he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing. At the end of the first day of combat described in the <i>Iliad</i>, the victorious Greeks were in a position to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e. Helen and her riches. That evening, the Greeks are no longer interested in her or her possessions. <br />
<blockquote>
“For the present, let us not accept the riches of Paris<br />
Nor Helen; everybody sees, even the most ignorant, <br />
That Troy stands on the verge of ruin,”<br />
He spoke and all the Acheans acclaimed him.</blockquote>
What they want is, in fact, everything. For booty, all the riches of Troy; for their bonfires, all the palaces, temples, houses; for slaves, all the women and children, for corpses, all the men. <br />
<br />
The auditors of the <i>Iliad</i> knew that the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans. Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. The conquered brings misfortune to the conqueror, and vice versa.</blockquote>
How tragically this echoes the themes we see treated in that much more famous poem, <i>The Afghanistaniad</i>, not to mention—for those unable to ignore them—recent developments of our own war-torn time, some three millennia later.<br />
<br />
We believe that the year Queen Simone wrote these words, the year 1940 by the Gregorian Calendar, was a time of great peace for the nation of Bon Appetit and her neighbors. But we know from fragments of another epic poem called the <i>Annamiad</i> or <i>Vietnamiad</i>, that this tranquility would not last. I would like to close my remarks with a recently discovered musical fragment of that latter poem—please excuse me while I see if I I can get this ancient technology to operate properly. This device was called “Your Tube,” which we believe refers to the Eustachian tube in the middle ear, reflecting the fashion of the time for music to sound as though one was hearing it from deep within a long hallway, warm and dark, and covered with fine and sensitive hairs.<br />
<br />
I leave you with this haunting song from 3 millennia past, "Song for the Corpses," by the troubadour Trinh Cong Son.<br />
<br />
<iframe align="middle" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VVnrU5ipeYc?rel=0" width="420"></iframe>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<a href="http://db.tt/E0pwX4HN">Song for the Corpses</a><br />
Trinh Cong Son<br />
<br />
Dead bodies float along the river<br />
They lie in the rice fields, soaked in sunlight<br />
On the rooftops of the city<br />
On the winding, tortuous streets<br />
<br />
Dead bodies lying around aimlessly<br />
Beneath the verandas of pagodas<br />
Within the churches of the city<br />
At the doorstep of deserted houses<br />
<br />
Oh, Spring, the corpses deliver a scent to the rice paddies<br />
Oh, Vietnam, the corpses breathe life into tomorrow’s soil<br />
The path forward, though full of treacherous obstacles<br />
Because humans have already resided here<br />
<br />
Dead bodies lying around here<br />
Beneath the cold, pattering rain<br />
Beside the dead bodies of the old and weak<br />
Lie the dead bodies of the young and innocent<br />
<br />
Which body is the body of my sibling?<br />
Within this dark cave<br />
Within the scorched areas<br />
Beside the maize and sweet potato fields.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-43503781903612547532011-04-18T16:23:00.000-05:002013-11-02T13:54:14.078-05:00Amod Lele on Humility in ScienceI like a lot of the things Amod Lele says <a href="http://loveofallwisdom.com/2011/04/humility-in-science-and-other-traditions/">here</a> about the Humbler Than Thou stance taken in the conflict of religion and science. Of course anyone who attempts to claim the mantle of humility immediately puts herself in a thorny spot.<br />
<br />
Carl Sagan, whose <i>Demon Haunted World</i> Lele highlights in his post, partially dodges this issue by asserting in that book not his own humility, but that of his tribe, the scientists, but I think the effect is the same. (Epimenides, remember, didn't claim that he was a liar, specifically, but rather that all Cretans were.) In particular, I am inclined to be less generous than Lele regarding the following quote, from <i>DHW</i>:<br />
<blockquote>
I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find.</blockquote>
This has a mythical flavor to it, that I don't think is borne out by the actual spirit and practice of science. Is it really humble to desire to know the secrets and regularities of nature, in order to render it more predictable, and thus easier to tame and control? Is it humble to build underground caverns the size of a small city, in order to smash particles together at immense speeds? To perform medical research on animals so that humans might be, for a time, spared the ravages of disease? To send manned spacecraft, and unmanned probes, to other planets? To test, develop, and mass produce synthetic materials whose brief usefulness is eclipsed by their long lifespan as detritus (think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas.) To genetically engineer crops and livestock?<br />
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I am not anti-science; not wholesale, anyway. I don't argue here against the potential benefit of many of these endeavors. But to my ear, "humble interrogation" is just the wrong word for them. And I would argue that in few other areas of life do we "impose our needs and wants on Nature" with as much brio as we do in the scientific arena; our needs and wants not just to understand nature, but to master it, to perhaps even outwit it. A position farther from humility would be difficult to stake out.<br />
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Sagan was sincere, I think, in his belief that science was humble, as are, surely, most if not all of advocates for science today. And it's true that the best scientists are always prepared to find themselves in the wrong. Every now and again a scientist will even express the hope that his hypothesis is overthrown, and you can't get much more humble than that. But for each one of these, how many feeding frenzies, such as the one Jerry Fodor stirred up with his recent book critiquing natural selection (which is not to defend his thesis in that book, though the response was instructive.)<br />
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Humility isn't everything. Sometimes what is called for is self assertion, sometimes bared teeth. The question is whether, where humility is a virtue, it is in any more ready supply in scientific communities than religious ones (or, since the world not is not actually divided in merely two, in artistic ones, political ones, historical ones, literary ones, etc.) Lele shows that Sagan needs some pretty creative bookkeeping to make his point, by personifying Science. Because of the tenacity and arrogance of a Galileo, for example, "Science" gets the credit for revising its picture of the cosmos from geocentrism to heliocentrism. And while science may, as Sagan claims, bestow its highest laurels on "those who convincingly disprove established beliefs," there are a lot of stops along the way where the incentives run in the opposite direction. You don't make your career by conceding other people's theories. <br />
<br />
The basic point being that science is participated in by humans, just as religion is, and it is hard (and not always wise) for humans to be humble. There should be no shibboleth here. Let each tend to his own garden.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-33660604376768556812011-04-05T20:07:00.000-05:002013-11-02T13:55:10.678-05:00Flatland of DreamsFor the second time in a week, Jerry Coyne, a secular Jew, has blamed the Shoah on ... <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/what-does-it-take-to-blame-religion/#comments">Judaism</a>. On April 1st he wrote, in the context of the recent <a href="http://underverse.blogspot.com/2011/04/maybe-michael-ruse-is-onto-something.html">massacre</a> in Mazar-i-Sharif, that Anne Frank was killed "because of religion." When a commenter challenged this idea, Coyne <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/ten-more-people-who-would-be-alive-if-it-werent-for-religion/#comment-89518">responded</a>, tersely, "Jews are a religion, not a 'race'." Then, yesterday, he blithley caricatured the (correct) view that not all conflicts involving religion are <i>about</i> religion:<br />
<blockquote>
We’re all familiar with those people who claim that ... while religion may <i>seem</i> to be involved in today’s horrors and evils, when you look deeper ... you’ll ultimately find the <i>real</i> causes. The Protestant/Catholic fracas in Northern Ireland? A historical squabble—religion was just a “label” for political opponents. The persecution of Galileo? A civil and political affair, not involving faith. <b>The institutionalized slaughter of the Jews during World War II? Well, the Nazis needed a scapegoat <i>somewhere</i>. </b>(my emphasis in bold.)</blockquote>
The notion that Nazi antisemitism was a "religious" matter is, of course, utterly unhistorical; the kind of non-fact one is used to hearing from people like Ann Coulter. The Nazis were concerned with Judaism as a racial phenomenon, not a theological one. The Nuremburg Laws were very clear in defining Jewishness along bloodlines. Even the descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity in generations past were considered as Jews, and marked for extermination. And while Jews were killed in larger numbers by far than any other group, they were not of course the only victims of the Reich. The Nazis killed Poles for being Poles, Roma for being Roma, homosexuals for being gay, political leftists, the disabled, and many more, adding up to several millions of victims.<br />
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There was one group that was persecuted on strictly religious grounds: the Jehovah's witnesses. Unlike Jews, they were allowed to escape persecution by renouncing their faith. In this sense, Coyne is close to being correct—a relatively small percentage of the Nazis' victims were killed "because of religion." But the point is a perverse one. Religion "caused" the death of some 2,500 Jehovah's Witnesses under the Nazis in the same sense that being physically weaker "causes" many women (and several men) to be raped, or that being non-white "causes" one to be disproportionally stopped, harassed, arrested, and jailed. It's just the wrong way to look at causality.<br />
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Because Jerry Coyne doesn't value the ideology of Jehovah's Witnesses, or religious Jews, he declares them objectively without value: extraneous, moribund. If these ideologies were absent, there would be no conflict, no bloodshed. Things will be better when we all cleave to the same metaphysical certainties, without dissent or pluralism. Sam Harris makes the case for this state of affairs in <i>The Moral Landscape.</i> Marcuse called such a society "One Dimensional." With less subtlety we could call it hegemonic.<br />
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Louis Ruprecht has a piece at <a href="http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/science/4459/the_end_%28of_religion%29_is_near%2C_scientists_say/"><i>Religion Dispatches</i></a> on the <a href="http://underverse.blogspot.com/2011/03/history-is-over-if-you-want-it.html">recent study</a> proposing mathematical models to explain the impending extinction of religion, in which he makes an excellent comment on the authors' invocation of enlightened self-interest ("utility") in one's choice of language, and, by extension, religion: <br />
<blockquote>
Deliberations over “status” in a colonial context are not matters of utility; they’re exercises in power. [Choosing to speak] Spanish or Quechua was a <i>political</i> decision as much as anything; a decision to accept or reject the new imperial order. Those who chose the more difficult bi-lingual option were often enormously useful as translators, though often deeply unhappy since they effectively belonged nowhere—no longer native and not quite imperial was their tragic new location.</blockquote>
From the point of view of mathematics, it's easy to interpret social change as a function of competing options in the marketplace of ideas, where the fittest wins. The study of social sciences—history, philosophy, anthropology, even literary criticism—is a needed counterweight to this view. It is easy to forget that power and privilege always regard themselves as rightful and inevitable. We abhor "might makes right" as an abstract principle, but in the real world we endorse it every time we neglect to ask if what is happening around us is what should be happening. To describe our moral choices as matters of "utility" gets us nowhere, since we can always rationalize the course of history as furthering the good of <i>something</i>.<br />
<br />
The tragedy of social monopoly—hegemony—is patently obvious in the case of the loss of our <i>linguistic</i> diversity (the capitulation of countless indigenous languages to colonial usurpers), making it a strange analogy for the authors of the extinction-of-religion paper to employ. Even in John Lennon's warm and fuzzy formulation, the idea of the world "living as one," with "nothing to kill or die for," has always had a very chilling (and ultimately boring) monotonic quality to it. Lennon, ironically, was a deeply iconoclastic man, who would not have lived comfortably in the "Borg Collective" milieu conjured in his song (another image suggested by the song is, also ironically, the Christian heaven). <br />
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Our task on this planet is surely not to end conflict. Manage it, as best we can, yes, but not end it. The call to celebrate ideological diversity is no more a platitude than the call to celebrate, and preserve, genetic diversity. It's more like recognition of a law of nature. Hegemony has never yet ruled the day, and likely never will. It takes two to tango, and, as Emma Goldman is supposed to have said, a revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-51703307314775306922011-02-17T18:41:00.003-06:002013-11-02T13:57:05.302-05:00On pausing to grab a robe for the Emperor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Allisvanity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Allisvanity.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
<a href="http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2011/02/emperors-gnude-clothes.html">Russell Blackford</a> and <a href="http://kazez.blogspot.com/2011/01/emperors-gnu-clothes.html">Jean Kazez</a> are brandishing competing denouments to the "Emperor's New Clothes," fleshing out what might happen after the brave innocent child says out loud that the Emperor is actually naked. In Kazez's version, meant to analogize what she sees as an over-emphasis on truth without regard for social relations (politics), the brave innocent child inspires a degraded second-tier response among the other children, who somewhat boorishly point out that the Emperor is not only naked, but also tubby to boot. In Blackford's version, meant to warn against a dangerous obsequity to social status, the brave innocent child is shouted down by the adults, who tell her she must never speak certain truths. <br />
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I've never liked the analogy of the Emperor's non-existent clothes to religion's supposed non-existent empirical underpinnings (and not just for the obvious reason that a great deal of what goes under the name "religion" does not aspire to empirical truth in the same way that science or history do.) I think the analogy does violence to the story, which (in the Anderson version) is a fable about vanity, not ignorance. The Emperor is able to be so easily swindled because he greedily desires the finest possible garments, and because he desires to maintain his Imperial station even when he appears to himself unfit to rule (inability to see the garments being putative evidence of lack of discernment). The irony is that it is his vanity that makes him unfit to rule. His senses don't deceive him, nor his reason; his insecurity does.<br />
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Furthermore, while we, the readers of the tale, know that the King has been deceived, the brave innocent child does not, and cares not. Nor has she heard the lie that not seeing the non-existent clothes is evidence of foolishness. She only knows that he is naked. This simplicity is what makes her innocent, and also what makes her a bad model for any thoughtful social critic, who we would like to have studied the ways of the world, or at least read some <a href="http://www.gailgastfield.com/innocence/soi.html">William Blake</a>. (I take this to be Kazez's main point: that while calling a spade a spade has value, all things being equal, it is not always the wisest choice. We blunt, temper, dress up, and postpone the truth for a host of reasons, sometimes legitimate, sometimes less so; truth is one value among many.) <br />
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Having said that, I can see why Kazez's story rubs Blackford the wrong way, since she explicitly compares the Incompatiblists to children, and the Compatiblists to grownups. This would come off as undeservedly condescending, if Blackford did not reply--in a voice very much like a child's--that his side was innocent and noble, while the other side is mendacious, simplistic, underhanded, and just mean. (This isn't the first time Blackford has assigned the black and white hats thusly):<br />
<blockquote>
As far as I can see, the incivility is generally not coming from people who could be considered part of the New Atheist movement - such as Dawkins, or Ophelia, or maybe Jerry Coyne [...] Most of the mockery, name-calling, gotcha rhetoric, twisting of the truth for effect, adopting outrageous and wildly implausible lies as "Exhibits", and various others forms of downright unfairness actually seem to be coming from such people as Chris Mooney and Josh Rosenau, i.e. people who wish that the Gnus would go away.<br />
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What we actually tend to see is reasonably civil, courteous, thoughtful critiques of religion from the Gnus being met with the response that it is so far beyond the pale that it should not be said. Thus, the crucial moment that set off the current round of debates was when Jerry Coyne reviewed two books by religious authors who argued for a compatibility of religion and science. The review was as civil as one could expect from any reviewer who disagrees strongly with key elements of non-fiction books that he or she is reviewing. It was thoughtful, detailed, and followed all the courtesies. See for yourself.<br />
<br />
The response from Chris Mooney was that such things should not be said.</blockquote>
Without even getting into particulars, this is a suspect stance. It's human nature that one's argument will appear to oneself as highminded, while one's opponent will seem to be illegitimate and sniping. This is one of the tendencies that the best discourse tries to meet head on, and rise above. The same is true of the position that <i>our</i> arguments are in the spirit of debate, dialogue, truth and inquiry, while our opponents arguments are censorious and scolding. "There is no God, and people should not believe there is," is an opinion which may be supported by rhetoric and logic, just as "Attacking religion in a withering, alienating fashion will have undesired blowback" is an opinion which may be supported by rhetoric and logic. Each can be presented in good, or bad, faith.<br />
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To be fair, it's true that Coyne's TNR article was pretty measured and tame. And it's true he was gentle and respectful when addressing that group of Methodist parishioners. But before we take these examples as typical and endorse Coyne's self-congratulation for never having "criticized an evolutionist, writer, or scholar in an ad hominem manner," it's worth taking a quick glance at his blog, where it's hard to find a post that doesn't devolve into ad hom (unless it's about kittens). Starting with the most recent example, earlier this week Coyne <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/good-bad-and-ugly/">called</a> Deepak Chopra (not someone I particuraly admire, but a writer nonetheless) "Deepity Chopra," whose significant wealth he calls "an indictment of America." <br />
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Prior to this he <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/zuckerman-we-hardly-knew-ye/">suggests</a> that the critiques ("tripe") of Phil Zuckerman--writer and scholar--are motivated mainly by jealousy of the New Atheists' book sales. Thomas Jackson writes "babble," Mary Midgley is "dumb" and "superannuated" (Coyne loves the 10 cent words Hitchens and Grayling teach him). Elaine Ecklund is a "disingenuous" "Templeton-funded automaton," (regular readers of Coyne's blog will learn that everyone funded by Templeton has been horribly <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/accommodationist-or-faitheist-templeton-will-pay-you-big/">corrupted</a>) Laurie Lebo has "lost neurons," Rob Knop is "mushbrained, and <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/">Josh Rosenau</a> has been taken over by a demon. That's just in the last 3 weeks. <br />
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Now, I really do mean to be sociological about this. There are numerous fair, interesting and important criticisms to make about religious belief and practice in this world, and I have no interest in stopping anyone from making them. Some I've even made myself. But do we really need to erect a firewall between these criticisms, and similar good-faith criticisms of science, humanism, or enlightenment values? Debate unavoidably divides people into teams, but we can acknowledge this division as a structural artifact, rather than mistaking it for a carving out of ontological categories. If we're interested in truth, dialogue, learning, and similar values, does it really matter so much where the lines are between us and them?<br />
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Not that I have any illusions about our ability to reject shibboleths altogether. But we can periodically direct our attention to the high-amperage jolt of human nature that runs through this debate, fueling (in this case) the self-serving myth of the big bad accomodationists trying to stamp out the decent, unimpeachable, eminently rational arguments of the "Gnus." And yes, there's sanctimony and snark to go around on all sides. That crack above about the 10-cent words, for example. That was jerky of me to say. It was and is an obstacle to clear vision and communication, every bit as much as the vanity of the Emperor in Anderson's story was an obstacle to his own clear sight and judgement.<br />
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<b>Update I</b>: <a href="http://www.jeremystangroom.com/were-not-uncivil-you-toothy-bastards/364/">Jeremy Stangroom</a>, in response to Blackford's post, calls him out for some choice ad homs of his own. His post is more concise than mine, if also slightly more testy.<br />
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<b>Update II</b>: Josh Rosenau <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2011/02/as_gnasty_as_they_wanna_be.php">chimes in</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
But when Russell claims in the post linked above that I "wish that the Gnus would go away," he's wrong. I wish they'd make better arguments, ones which engage the peer reviewed literature in the relevant fields, including philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, science/religion studies, metaethics, and even theology. I wish they cited that literature more, and I wish they published their arguments there and engaged with the relevant communities of scholars that way, rather than just through blogs, and TED talks, and mass-market books and magazines. I wish they'd study the literature of social movement theory, and take what lessons can be learned from past efforts to change society and apply that research to their own efforts. I wish they'd lay out some sort of consensus platform, including both big principles and practical changes to be made. I wish they'd work with, rather than against, their most likely allies. I wish they wouldn't drive wedges within the pro-science movement, and would focus their righteous ire on the religious authoritarians who deserve it, or who at least we all agree deserve it <i>most</i>. I don't want them to go away, I want them to be better at what they're trying to do. </blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-51522628774588294662010-11-02T13:57:00.000-05:002013-11-02T15:10:38.196-05:00Who is the Master Who Makes Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously?The "language of thought" hypothesis (LOT), originally developed by Jerry Fodor in the 1970s, and now championed in the popular press by Steven Pinker in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Language Instinct </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Stuff of Thought</span>, presumes a pre-literate conceptual language, sometimes called "mentalese", upon which our conscious, tangible symbolic language is based. This language of thought is imagined to be innate and universal, and thus a substrate for all human language from Algonquin to Finno-Ugric to Brooklynese.<br />
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The LOT hypothesis is an outgrowth of Chomsky's nativist theory of a "universal grammar," which in its turn was a response to the reigning behaviorist paradigm of the day. Behaviorism never rebounded from Chomsky's critique (though it’s found new expression in the speculative protoscience of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics">memetics</a>), and we're all better off for this. But beyond this, nativism has not proved to be very fruitful in our understanding of cognition, serving mostly to fortify the sociobiological argument that our cultural norms reflect hard-wired biological determinants that originally emerged to help us manage the challenges of our paleolithic beginnings.<br />
<br />
There are a number of logical problems with the LOT hypothesis, with perhaps the most obvious being that words, unlike numbers, are not static and precise through time, as they would need to be if they were subject to translation into and out of mentalese. The number represented by the numeral 2, for example, can be counted on to always be the same. But what is indicated by the modern English words <span style="font-style: italic;">love, doctor, faith, fish, holiday, circus, atom, fairy, wealth</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">savage</span>, just to name a few, has wildly varied just in the few hundred years we've been using this form of the language. If there was some kind of inborn uber-language which determined the meanings expressed in our own spoken languages, it's difficult to see how it could permit this kind of semantic drift.<br />
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The LOT model is built on the metaphor of computer processing, so it is instructive to ask how well a computer would function if different things were intended by the same terms during successive installs of a piece of software. It seems plausible to many of us us living now to imagine that human language rests on a logical foundation just like a computer program: after all, we can perform logical calculations, just as a computer can, and most of our expressions appear to be logically grounded. But the question to ask is not what we can do now, but what humans or humanoids could and did do at the dawn of language, at least 50,000 years ago, perhaps much earlier. The rudiments of formal logic didn't appear on the scene until less than 3,000 years ago, with the Greeks, and weren't developed into a complex system until the 20th century. This would be a strange course of events if formal logic were <span style="font-style: italic;">built into</span> the structure of our cognition from the start, which is what LOT proposes.<br />
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As best we can tell, for the first several thousand years of our existence human cognition took the form of what we now derisively call "magical thinking," or myth. This is the environment into which language was first born and given to develop. There is little in our history to suggest a strictly rational thought process underlying pre-modern language, and a great deal to suggest something very different.<br />
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Ernst Cassirer noted that the primacy of mythological thinking presents a significant problem for the realist view, which characterizes mythic narratives and meanings as erroneous explanations of objects and phenomena, given the lack of adequate tools and resources to understand these objects and phenomena for what they really were. But this description is based on a misunderstanding of mythical thinking; it presumes that from the very first, humans were concerned with explanations. The problem is that to formulate the questions that these explanations are supposed to answer, one must already have a language, and a fairly well developed one. Cassirer locates the error in common sense, writing in <span style="font-style: italic;">Language and Myth</span> (1946):<br />
<blockquote>
It seems only natural to us that the world presents itself to our and inspection and observation as a pattern of definite forms, each with its own perfectly determinate spatial limits that give it its specific individuality.</blockquote>
But on reflection it becomes difficult to see how these forms might have been experienced before there was a language to conceive them in. At the very least it is an open question whether or not we can truly be aware of spatial limits that we cannot name, and thus it would seem that ideation and language require each other. But then we are faced with the problem of winnowing down the full stream of experience into discrete, graspable elements. Cassirer continues:<br />
<blockquote>
What is it that leads or constrains language to collect [classes of objects] into a single whole and denote them by a word? ... As soon as we cast the problem in this mold, traditional logic offers no support ... for its explanation of the origin of generic concepts presupposes the very thing we are seeking to understand and derive, the formulation of linguistic notions.</blockquote>
Cassirer was writing 40 years before Pinker's first books on language, but provides an apt preemptive critique of the LOT thesis. We are tempted, in developing a philosophy of language, to work backwards from the world we know, but since philosophy must proceed in language (and a highly discursive one at that), <br />
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That's the rational critique. The empirical critique is that How would this putatively inborn, genetically determined linguistic structure have supported a conceptual schema so radically different from our own, and so different from what its own nature would predict, for so many thousands of years?<br />
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Cassirer provides numerous examples of the slow progression of mythological ideation from the earliest and simplest myths to the appearance of logical reasoning, and we could turn to any prominent cultural anthropologist for additional demonstrations. But there is interesting evidence of a more recent provenance as well, in the autobiography of Helen Keller, who very explicitly asserts that she had close to no inner life at all before she was taught sign language:<br />
<blockquote>
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind impetus... [N]ever in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation.</blockquote>
We shouldn't read too much into one self-reported anecdote, of course. Keller was a special case, born with sight and hearing only to lose it at nineteen months, so she was exposed to spoken language for a not insignificant period of time. But it is intriguing to note how little cognition she seemed to be capable of before she learned to use language.<br />
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In the March 10 <i>New Yorker</i>, John Lancaster writes of a similar, though more everyday, predicament when it comes to the most precisely descriptive regions of experience, as in the appreciation of wine, or perfume. He begins with a story about his "discovery," after long resistance, of what oenophiles call "graininess" in red wine. Before the experience, he had rejected the term as rhetorical overkill--something that many people with less refined palates (myself included) are quick to presume when encountering such seemingly fantastical language.<br />
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But when he finally noticed graininess (after many failed attempts), he conceded it was the perfect word, and not nearly as figurative as he had imagined. Here's the interesting part, which I was not expecting to find in a <i>New Yorker</i> article on olfactory perception:<br />
<blockquote>
What's more, in tasting it I realized I'd encountered versions of it--milder, more restrained--before. Now I knew what grainy tannins were. Most taste experiences work like that. A taste or smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don't have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded.</blockquote>
This is exactly the opposite of the common sense view, that objects and phenomena precede their names (though to be fair, someone had to be the first person to call a wine "grainy.")<br />
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Is it possible that our understanding of the world expands and develops not <span style="font-style: italic;">before</span> we describe it, and not <span style="font-style: italic;">because</span> we describe it, but <span style="font-style: italic;">as</span> we describe it? This seems much more plausible than the Darwinian explanation, in which we are in constant stenographic response to a world of given stimuli; and because the latter has us spinning our wheels, culturally, over alleged biological imperatives from a world long past, the possibility that we participate in our description of the world also seems much more likely to allow some actual evolution of thought, philosophical, scientific, and moral.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-29974990063581434312010-08-14T14:27:00.000-05:002013-11-02T15:10:05.271-05:00Saturday T'ang Poetry Blogging<b>Chingting Mountain, Li Bai (3 Translations)</b><br />
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Flocks of birds have flown high and away<br />
A solitary drift of cloud too has gone wandering on<br />
And I sit alone with the Ching ting Peak towering beyond<br />
We never grow tired of each other the mountain and I <br />
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<i><span class="addmd">--Shigeyoshi Obata</span></i><br />
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Flocks of birds fly high and vanish;<br />
A single cloud, alone, calmly drifts on.<br />
Never tired of looking at each other<br />
--<br />
Only the Ching-Ting Mountain and me.<br />
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<i>--Irving Y. Lo</i><br />
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Flocks of birds disappear in the distance<br />
lone clouds wander away<br />
who never tires of my company<br />
only Chingting Mountain<br />
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<i>--Red Pine</i><br />
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<span class="addmd"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-68711040443905341992010-08-06T14:09:00.000-05:002013-11-02T15:12:36.188-05:00Two Images<br />
1. A desert traveler spies an oasis, and makes for it. Upon approaching it, he sees that it has been a trick of the light, a mirage, and that what lies in its place is just more desert. The traveler makes a note that things are not always what they seem, and travels on.<br />
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2. A desert traveler spies an oasis, and makes for it. Upon approaching it, he sees that it is missing, and that what lies in its place is emptiness, in the form of a large pit. The traveler makes a note that someone could get hurt falling into such a pit, and resolves to fill it with something.<br />
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What we call the "death of God" should be like the first story, but is too often like the second, perhaps nowhere more so than in evolutionary biology.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-11116062957951474292010-05-16T22:51:00.002-05:002013-11-02T14:31:48.179-05:00Three Questions<blockquote>
Three questions have ever vexed the rational faculties of mankind: Life is the beginning of what? Love is the fulfillment of what? Death is the end of what? The essential attribute of an enduring religion or philosophy is the rational solution which it offers this three-fold riddle.</blockquote>
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--Manly Hall, 1929Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7827846.post-33802922173358787992010-04-30T13:07:00.002-05:002015-12-14T16:58:11.298-06:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Do you hear that--a faint whirring sound, like the sound of a distant pinwheel under a stout breeze? That's the sound of the internet, running smoothly without any interference from me. It's a good sound, especially to a person as up to the gills in non-thoughts and non-reflections as I presently am for much of the day. Will you find your way without me, to all the wrongnesses and incompletenesses, the reductionisms that need unreducing, and the pythons that need umbrellas opened in them? And all the smart and lovely things awaiting your limpid eyes and fertile minds? Will you manage to avoid the distractions--the viral videos, the endless comments threads, gossip, tirades and jeremiads? Yes, you will--or you won't, but then I'll be back and we'll riffle through it all, refreshed, and wiser, and perhaps even lighter of heart.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1