Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (Please, in particular, discuss Palestine in one of the two recent threads.)
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (Please, in particular, discuss Palestine in one of the two recent threads.)
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Plague Species
No more pesky masks!! Yey! Hallelujah!! The anti-maskers were right all along and have won the day. How’s that for bipartisanship? Next thing you know, Biden will announce the 2020 election was stolen and McDonald Trump really is POTUS afterall.
Trinity
Michael Hudson has an excellent interview on NC where he talks about China and a bunch of other stuff. What caught my eye was his repeatedly stating that Gates is essentially mentally ill, that all the oligarchs are the same. That we are dealing with people unable to think clearly anymore. That fits. I also didn’t know Gates is getting divorced, no surprise given his mental state. Same with Bezos’ last one. Maybe there is a difference between being the one who “made” the moola versus the one who only gets to spend it. The Gates foundation should be declared a global criminal enterprise for crimes against humanity (and the earth and other living things.)
We are literally in thrall to a bunch of nut jobs. It’s nice to hear someone with Hudson’s stature declare what is (or should be) common understanding. These “rulers” are losing their marbles. The more they make, the more they own, the more marbles they lose. I can’t help but suspect that evolution is in play here. It’s like a natural feedback loop, ensuring their eventual destruction, demotion, or demise. Nature rules over all of us.
And I don’t want to minimize the amount of damage these nut jobs have done and continue to do.
Willy
@ Trinity, plasticity is part of what made humans the dominant species. We can get really good at one thing, like powerlifting or chess-playing, and we have to adapt psychologically to focus all of our resources around that one thing. But there are downsides.
It’s obvious why the self-made wealthy lose touch, and thus empathy with their poor roots. Because those neural pathways aren’t needed anymore and become abandoned. Regarding wealth, we risk becoming so addicted to continuously expanding our wealth-derived power that we become oblivious to any negative impacts our activities have toward others. In the extremes, this looks as nuts to outside observers as does Uncle Louie’s alcoholism or Aunt Betty’s 600 pound life.
I’ve mentioned my average Joe “Christian” in-law who squeaked into osteopath school via connections and used new connections to rise to a top position in a medical clinic with several thousand employees. He then with his allies, ‘bookworked’ the clinic away from its value/integrity roots and into a money extraction racket well-documented by the dozens of angry online reviews from once-loyal former patients. He then with his allies, sold the place to an even larger corporation for millions into his own pocket, in exchange for ruining a valuable community resource. With no sense of guilt or even awareness whatsoever. And lots of rationalization. He’s not a bad guy. At least not born that way. He’s just a normal person using a system gone nuts for his own highly rationalized greed/power addictions. But it’s a free country, right? I can always leave that clinic and even that system and try to stay fit and healthy to avoid ridiculously expensive institutionalized doctors and use small-business value/integrity naturopaths instead, if I absolutely need health care.
But it pisses me off that humanity has to continuously go down that path over and over again, always forgetting any lessons learned.
Trinity
Willie, I hope you aren’t saying I should have empathy for Gates. I don’t, never will. To me it illustrates how narrow his intellectual capacity has always been. I don’t think you are saying that, and hoping you are not.
Some Native tribes did learn these lessons, initially isolated as they were from Eurasia, and they structured their cultures to deal with the occasional rapist or murderer. They’ve been telling us from the beginning what would happen to us. I’m sure they feel some measure of satisfaction, but there are many reasons they remain maligned and sidelined, not just for their land and it’s resources. In other words, it’s only Euro-based cultures that have to “relearn” the lesson, and I would posit that too is deliberate.
In other words, it is the con that keeps repeating, the knowledge has been there all along. And what Gates is doing is ensuring that the con will repeat well into the future. Just like now when sane alternatives are continually suggested, people like Gates are there to ensure they are NOT employed. He is understandably keen on IP given his entire fortune (and his ability to continue the con) is at risk.
Chicago Clubs
“I know a guy who did a lot of bad things and has no remorse, but he’s not a bad guy.”
Actually he is.
wm h kotke
The reports of novelists and travelers often give us more of the flavor of encounters with tribal people than dry academic studies. During the period of European colonization encounters were happening around the globe. Some of these “first encounter” reports carry the amazement of the Europeans who were coming from a life in a culture of tension and negative emotion, when they encountered a radically different culture. The contrast between a healthy culture and an unhealthy culture is clear. Herman Melville provides a view of a culture in which positive feelings are prevalent from his book Typee. The Typee, a tribe on the Marquesa Islands, are now an almost vanished group but they were in full flower when Melville visited.
Herman Melville
During my whole stay on the island, I never witnessed a single quarrel, nor anything that in the slightest degree approached even to a dispute. The natives appeared to form one household, whose members were bound together by the ties of strong affection. The love of kindred I did not so much perceive, for it seemed blended in the general love; and where all were treated as brothers and sisters, it was hard to tell who were actually related to each other by blood. Let it not be supposed that I have overdrawn this picture, I have not done so.
wm h kotke
A few early explorers have provided us with insights into the day to day lives and the emotional tenor of other Natural cultures that existed before the complete expansion of the world empire. Explorer Villialm Stefannson, writing in 1908, wrote a report after living 13 months with an Eskimo family.
Villialm Stefannson
With their absolute equality of the sexes and perfect freedom of separation, a permanent union of uncongenial persons is wellnigh inconceivable. But if a couple find each other congenial enough to remain married a year or two, divorce becomes exceedingly improbable, and is much rarer among the middle-aged than among us. People of the age of 25 and over are usually very fond of each other, and the family – when once it becomes settled – appears to be on a higher level of affection than is common among us. In an Eskimo home I have never heard an unpleasant word between a man and his wife, never seen a child punished, nor an old person treated inconsiderately. Yet the household affairs are carried on in orderly way, and the good behavior of the children is remarked by practically every traveler.
These charming qualities of the Eskimo home may be largely due to their equable disposition and the general fitness of their character for the communal relations; but it seems reasonable to give a portion of the credit to their remarkable social organization; for they live under conditions which some of our best men are striving – conditions that with our idealists are even yet merely dreams.
wm h kotke
Obviously, not all tribal cultures have arrived at the level of positive cooperation that this report demonstrates of the Eskimos, but we can be sure on the other side of it that few imperial cultures have.
So that we may fix in our minds the fact that it is possible for humans to live on the planet without jails, nuclear war, ecological ruination, valium, and the one-dimensional artificiality of suburban-shopping center culture, let us look at another report from the same area. This report is from the famous arctic explorer Amundsen.
Roald E.G. Amundsen
During the voyage of the Gjoa, we came into contact with ten different Eskimo tribes in all … and I must state it as my firm conviction that the Eskimo living absolutely isolated from civilization of any kind are undoubtedly the happiest, healthiest, most honorable and most contented among them. It must therefore be the duty of bounded duty of civilized nations who come into contact with the Eskimo to safeguard them against contaminating influences, and by laws and stringent regulations protect them against the many perils and evils of so-called civilization. Unless this is done they will inevitably be ruined….
My sincerest wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimo is that Civilization may never reach them.
Dr Martin Walker
In the Western Hemisphere, a place exists where degenerative diseases seldom if ever affect the population. The people have no heart disease, no cancer, no diabetes, no stroke, no cirrhosis, no senility, no arteriosclerosis, nor any other morbid conditions connected with an interruption in blood flow that are commonly responsible for illness, disability, and death among industrialized people. Since they don’t die of degenerative diseases, the inhabitants of this place are able to live the full complement of mankind’s years – often more than a century….
Vilccbamba is a veritable paradise on earth….over the years the Sacred Valley has been variously called The Land of Eternal Youth, The Valley of Peace and Tranquility, and The Lost Paradise. It has been given these labels because of the valley’s solitude, serenity, clean air, dazzling sun, near constant blue sky, pure mineral drinking water, helpful neighbors, lack of illness, and a kind of ubiquitous beauty that penetrates to one’s soul and provides a sense of well-being.
Guillermo Vela Chiriboga
The inhabitants of Vilcabamba are agile and mentally lucid, with a sense of humor and admirable physical health….They enjoy tranquility without a competitive spirit, and spurn the accumulation of wealth.
Dr Allen E Banik
This race – the Hunzans of Pakistan – which has survived through centuries, is remarkable for its vigor and vitality….In 2000 years of almost complete isolation, the Hunzans seem to have evolved a way of living, eating, thinking, and exercising that has substantially lengthened their life span. They have no money, no poverty, no disease….It is a land where the people enjoy not only purity of body but also mutual trust and integrity….
The Hunzans are a hardy, disease-free people unique in their enjoyment of an unparalleled lifespan….It amazed me to see the number of older citizens going about their work and showing none of the signs of decrepitude that are so often evident in the United States….
The children laugh readily and seem to have a kindly feeling toward everyone. There is no juvenile delinquency in Hunza.
Charles Percy
[Illinois senator Charles Percy, a member of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, visited Hunza]
There was a general air of goodwill that permeated our visit. Wherever we walked, the villagers saluted us and clasped our hands between theirs. Men greeted men, women greeted women. Children ran into the orchards to gather fresh, sweet apricots for us or offered wild flowers and apples.
Dr Jay Hoffman
The thing that impressed us most [upon visiting Hunza] was the terraces that stretched far out into the distance through the valley and up the mountainsides …. Even the best engineers who have visited Hunza cannot understand how the originators of these terraces were able to erect thousands of them, each irrigated in the greatest engineering feat ever witnessed …. Though they are not listed as such, I like to think of them as one of the seven wonders of the world [due to] the magnificence, engineering skill, and scientific competence built into these terraces.
Jerome Irving Rodale
In every phase of their agricultural operations, the Hunzans show a sagacity that is uncanny. One ponders over the amazing fact that it took the civilized world so long to learn the simple facts of water and sewage hygiene, and yet the Hunzans, in their primitive hideaway, applied it effectively a thousand years ago …. The Hunzan is downright uncanny in his methods of coaxing food out of the soil …. His finger is on the pulse of the land. Soil erosion is at a minimum because he is intelligent and understands the danger of soil loss. He has the time and the energy to farm in a manner that conserves the soil.
John Robbins
Dr Banik paid particular attention to the Hunzans’ eyes and vision. In the west, he well knew, most people experience a gradual loss of flexibility in their vision beginning in their forties and fifties, a condition western medicine calls presbyopia. As presbyopia develops, people need to hold books, magazines, newspapers, menus, and other reading material at an arm’s length in order to focus properly. When they perform near work, such as embroidery or handwriting, they may get headaches or eyestrain. The prevailing belief among modern optometrists is that there is no getting around it – presbyopia happens to everyone at some point in their life, even those who have never had a vision problem before.
Yet Dr. Banik found that even the most elderly of the Hunzans did not suffer from presbyopia or any of the other diseases and weaknesses of eyesight to which elder Americans are prone.
“In all respects, the Hunzans eyes were notable. I found them unusually clear; there were few signs of astigmatism. Even the oldest men had excellent far- and near-vision – and indication that their crystalline lenses had retained elasticity.”
Willy
Trinity and Chicago Clubs, no I’m not empathetic. Just explaining, based on my own experience, including personal. I was far more callous when I was actually “reaping what I’d sown”. Or so I’d believed. Only later did I learn how much ones environment dictates your outcomes and how quickly your status can change, often at the whims of powerful evil. As a result I’m fully aware that we only want good people in power, and not those who are still worth 150B decades after having declared they’d give it all away.
Willy
I’m not sure what all the variables are which causes a tribe which is quite happy with less, to want more, even at the expense of others, even their own.
John Robbins
Shoto Gogoghian, M.D. is one of the world’s leading authorities on Abkhasian longevity. He was director of public health in Abkhasia for 23 years, and subsequently became director of the prestigious Soviet Academy of Medical Science. Dr Gogoghian wrote that the people of Abkhasia most certainly do have unusual rates of longevity and remarkable health in old age. About 80 percent of all Abkhasians over the age of 90 are mentally fit and outgoing. Only 10 percent have poor hearing, and only 4 percent have poor eyesight. These are staggering statistics when compared to the health of elders in most fully industrialized nations.
Retirement is an unknown concept in Abkhasian thinking. The Abkhasians never, at any stage of life, become sedentary. Most of the elderly still work regularly, many in the orchards and gardens, pruning the fruit and nut trees, removing dead wood, and planting young trees. Some still chop wood and haul water.
They work hard, but they are fortunate in that their work does not entail the emotional stress we often associate with work. Their work tempos are natural expressions of biological rhythms, and they have no sense of the drivenness and hurry that predominates in most industrialized nations. In fact, Abkhasians distinctly dislike being rushed and have no concept of a deadaline. The only time they feel a sense of urgency is during rare actual emergencies, such as when a house is on fire. Other than that, they are remarkably relaxed, and often joke and sing while working.
Jerry Mander
In The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant, a professor of natural re-source studies at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that until the Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s, and the “scientific revolu-tion” that accompanied it, the prevailing viewpoint among the peoples of the earth was that the planet itself was a living creature. Most cultures shared this belief, whether they were “Western” in orientation (such as the Sumerians, the Greeks, and the Romans), or whether they still lived within nature. They believed that the Earth was a being, with skin, soul, and or-gans. The skin was the soil, the soul was contained within the rocks and bones of the dead, the organs included rivers (the bloodstream) and wind (the lungs). Such categories were not meant as metaphors. Earth was alive; we lived upon it as millions of tiny microorganisms live on human skin.
According to Merchant, most cultures up to the Enlightenment also be-lieved that the Earth was a female being, the actual mother of life.
The “scientific revolution” changed all this. For the first time, the idea was postulated that the earth is actually a kind of dead thing, a machine. With that perspective came a new set of scientific paradigms that gave im-petus to the idea of human superiority over other animals and over nature. The seeds of such a notion had already been well implanted by the Judeo-Christian tradition. But with the manmade technical machine spreading itself rapidly across the landscape, we had physical demonstrations of our power to alter nature, giving us “proof” of our superiority.
Soredemos
@Herman Melville
IIRC, this was a central dispute between Confucius and a rival philosopher, whose name currently escapes me. Confucius essentially said family loyalty matters more than anything, while the other guy said family is a good and natural place to start as a child, but eventually you have to expand to the realization that all of mankind are siblings.
Confucianism ultimately won, and the end result is that it’s extremely common in China, Korea, and Japan for people to be loyal to the family above all else. Except it’s often not actually the family, but The Family™, the imaginary entity that exists in the minds of the public outside the actual family, that they’re servicing. So you can get bizarre things like parents disowning their screw up children (and the definitions of screw up can range from being a drunken trainwreck who killed someone while driving drunk, to having dared to have sex outside of wedlock) in order to protect the name of The Family™.
bruce wilder
I am not sure I see the relevance of largely groundless speculation about the happy lives of remote and simple peoples, but I absolutely understand the ambivalence and regret and fear Willy expressed with his insightful and personal anecdote. Lived experience with the evil to which hierarchy carries as an inbuilt hazard. Screwups in charge and benefitting mightily from their screwups and the rest of us passively accepting the downside.
Rebecca
am not sure I see the relevance of largely groundless speculation about the happy lives of remote and simple peoples
That’s not a very nice thing to say. That your comment contains both the belittling and inaccurate “groundless speculation” speaks volumes of both your character and your intellectual curiosity and breadth.
I intuit a theme geared towards a larger understanding, beyond the individual posts.
Thank you everyone for an enlightening, creative array. I hope it continues.
Robert
I’ll take simple peoples over simple minds every day and twice on Sunday.
Of course, as Rebecca implied, the people and cultures detailed are hardly “simple” as pejoratively expressed by bruce wilder.
Psychology 101 would tell us that a thoughtful person such as bruce is reacting to something deeper when he expresses these nasty sentiments.
But then, you don’t need modern psychology to understand bruce’ dilemma. You can read this thread again.
bruce wilder
I am in a bad mood, it is true and therefore more cynical and scornful than usual.
Now, apparently, I am also “nasty”! So be it.
Look, I am well-aware that tales of the noble savage living in harmony with nature are popular for being objects of romantic fantasy. It is no insult to the actual peoples that are the projection screens for these fantasies — the only ones who should feel insulted are those waxing poetic about people and cultures with which they have little to no experience, their fantasy backed only by the thin testimony of a third-party with an agenda of their own.
I am sick of such nonsense. It is rarely truthful, let alone useful and I find it pointless.
I am not saying that people could not be much happier living simpler, less technologically complicated lives, working bullshit jobs and so on. If we are to save the planet from catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse, we ought to be seriously thinking about how to live our lives with radically less use of energy, which would require some changes in “lifestyle” so to speak. If we were really serious, we’d be thinking about how to reduce energy use and waste, while still supporting the things that make life pleasant and satisfying. So, yes, by all means, think about such things and encourage others to do so. We should be imagining a better life in a better society. but, i challenge anyone who thinks the flights of fancy offered in this thread are any such thing.
frankie
I absolutely understand the ambivalence and regret and fear Willy expressed with his insightful and personal anecdote.
I understand too. I’ve experienced it as well. And this was really helpful for me.
I wasn’t aware of much of this. My knowledge of the world and my history are pretty limited.
Thank you for the various sources, all who posted. I am going to do some reading tonight and tomorrow (I have off tomorrow, yay!)
I hope everyone has a good weekend.
Jason
It also may be that this is intended more as a conversational forum, and simply posting snippets by other writers, without any accompanying personal thoughts, takes away from the personal nature of the forum.
Jerry Mander opened my own eyes, mind, and heart to something I had only a cursory knowledge of previously. I live a pretty modern life – a relatively poor one – but the knowledge and understanding I gained from his and other writing has helped me immensely. And I need all the help I can get!
Bruce, I hope things let up for you, whatever the cause of the bad mood may be. This too shall pass.
Soredemos
@Jerry Mander
Hahaha, wow. Imagine holding up the Sumerians, Greeks, and, especially, the Romans as some sort of ideal worth emulating.
Also, the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is itself Greek, traceable straight back to Plato. To the extent that any Jewish-Christian tradition ever really existed at all, it was about 90% LARPing fan fiction created by Greek speaking outsiders culturally appropriating the Messianic beliefs of Aramaic speaking Hebrews.
There’s a reason that there have always been practicing religious Jews in their millions, long after the founding of Christianity. Because Christianity is very conspicuously not Jewish. This started first with Hellenistic Judaism, and then Saul, history’s greatest con artist, retreaded and expanded on these ideas. The entire concept of a god (especially one who is a very vaguely defined mystical force, a divine essence of love; this is all just pure Platonic forms stuff) impregnating a human woman to incarnate himself as a man so he can sacrifice himself to himself to appease himself and enable his followers to escape his own arbitrary wrath and enjoy an eternal afterlife (that doesn’t exist in Judaism) is very blatantly not Jewish. It’s Greek, not Semitic.
This stuff is all just absurd to a practicing Jew, when it isn’t downright offensive cultural appropriation and blasphemy (though many of them are too polite to actually say this in so many words).
Hugh
“Because Christianity is very conspicuously not Jewish.”
Matthew 5:17-18:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”
The Bible is complicated. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic and is a compilation of three main traditions: an Exodus one, a native Palestine one, and a Babylonian Captivity one. The New Testament was written in koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean. Mark was probably the first of the Gospels and its audience was likely gentile. Matthew’s audience was more Jewish. Audience is usually determined by the retention of Jewish elements, whether or not these elements are explained or knowledge of them is assumed, and themes, such as Matthew’s criticism of the Pharisees which would not interest a non-Jewish audience.
Mr Jones
“Progress” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The rut of determined thought processes inhibits broader discovery and realization.
Rebecca
@Soredemos
You missed the point entirely. Mander is quoting Merchant, who was making the point that all of these groups saw the earth as alive, not as a mechanistic machine.
Mander said the “Judeo-Christian tradition” had already planted this seed. Sure, you can quibble with this. The larger point remains.
Read much?
Robert
@Rebecca
I’m sure he reads a lot. How much he comprehends is another story. It doesn’t seem to induce any broader understanding beyond the narrow frameworks he’s comfortably operating in.
Robert
I’m reminded of what Richard Feynman said about the rabbis’ lack of interest in nature and the wider world beyond their Talmud.
Jessica
This is the pertinent part:
They believed that the Earth was a being, with skin, soul, and organs. The skin was the soil, the soul was contained within the rocks and bones of the dead, the organs included rivers (the bloodstream) and wind (the lungs). Such categories were not meant as metaphors. Earth was alive; we lived upon it as millions of tiny microorganisms live on human skin.
According to Merchant, most cultures up to the Enlightenment also believed that the Earth was a female being, the actual mother of life.
Jason
@Hugh
Thank you for your post. I think this is very clarifying:
“The Bible is complicated. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic and is a compilation of three main traditions: an Exodus one, a native Palestine one, and a Babylonian Captivity one. The New Testament was written in koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean. Mark was probably the first of the Gospels and its audience was likely gentile. Matthew’s audience was more Jewish. Audience is usually determined by the retention of Jewish elements, whether or not these elements are explained or knowledge of them is assumed, and themes, such as Matthew’s criticism of the Pharisees which would not interest a non-Jewish audience.”
Vincent P
@Rebecca
“Read much?” isn’t a very nice thing to say either. You don’t seem able to hold up your end of the bargain even within the relatively safe confines of a small online commentariat.
We all fail miserably, I suppose is the lesson here.
jules
Thank you everyone for the discussion. Ian’s threads rarely fail to fascinate.
I think Willy boiled it down well with his question, which everyone ignored:
“I’m not sure what all the variables are which causes a tribe which is quite happy with less, to want more, even at the expense of others, even their own.
That’s a question that the overly ambitious in any culture or society would rather not be broached.
Soredemos
@Hugh
Yes, that’s generally how propaganda works. You lie and cater your message to your audience.
Though the most generous interpretation is that Matthew best preserves the original beliefs of early followers of Jesus, when he was still ‘merely’ a potential Jewish Messiah, promising among other things to restore the Davidic royal line. It’s later that the ‘he’s a Messiah for all mankind offering a glorious afterlife’ stuff was grafted on.
Contrast Mark, Matthew, and Luke with John, which is a. batshit insane, and b. virulently antisemitic.
Also there was no Exodus as a real event, and probably not even a genuine folk tradition of an Exodus myth. It was a tale manufactured centuries after the supposed events to help create a distinct sense of Hebrew identity in contrast to the other tribes of Canaan. All of the stuff about the Israelites constantly being deceived into pagan worship was basically the elites in Jerusalem raging that the rubes in the countryside stubbornly refused to give up their Canaanite folk beliefs and accept the up-jumped storm god being pushed by the Temple priesthood.
@Rebecca
Life itself is inherently an immensely complex mechanism. The solution to the problem of people not having sufficient appreciation for the fragility of complex systems, and not taking a wider view of the damage done by pursuing short-term gain at the expense of those systems, is not to indulge in vacuous mysticism. That’s agnotology; the deliberate manufacturing and perpetuation of ignorance.
@Robert
I both read and comprehend plenty, but thanks for the condescension.
Rebecca
Life itself is inherently an immensely complex mechanism.
An “inherently, immensely complex mechanism.” Sounds like a machine. You’re not off to a good start here. But it sounds good. Your grand statement on life, I mean.
The solution to the problem of people not having sufficient appreciation for the fragility of complex systems, and not taking a wider view of the damage done by pursuing short-term gain at the expense of those systems, is…
Excellent. We have a solution.
..is not to indulge in vacuous mysticism
Oh dear.
vacuous: emptied of or lacking content
That certainly doesn’t apply.
vacuous: Devoid of substance or meaning; vapid or inane.
This is an opinion, sans a substantive argument. Again, you may not be capable of making the larger connections. That’s okay. Or perhaps you just wanted to sweep the entire thing under the rug without engaging with it. Fair enough.
mysticism: the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality reported by mystics
Doesn’t apply.
mysticism: the belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience (such as intuition or insight)
This may apply to some degree. But the term “mysticism” has a negative connotation. That may be why you chose to use it, whether you’re aware of it or not.
That’s agnotology; the deliberate manufacturing and perpetuation of ignorance.
Oh god. Agnotology isn’t a particularly useful term. It’s a theory itself, and is most commonly used in studying the misdirection propagated by the scientific community. Strange you’d use it to make an argument against indigenous cultures.
Soredemos, I’m afraid your attempt at a rebuttal actually served to dig a bigger hole for yourself.
Be well my friend.
Rebecca
Excellent. We have a solution.
Robert
@ Rebecca
I disagree with Vincent P. I think you’re too kind. I would have dispensed with old Soredemos with a quick and easy ad hom, as opposed to the roundabout method of “intellectual criticism” that all the people who consider themselves smart default to.
Soredemos, you’re an idiot. Good day
bessie
@bruce wilder
Now, apparently, I am also “nasty”
You weren’t called “nasty.” It was stated that you expressed nasty sentiments.
@Rebecca
Strange you’d use it to make an argument against indigenous cultures.
No, it’s entirely befitting.
someofparts
It looks like we have a ratio system at work here. For every crop of new folks that pop up in comments, one or two will be interesting new voices with worthwhile things to contribute. Meanwhile, there will also be several others that just add to the list of Those Who Must Be Scrolled Past. Yeah, keep lobbing those ad homs you clowns and wasting everyone’s time.
metamars
There’s a new claim about an extraordinarily effective anti-viral, that (if I understand correctly), attack’s the coronavirus genome. It’s claimed that it will reduce 99.9% of coronavirus in lungs. Won’t be ready for 2 years, though- if then.
Furthermore,
“Co-lead researcher Professor Kevin Morris said the treatment was designed to work on all betacoronaviruses such as the original SARS virus (SARS-CoV-1) as well as SARS-CoV-2 and MERS.
“And any new variants that may arise in the future because it targets ultra-conserved regions in the virus’s genome,” Professor Morris said.”
See “World-first COVID-19 antiviral therapy developed in Brisbane and US targets virus in the body”
Jaime
Sometimes you get sense that the dedicated people who care deeply about achieving more equity in the current system would nevertheless be okay with an indigenous group being destroyed* in order to erect a Wal-Mart, provided the Wal-Mart had excellent jobs and benefits achieved through unionization, or even as a result of regulative measures enacted by some larger governing body.
You can see the problems inherent in bigness, hierarchy, and never-rending antagonisms resulting from faux binaries that are designed and implemented with the intention of distracting the wider public so the dominant systems remain in place.
This isn’t all ancient or even recent history. The Hunzans are still around and still living the way they do, though their way of life has been steadily encroached upon by the nation-state of Pakistan. These battles are still fought daily by the indigenous groups here in the United States.
Astrid
Meh. This is not a gender issue as there are a reasonable number women regulars who are not harassed based on gender. More an issue of strangers who don’t understand the dynamics of a place acting high and mighty, thinking they are bestowing wisdom on native ignoramuses.
The natives may have their own issues, but most do not appreciate getting ad hominems tossed at them by a bunch of outsiders who drift in, make a couple posts demonstrating to themselves how much better they are, then drift off never to be heard from again.
It’s really very low stakes colonialism/rescue game on display.
Alan Watts
Although I am anything but a Roman Catholic, the recent death of G.K. Chesterton felt almost like a personal loss. For with no writer of today did I find myself in deeper sympathy. It was not that I agreed with all his ideas, but rather that I felt myself in complete accord with his basic attitude to life. If I could believe that that attitude really reflected the heart and mind of the Roman church, I should have become a Catholic long ago. But it must be remembered that Chesterton “went to Rome” rather late in his life, and one may suspect that his view of reality had become a little dulled and that in his love for romance he had been captured by an institution which knows more about the power of glamour than any other community in the world. This was, perhaps, unfortunate but, nevertheless, I should be the last to quarrel with anyone for his love of romance, for it indicates a childlike attitude to life which is the passport to the kingdom of heaven. It is, in fact, the sense of wonder, the sense which transforms every littlest thing in the universe into a divine mystery.
A very remarkable person once told me that the greatest wisdom was to be surprised at everything, and I believe Chesterton would have shared this opinion. The sense of wonder expresses itself in gratitude, and I know of no finer exposition of the mysticism of gratitude than the concluding pages of Chesterton’s Autobiography
‘The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.’
And he takes the modern optimist to task for despising humble and elementary things because man, in his scientific omnipotence, can create such ‘superior’ varieties. Chesterton takes ordinary dandelions as his illustration of this, and remarks of the optimists,
‘They were not in touch with this notion, of having a great deal of gratitude even for a very little good. And as I began to believe more and more that the clue was to be found in such a principle, even if it was a paradox, I was more and more despised to seek out those who specialised in humility, though for them it was the door to heaven and for me the door of earth. For nobody else specialises in that mystical mood in which the yellow star of the dandelion is startling, being something unexpected and undeserved.’
In other words, ordinary experience, if you look at it in the right way, is nothing other than the supreme religious experience which is the goal of all mystical endeavor. You may look beyond the stars for God and search for knowledge of Him in all the theological and philosophical treatises in the world. Yet we are standing face to face with Him at every moment of our lives.
I youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars…
But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God
For in truth there is nothing more surprising and mysterious than perfectly ordinary objects. There is nothing more wonderful than the astonishing fact that we are alive, that we breathe, eat, sleep, walk, laugh, cry and the danger of scientific investigation is that in attempting to explain these mysteries it may imagine that it has explained them away. When I read the rationalist books of Haeckel, the Dialectical Materialists, and of all who try to make out that life is nothing but this or nothing but that, my reaction is that though such ideas are very logical they are also very dull. Nothing is more deathly to the soul than the idea that one has solved all mysteries or even that one stands a chance of so doing. And a person who thinks he has reduced the world to nothing but matter nothing but a conglomeration of electric waves becomes as uninteresting as if he were nothing but matter himself. As may be expected, he becomes an intensely proud and serious person. The world no longer intrigues him, because there is nothing left for him to explain; his knowledge acts as a great weight upon his soul which drags him down to hell. But if he were a true scientist he would understand the paradox that the more you know the more mysterious everything becomes until you are forced to roar with laughter at your own efforts to make yourself the equal of God.
Chesterton never tired of making fun of this type of spiritual pride; seriousness was to him a heresy, and especially the seriousness of scientific logicians. Thus in Orthodoxy he writes,
‘To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it his head that splits.’
We have said that the sense of wonder expresses itself in gratitude; it also expresses itself in humility, not to mention humour. For the essence of humour lies not in seeing what is funny about other people and things, but what is funny about oneself. It is the art of seeing oneself in correct proportion to the universe, and laughter is the reaction that follows the realisation of the insignificance of human knowledge and strength before the might and mystery of the cosmos. And I do not refer only to the great, vast cosmos which the astronomers explore; I mean also the equally mysterious cosmos which is vast in its littleness, which may be discovered in drops of muddy water and insects invisible to the eye. Our lives are surrounded with such mysteries, and the least that can be asked of us is that we should be boundlessly grateful for such a feast of entertainment. What we have done to deserve it I cannot imagine, but it surely behooves us to use it with infinite reverence.
– Adapted from the piece G.K. Chesterton: The ‘Jongleur De Dieu’ found in the text Alan Watts – Seeds of Genius: The Early Writings
Hvd
Actually Astrid you are the one who started hurling “hasbara troll” ad hominem epithets around in response to PS’s reasonable question regarding the fact that Hamas has failed to seriously advance the Palestinian cause against the occupiers. This in no way excuses the occupiers. But is inviting punishment from a cruel and pretty damn merciless foe an effective strategy for getting their knee off your neck? Particularly when the world at large will simply shrug and walk away.
Jason
@Astrid
I didn’t get the sense that Newbie was making a gender-based argument. This is the full paragraph:
“Guess the strays who happen along lack the intellectual chops to keep up with the dazzling and thoughtful insights the regulars provide for the edification of the hoi polli, although the women who spoke up on this open thread seemed to more than hold their own…”
I think it has more to do with the first part of the statement. I can understand why people would sense an air of arrogance here. But I also think people may have a hard time formulating and expressing their ideas, particularly when they’re in the midst of people do who seem to express themselves well. This is particularly true of ideas that aren’t easily incorporated into the flow of the immediate conversation.
“I’ve said so poorly what I’ve seen so clearly.”
“seen” meaning in the mind, upon reading a comment, and then reflecting on all that one has learned and known and experienced in life so far and then trying to incorporate that into the immediate conversation in such a way that people understand and may bring about a larger understanding.
Of course, some people just aren’t nice, period.
I think many yearn for a connection deeper than a mere intellectual understanding. I often do. This may not be the right place for it, but I can understand, given the state of the world, why many are online searching. It’s not exactly akin to “looking for love in all the wrong places,” because it’s not about love per se, but it’s a similar dynamic at work.
Who knows, maybe Ian has saved a few lives by simply allowing people to just get negative energy out.
Or, maybe it was all about gender. Newbie?
Astrid
Hvd,
I searched for hasbara in the last 2 threads and plague Species and you are the only ones using the word. I called bullshit on PS because it’s victim blaming a people who have every moral justification to fight back, even if just with fists and homemade rockets. This is the sort of empty moralizing that distracts from the actual suffering and actual evil acts, and towards victim blaming”what-ifs”.
As I said before, it’s like telling a black man being lynched that he shouldn’t have looked at a white woman. It’s dispicable. Whatever the issues of Palestinians strategy or corruption or ineptitude is besides the point. They have tried peaceful protests, they were mowed down by war criminals. They tried to get their story out but were silenced by the Zionist infested MSM and complicit Western governments. They have every right, to do whatever they can against their oppressors. It might not be enough and it will hurt them mightily, but it’s a hell of a lot more than whatever the hell PS the know nothing internet blowhard can do for them.
Astrid
Jason,
That comment didn’t have to say women. Saying new commenter would be more accurate. I think it was fair to respond, since the use seems clearly intended to imply a gender dynamic that I find distasteful.
As for deeper connections…I just spent a very pleasant weekend with some close friends that I haven’t seen in a year. I found it that the son of a nice “liberal except Israel” family just married a woman who served multiple enlistments in the IDF. Then visited with some friends who moving their ways up the imperial bureaucracy and yes, who unthinkingly assume USA good, China/Russia/Venezuela/Iran /Syria bad. If it wasn’t for the delightful palate cleanser of our Jacobin reading “loser” friend, who greeted my declaration of turning full Marxist with “yes, that is the only same option” and thinking up appropriate tax schemes for billionaires, I would be in utter despair.
Newbie
Ian erased my comment, which is fine with me; it was an undignified bit of venting. I thought it would go unnoticed—that readers had moved on to the next thing, just as I don’t think this comment will gain notice.
I’m a guy by birth and proclivity. I only noticed that some of the comments in this thread were written by women whose names didn’t seem so familiar around here, but as a newbie, how would I really know?
And, yeah, I have some issues with intellectual pretentiousness having been exposed to so much of it in my private and professional life.
It’s a small hangout here, and I won’t be dropping by again, so rest easy—although probably best not to rearrange the furniture while your house is on fire.
Claude Alvares
I shall illustrate the principle connections between science and violence in two arguments, one from methodology and one from history. These may at times overlap. Elements of both arguments have been pointed out by others; my intention is to provide a reasonably comprehensive picture. More illustrative material could be provided later.
The first argument, which relates to scientific method, concerns the functional, violence-disposition of the method. The method vetoes or excludes compassion. Its postulates require the excision of values. In actual operation, both the method and its metaphysics require mutilation or vivisection as an integral part of science. Aware of this disposition, often too easily translated into practice, the propagandists of science have offered to make extensive changes, including changes in the offending metaphysics; they have even offered to make science more holistic. These changes cannot alter the fundamental disposition. The change required is not cosmetic but cosmic.
The second connection between science and violence became apparent soon after the scientific method was invented: colonialism. This is a historical and political argument, and specifically underlines the close and continuing ‘blood relations’ between science and imperialism. The problem has been recognized, but efforts are being made to suggest that science can be delinked from colonialism/imperialism. I shall argue here that since science and technology are both colonizing activities, any suggestions about delinking them from technology can only be fraudulent.
Following closely on these are two other arguments that work out an analysis from negative consequences. The theoretical arguments, in this second set, are sewn up with empirical demonstrations. I have divided this set of arguments into the ‘first series’ and the ‘second series.’
The fist series examines the application of modern science to life processes in agriculture, forestry, medicine, and food. In all these, the application is seen as leading to serious harm. Suggested popular remedies include the introduction of soft technologies. The real argument should concentrate on the irrelevance of modern science to such processes.
The second series, which concerns the fabrication of machines through the application of physical laws, is a problem area because it concerns the application of a basically fragmented science. The result is pollution and ecological imbalance. Industrial processes are almost always at variance with life processes and with natural events. The fragmented nature of applied knowledge produces a reaction/response in the concept of the technological fix. This is no solution. It is postponement, for one becomes involved in an absurd merry-go-round of circular production.
A radical break is required, for the connections are not merely intrinsic, they are dynamic and actively colonizing. They help increase the political clout of modern science. The final section of this paper contains suggestions on how one might counter the violence of modern science, suggestions that approach Ludditism.
Claude Alvares
Method as Madness
Philosophers of western origin have themselves made devastating critiques of western science, and have required little help from their counterparts in the east. Lewis Mumford lays bare the origin of modern science from the days of its early veneration, in two splendid essays, one on Galileo and another on Francis Bacon.
Mumford argues that Galileo’s ‘crime’ was the extinction of what he calls ‘historic’ man: Galileo’s method involved the elimination of all subjective elements, rendering suspect all qualities except the primary qualities. ‘Only a fragment of man – the detached intelligence – and only certain products of that detached, sterilized intelligence, scientific theorems and machines, can claim any permanent place or any high degree of reality.’
For the first time objectivity was defined in a specific, highly distorted, way. Later, such objective knowledge’ became identified with modern science. Still later, such a stipulatory definition was enshrined within a positivist worldview. As Britain took the lead in institutionalizing this worldview and as Britain in that epoch ruled not only the waves and thus also the mind and manners over men over the globe, this new creed was easily accepted in different centers of the intellectual world.
Yet, as many commentators have set out to show, this particular form of objectivity was not a phenomenon foreign to the west. Western civilization, because of its absolute faith in reason (extended to elaborate rational proof for the existence of God), has been compelled to swing between two poles of what may be called a scale or continuum of restrictions. A society that values reason as its prime instrument for grasping truth will also tend to move along a continuum of more or less dependence on the principal character of reason, abstraction. (Abstraction and restriction are two sides of the same coin; in the process of abstraction, one restricts reality by abstracting certain features and restricting others.) Such a scale of restrictions has been inoperative with other civilizations like the Chinese, or the Indian, which only give a subordinate position to reason in their scheme of things. By and large western civilization has maintained a homeostatic balance between reliance on total experience and pure abstraction.
Experience consists of historical events that are irreversible and unique, and can be immediately grasped. The mystic, for example, offers a clear example of direct experience. The function of the intellect in mysticism is zero. Radical anarchism, as another example, could also fall in this category. Most non-human species operate at the level of total experience. A tribal group survives very close to full integration with experience. One should remember that no preferred values are assigned in this analysis to total experience or to pure abstraction. It is my argument that a mystic’s perception of reality is no less significant than that of a pure scientist. The scientist may object to this, but the mystic could not care less.
Abstraction involves restricting experience to zero. Abstraction means zero history. The other features of abstraction are mediacy and communicability. Plato’s World of Ideas is pure abstraction. The Galilean experiment, or scientific rationality, merely purified such abstraction to a further extreme. The experiment ideally restricts: it first eliminates historicity. The scientific experiment is, in fact, an exercise in total abstraction.* This may sound strange to many, since what is really supposed to distinguish modern science from metaphysics or religion is precisely the idea that it alone is empirical, that it appeals to fact as the final arbiter.
It is when we examine closely the nature of this fact that we discover something seriously amiss: the scientific ‘fact’ is not the ordinary historical event or object, with all the relevant historical forces acting on it at the moment. It is a theory-laden fact, a fact created out of a certain metaphysics. The empiricism is not the empiricism of the ordinary English language, but carries its own stipulated meaning. The main feature of the experiment is that it is devoid of historicity, of uniqueness, of time. In order to experiment, one has to create one’s facts to fall in line with certain postulates. These postulates themselves are not subject to ‘scientific’ scrutiny nor to any systematic reasoning as to why one postulate is preferred to another.
A scientific fact has to stripped of all its unique features, its essential nature has to be extracted, to make the new information fit other similarly anesthetized events. The fact that an experiment distorts reality is no longer doubted; what is striking is that such ‘objective knowledge’ is passed off as the final and the only reality. The method thus becomes the sole criterion for truth. It makes possible the invention of a certain kind of truth, a ‘scientific’ truth. The point can be elucidated by a simple comparison between two western thinkers, Aristotle and Galileo.
Aristotle determined that if one were to drop a stone and a feather from a height, the stone would fall faster than the feather. And in reality, in history, as a rule, stones do fall more rapidly than feathers. Galileo’s invention of scientific rationality eliminated all the possible historical forces acting on both stone and feather: if all such influences were removed, he hypothesized, both stone and feather would fall at the same speed. Toricelli later constructed a vacuum to prove him right. A vacuum is total emptiness, zero experience; the scientific fact created by Galileo and Toricelli was not a natural fact, it was an artificial fact. The argument of this paper is that violence results when ‘artificial’ or ‘perfect’ nature is imposed on ‘natural’ or ‘imperfect’ nature (seen as being in an unscientific state).
Modern science is thus not a presupposition-less activity, though it may often pretend to be. It seems to start from scratch, from empirical fact, and its postulates seem to deny all metaphysics. Nevertheless, its postulates front for a new metaphysics, and because they, like all other kinds of postulates, are assumed, they distort reality and define it selectively.
There is a metaphysics that enables scientists to detonate an atomic bomb over a human population purely as an experiment, or to endorse the planting of a monocultural forest under the garb of scientific forestry. One common strand runs through all the perverse manifestations of science in our world. Our business must be to locate it and to determine how it can be progressively ruined.
Claude Alvares
The postulates upholding science are not the result of critical scrutiny, nor are they the result of any democratic process. The scientific worldview argues that there is no real need for democracy in science, as personalities, history, time have all been excised. Here lie the origins of modern intolerance. On the scale of restrictions, an event of pure experience, because it is unique, is incomprehensible and often incommunicable. For this reason, it is quite tolerant of other unique events. Abstraction demands the reverse set of qualities. It provides a basis for communicability precisely because the irreversible, unique, historical character of any event has been eliminated, and this placing of the event outside time and other historical forces enables public agreement on what modern science is about. The event has been reduced in status from the unique to the non-unique and repeatable. In the Indian tradition, there was no basis for such a view, as reason itself was considered defective for reaching truth. The postulates were different, and while they permitted earlier science, they effectively and fortunately eliminated the rise of Galilean science.
One of the qualities of abstraction, communicability, also lays the basis for a close alliance between science and authoritarianism. The scientific worldview is an totalitarian worldview: it compels universal acceptance of its postulates, without providing an equivalent ‘scientific’ argument for such acceptance. While the method demands that teleology must be kept out of experiments, the general nature of science correspondingly urges that societies should operate as if teleology were a figment of the imagination.
Science claims for itself a method for arriving at indisputable knowledge, knowledge that is not the result of negotiation, bargaining, or choice, and that has no basis in politics. One is not free to choose scientific knowledge on principle. That is a given, declared final after the efforts of thousands of researchers. One is free (and often encouraged) to reject the statements of religions or art but he who refuses to accept the basic scientific worldview runs the risk of being labelled ignorant, insane, or irrational. Science has redefined the rational to mean its own method, excluding all else.
The implications for a democratic order are obvious. Science, to be science, concentrates all knowledge within itself while access to scientific knowledge becomes itself a matter of privilege. The non-scientist is then seen as an empty receptacle into whom is poured the benefits science confers; and he must ask no questions. But democratic rights include the rights to assess, or claim, true knowledge, and to reject impersonal knowledge. The right, in other words, includes the power to certify knowledge on any scale. Under the dominance of science, such rights have been eroded, and ordinary people (those who do not wear white coats) are no longer considered able on their own authority to provide true knowledge of the world.
Nature acts according to her laws. The scientist wishes to discover these laws. He may discover a few, but the totality eludes him and will always do so. Despite this, his effort is to substitute his knowledge of natural laws for such laws themselves. The scale of restrictions could be rewritten, therefore, as a scale stretching between organism/nature and machine/science.
The transformation of medieval man into modern man is now clear; the movement of western society has taken it from an organic base to a machine base, while the earlier reliance on natural principles has been supplanted by one on principles invented by modern science. For western man, the mechanization of the world image is diametrically the opposite of what constituted the earlier organic perspective.
Soredemos
@Alan Watts
I guess I’m a weirdo for wanting to put my trust in institutions and beliefs that are actually, you know, true. Chesterton could have been the most noble, principled person ever, and the Church could live up to all his ideals, and it wouldn’t change the core fact that it’s built on lies.
@Rebecca
I don’t particularly care if you don’t find it ‘off to a good start’. All the evidence is that life is the result of complex interactions. It is a complex system. Yes, it is a machine in the sense that it is the sum of numerous interacting mechanisms.
‘The ancients’ used to believe in something called a life force, which was a magical…thing (different cultures have given it various names, and come up with various schema of mystical gibberish to ‘explain’ its workings, all of them happily based on no evidence whatsoever) that separated living from nonliving. When something died and became a corpse it was because the life force left the body.
We know (yes, know) that this is completely wrong. It’s as wrong as the idea of four bodily humors, or women having a wandering womb that drives them crazy. The state of being alive is the result of many complex subsystems working together. There is no magical ghost inside us animating us.
There’s plenty of valid criticism to be made of human hubris in not sufficiently appreciating complex systems, and going in full of self-confidence that we have everything figured out. The solution to this recurring problem however is not to make up magic as an explanation. Spiritual beliefs are just another form of human arrogance, though one that often masquerades as humbleness.
@Claude Alvares
Long-winded whinging about empiricism usually comes from people who can’t find any facts to support their positions. It’s a desperate cope.
jules
Things that Soredemos can’t comprehend are long-winded. He reserves his own stores of long-windedess for defending the world he’s accustomed to. We all have our blind spots.
Soredemos
@jules
Come back when you have any actual evidence, thanks.
Nancy
@Soredemos
Irrefutable evidence has been presented. You have failed to adequately address the evidence in its entirety, and you have clearly exhibited a predetermined bias in your own favor towards the diminutive amount of material you have chosen to address.
This behavior is obviously not commensurate with any reasonable person’s understanding of good faith practices in ethics and reasoning.
Frankly, sir, this court is appalled at your utter lack of good faith and judgement in the preceding affairs. We hereby mandate your appearance before the ethics committee.