A Poem

~~~
Flying saucers and Jews are shapeshifters

They search the culture when they arrive
To build a vehicle to drive
You see some thing familiar but not the whole truth
Behind image and projection is a booth

Flying saucers and Jews are history

Agents of change that demand respect
In the margins more often than you'd expect
At liminal times of anti-structure
There as catalyst and trickster

Flying saucers and Jews are religions

It matters not if disbeliever,
Doubter, faithful or hater
In praise or in bile
In worship or denial

Flying saucers and Jews are important

They affect the course of things
In radiating concentric rings
Everywhere and nowhere
It is important not to stare

Flying saucers and Jews are dangerous

To your employment and your sanity
To culture and humanity
Your life and home and such
And especially if you know too much

Flying saucers and Jews are secret

There are shadowy groups of men
Who have this as their ken
Causal forces are kept from you
Whether UFO or Jew

You'll lose family and friends
Who won't follow 'round the bends
They'll think you mad or cruel
Or just a hopeless fool
They will not hear your facts
And they will not have your back
Their worldview is their ground
So they must assume it's sound
They don't want to leave confused
Or think that they've been used
So they start on the offense
And say you don't make sense
The alternative seems bad
To learn and become sad
Ignorance is bliss
But there are some things they have missed

Have YOU heard the news?
Flying saucers and Jews!

Pragmatic Provisional Perspectivism

 

 ~~~

A person's sense of reality is established by their upbringing, their education, their experiences, their culture, society and community, their friends and family, their idols and enemies, their values, beliefs, politics and religion, the books they read, the programs they watch, the people they listen to, the knowledge they have accumulated and the questions they ask, their fears and joys, their feelings, intuitions, hunches and reactions, the wisdom of their soul, intelligence of their mind, and awareness of their body through touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and all the other senses, by their health, their habits, their diet, their dreams, by what must be said and what goes without saying, by those things not mentioned, and to some extent, by reality itself.

The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun.  A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions.  That's where great art and ideas are born.  The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context.  Why can't we have candy for dinner?  It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be. 

What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective?  What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals?  The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism.  We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth.  I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you.  You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.

It would have been relatively easy when things were boring.  When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble.  Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything.  As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.

Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord.  Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.

Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception.  It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on.  Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality.  The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.

It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately.  To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness.  As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal.  It was easier when we knew less.  We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.

There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project.  Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.

It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future.  It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth.  Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual?  At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself.  It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally.  The ego is threatened along with the idiom.

As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough.  Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage. 

Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs.  They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats.  They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from.  They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.

We must become anthropologists of each other.  Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human.  Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people.  The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable.  The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere.  One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.

In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.

Disappointed Liberals

 

~~~

George Carlin said, "Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."

These are cynical times.  The assumption that others speak in good faith is unfashionable. The basic etiquette of rational speech isn't observed, yet these very unreflective arguers, blind to their own psychology, are happy to guess at the motivations of others.  It couldn't be that you know something I don't.  It must be that you're driven by a stupid animal urge to be a bad person.  I feel better about that.

At the risk of returning the favour, it seems safe to say that the vitriol on the left today must emanate from some deep wounding or disappointment.  Progress sounds good, but it sounds linear.  When it encounters complications, changes, cycles, or conservatives, the expectation is disappointed.  In order to hold on to the faith, the cultist must adapt their belief system to the new reality.  Heaven didn't come to Earth because someone somewhere was sinning.

But behind that steaming resentment is the hope for a better world, twisted and perverted into hatred for those who stand in its way.  A sincere wish for good things becomes transmuted into a disingenuous attack.  This reverse alchemy turns gold into garbage.  The disappointed progressive says in their heart that we will have our world of peace and love, even if we have to hate and kill to get there.

The lines are ever-shifting, but not so long ago liberals and progressives appeared to have a common cause.  Disappointment has driven them apart.  Disappointment that those who don't agree with the program of change won't get on board with it has driven progressives further to the left.  Disappointment with the dismissal of natural law, utility, and objective measures of progress has driven liberals to the right.

If we place to the side the rabid projections of their opponents, we find among the growing ranks of conservatives a good number of former liberals and libertarians.  These are people who believed in freedom, for the individual and society.  They believed in the promise of progress.  They believed that tolerance and compromise would reduce strife.  Ultimately, they believed in the power of egalitarian principles to hold everyone to the same standard, and thereby establish a common understanding. 

Instead we are at war for reality, perceiving different worlds, speaking different languages with the same words, and disagreeing on the most fundamental values.  Those who would stay out of it and go home to their families are treated as traitors or deserters.  It was never about fairness, or logic, or stability.  We all wanted to make the world a better place, but we forgot to stop and make sure we were talking about the same thing.

Some or quite possibly all are born that way, but the haters of haters should be aware that inside many a deplorable, there is a disappointed liberal.

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

The Status Quo as Moral Compass

If what we’re claiming is correct, changes in how people explain what’s typical should change how they think about right and wrong. When people have access to more information about how the world works, it might be easier for them to imagine the world being different. In particular, if people are given explanations they may not have considered initially, they may be less likely to assume “what is” equals “what ought to be.”

I Chose To Believe

Virtual Reality and the Holocaust

A "virtual Holocaust survivor" who lived through an extermination camp and a death march will now be educating children by "upsetting the viewer’s sense of comfort." 

The interactive hologram and associated artificial intelligence answers questions with selections from 25 hours of footage of Pinchas Gutter, creating a vivid and convincing testimony intended to "jolt another world into your own." 

Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.

Monoliths and Lighthouses

Unethical Amnesia

Because of the brain's preference for virtuous memories, unethical actions have a tendency to be poorly remembered, and therefore repeated.  The ego's defense mechanisms encourage dishonesty to discourage psychological distress.  The petty blind spots of individuals thus accumulate, weaving a lying web of dissimulation and deception we like to call society.

On The Unreliability of Witnesses and Scientists

Once the reality of meteorite falls became established, the historian Eusebius Salverte pointed out that scientists' failure to recognise the truth of the matter for so long was borne out of "a predetermination to see nothing, or to deny what we had seen."

Neil deGrasse Tyson Fucking Loves Science

‘Science’ here has very little to do with the scientific method itself; it means ontological physicalism, not believing in our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the spectrally stupid, and, more than anything, pretty pictures of nebulae and tree frogs.

Parsing Partisan Psychology

Political discussion among like-minded people polarises political opinion and retroactively alters biases.  Political psychology is so pernicious as to invisibly intensify upon exposure to consensus!

Eisenhower Eats

Ike's great-granddaughter recommends a diet not far removed from Cathar or Vedic practice to facilitate contact with sky beings.

This could prompt us to reflect deeply on the mysterious resonances between religious revelations spanning the centuries, or perhaps to enjoy an amusing piece of fluffy journalism with a condescending smirk on our smug faces.

TV Worse Than Nothing For Learning, Parents Don't Care

Television time in early childhood has been found to decrease motor, vocabulary, math, and social skills, as well as "physical prowess at kindergarten."

Birds Of A Feather Flock Together

A study into how groups form has reinforced a known association between anonymous group membership and "social loafing."

JREF Narrows Challenge

The overabundance of dowsers and psychics hoping to be tested but unwilling to submit to the arbitrary, fluid, and unfairly weighted experimental protocols established by an ornery stage magician -- The Amazing Randi -- has forced the James Randi Educational Foundation to limit applicants for the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to established psychics (sic) with a TV crew.

They're Listening

In Bentham's Panopticon, a design for a prison, the guard in the tower can see right through the surrounding ring of cells.  The inmates in their cells can't see into the guard tower, so they don't know when they're being watched.  They begin to police themselves, just in case.  They internalise the judging observer, and don't break any rules.

A recent paper suggests that online commenters aware of NSA surveillance, and convinced of its import for national security, will censor themselves from expressing views they believe go against the norm.  The perception of being observed increases conformity, and discourages dissenting opinions.  The need for hectoring collectivism is never even reached.

Bill Nye the Scientism Guy

Today's popular scientists and popularisers of science have come down firmly against the love of wisdom.  Most recently, this was done by a former children's show host, channeling Dr Johnson by dropping a hammer on your toe, and declaring, "I refute it thus!"

Foreigners Stink

New research suggests that group identification mitigates feelings of disgust, necessarily placing out-groups in an unfavourable light.

The evolutionary advantage of being more sensitive to the smell and sight of outsiders would be the protection of kin and community from foreign pathogens.  The social consequence in modern times is a physical reaction framed as a moral failing.

Possible solutions include a reeducation program to present outsiders as part of the same society, or people just following their noses, and limiting the condemnation of association with one's kind.

How Language Influences Emotion

Our current sense of the word “emotion” is deeply ingrained in an early 19th-century view of what it is to be human: that we’re a mechanistic body evolved from animals, and that our psychology is rooted in the world, as opposed to given by God. The key thing about this is that it imagines the body and the psychology working together as a secular event.