Sunday, August 28, 2005
Onions and Cats
“Time at last produced philosophers who saw that neither onions nor cats nor even the heavenly bodies had organized nature. They did not immediately tell the people, for anyone who spoke badly about onions and cats in front of old women and priests would have been stoned.” Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
Saturday, August 27, 2005
It’s all good.
Stupid me. I only today realized that “It’s all good” -- that amoral, irrational, asinine and masturbatory phrase that I’ve detested ever since it became au courant -- is fully and almost literally the same arrogant, spoiled, self-satisfied and facile 18th-century Christian Panglossian bromide that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The vile thing about postmodernism is its self-congratulation for being, allegedly, ahistorical. But it’s so obviously Baroque Redux! -- in its irony, its bricolage, its spoiled carelessness and its vacuous, murderous optimism. And why not? The price technology has charged for power has been laziness since Yahweh flattened Babel, since Socrates declined to write. When have better vacuum cleaners NOT made housecleaning more convenient? Stand outside THIS telos, postmodernist: arrow, gunpowder, oven, Bomb, remote control.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
More signs of the Apocalypse
As for [an aquaintance’s] literal interpretationism -- "literal translation," I believe you called it -- have someone point out to her that the very phrase itself is oxymoronic. A reading can't be literal if it's an interpretation, nor certainly if it's already been translated, i.e. interpreted.
In truth, "literal" reading of anything doesn't actually exist. When we use the phrase "to take something literally," we mean to interpret it in the most customary, normal, commonly understood way. Obviously, this too is something one could never get "right" -- we just make estimates based on our understanding of normal usage. And if you don't understand normal usage all that thoroughly, like most uneducated folks don't -- simply because they haven't been trained in it, or norm-alized -- then your sense of "normal" will be a little off. As you can see, the more remote one is from a given culture, the less familiar one is with its linguistic norms. Less-than-hugely-literate ("literal") people have trouble guessing at the norms of their own culture; how much harder, then, to guess at the norms of a culture from the Middle East 2,000 years ago?
This is precisely why all serious people of faith, including the Catholic church, rejected "literal interpretation" as heretical and impossible nonsense over 400 years ago. These "literalists" are defending a position that their own tradition rejects. On what grounds? None. Pure ignorance. Well-meaning; an entirely understandible grasping for truth in the absence of education. But they're as ignorant as medieval serfs, who were the last people to believe in literal interpretation of the Bible. But they're also increasingly common -- among the masses.
Meanwhile, the leaders of science and education and business don’t even believe in God, much less literalism. But they profess belief, or spout it through mouthpieces like DeLay and Frist and Bush, in order to organize the zealots. Just like the Nazi regime (3rd Reich); just like Rome (which was, to the Nazis, the 1st Reich, Hohenzollern Germany being the 2nd). Religious zealotry is a cultural cancer that spreads like wildfire and, when it reaches a critical mass, kills its host. Look at the Middle East; this wasteland is the smoking shell of what 1000 years ago was the world's most advanced empire. The Muslims carried the light of the world's advanced science and philosophy while the wreck of Rome smouldered for 1000 years. Look at them now: a third of the world, suicide bombers in mud huts. They've been that way ever since Europe snatched back the prize of economic prosperity in the 18th century, and zealotry swept the Middle East. What you're hearing down the road and on the airwaves is what they heard in Rome, Baghdad and Berlin as the empire collapsed and chaos filled the void.
And zealotry IS chaos. When literalists like Christy can't give a reason to justify their oxymoronic reasoning -- when they reject the demand that they must -- when they refuse to talk, reason, justify -- what can their beliefs governed by, then? Any arbitrary thing behind their veil of irrationality: any whim they feel, anything suggested to them. "Order" in society means reason, not mere organization; mere organization is habit, and animals have that. Only humans are capable of JUSTIFYING an order (or failing to). Lemmings are perfectly organized as they commit mass suicide, but they can't tell you why they do it. When lemmings preach to their choirs, exchanging greasy falsehoods with those who agree and refusing to debate and justify points they can't -- this is the mark of reason having died and habit won; this is, and has always been, the mark of the antichrist, the final symptom of cultural death.
Republican leaders today mistake Christian organization for rational order in exactly the same way that Soviet leaders mistook Communist party organization for rational order and Nazi leaders mistook German nationalism for rational order. The "orderliness" that they all think (or thought) they were celebrating is in fact a terrifying cancer of animalistic, anti-rational habitualism spreading like wildfire through their culture. And just as a creature that can't think won't live long, a culture that can't think won't, and never has. Unless we exterminate the poison now, the irrationalism that's poisoning American society will explode in our national bloodstream the minute the massive Asian economies pinch our economic windpipe. There are two retirement plans for a former empire: Switzerland or Iran. And all this sort of religious insanity is not what one hears yodeled in the impeccable streets of Zurich. Either one goes gently into that good night, or one goes violently. We are not a gentle nation; we are greedy, drunk on our former power and desperate to retain it as it slips away. These are the exact ingredients of Weimar.
Last time we talked, you said that history repeats itself. It does. You meant that the history of decades repeats itself -- the shallow left-right swings of generational politics. Absolutely. But history repeats itself by century as much as by decade. My students naïvely believe that the horrors of World War 2, which happened only a generation ago, are impossible today. I ask them: has humankind been miraculously struck wise and moral once and for all in the last short fifty years? Lucky us! -- to have grasped that holy grail that mankind's pursued for all human history. Of course, if we have NOT been struck wise and good, hold on to your seat: the next disaster's coming, and it'll be fought with suitcase nukes in our home towns. Humans are clever, but as a whole we've still not learned to put truth before greed. And truth is holy, and greed is a sin -- and, as wise Christians once said without hypocrisy, the wages of sin are death. Either we love and nurture and educate and communicate or we all go to hell in war. Mark my words: Switzerland or Iran. Name a epoch in human history when the choice has not been that.
So vote for sham irrational "Order," look out the window and say goodbye. "Order" isn't coming; it's here, and simply coming into power.
In truth, "literal" reading of anything doesn't actually exist. When we use the phrase "to take something literally," we mean to interpret it in the most customary, normal, commonly understood way. Obviously, this too is something one could never get "right" -- we just make estimates based on our understanding of normal usage. And if you don't understand normal usage all that thoroughly, like most uneducated folks don't -- simply because they haven't been trained in it, or norm-alized -- then your sense of "normal" will be a little off. As you can see, the more remote one is from a given culture, the less familiar one is with its linguistic norms. Less-than-hugely-literate ("literal") people have trouble guessing at the norms of their own culture; how much harder, then, to guess at the norms of a culture from the Middle East 2,000 years ago?
This is precisely why all serious people of faith, including the Catholic church, rejected "literal interpretation" as heretical and impossible nonsense over 400 years ago. These "literalists" are defending a position that their own tradition rejects. On what grounds? None. Pure ignorance. Well-meaning; an entirely understandible grasping for truth in the absence of education. But they're as ignorant as medieval serfs, who were the last people to believe in literal interpretation of the Bible. But they're also increasingly common -- among the masses.
Meanwhile, the leaders of science and education and business don’t even believe in God, much less literalism. But they profess belief, or spout it through mouthpieces like DeLay and Frist and Bush, in order to organize the zealots. Just like the Nazi regime (3rd Reich); just like Rome (which was, to the Nazis, the 1st Reich, Hohenzollern Germany being the 2nd). Religious zealotry is a cultural cancer that spreads like wildfire and, when it reaches a critical mass, kills its host. Look at the Middle East; this wasteland is the smoking shell of what 1000 years ago was the world's most advanced empire. The Muslims carried the light of the world's advanced science and philosophy while the wreck of Rome smouldered for 1000 years. Look at them now: a third of the world, suicide bombers in mud huts. They've been that way ever since Europe snatched back the prize of economic prosperity in the 18th century, and zealotry swept the Middle East. What you're hearing down the road and on the airwaves is what they heard in Rome, Baghdad and Berlin as the empire collapsed and chaos filled the void.
And zealotry IS chaos. When literalists like Christy can't give a reason to justify their oxymoronic reasoning -- when they reject the demand that they must -- when they refuse to talk, reason, justify -- what can their beliefs governed by, then? Any arbitrary thing behind their veil of irrationality: any whim they feel, anything suggested to them. "Order" in society means reason, not mere organization; mere organization is habit, and animals have that. Only humans are capable of JUSTIFYING an order (or failing to). Lemmings are perfectly organized as they commit mass suicide, but they can't tell you why they do it. When lemmings preach to their choirs, exchanging greasy falsehoods with those who agree and refusing to debate and justify points they can't -- this is the mark of reason having died and habit won; this is, and has always been, the mark of the antichrist, the final symptom of cultural death.
Republican leaders today mistake Christian organization for rational order in exactly the same way that Soviet leaders mistook Communist party organization for rational order and Nazi leaders mistook German nationalism for rational order. The "orderliness" that they all think (or thought) they were celebrating is in fact a terrifying cancer of animalistic, anti-rational habitualism spreading like wildfire through their culture. And just as a creature that can't think won't live long, a culture that can't think won't, and never has. Unless we exterminate the poison now, the irrationalism that's poisoning American society will explode in our national bloodstream the minute the massive Asian economies pinch our economic windpipe. There are two retirement plans for a former empire: Switzerland or Iran. And all this sort of religious insanity is not what one hears yodeled in the impeccable streets of Zurich. Either one goes gently into that good night, or one goes violently. We are not a gentle nation; we are greedy, drunk on our former power and desperate to retain it as it slips away. These are the exact ingredients of Weimar.
Last time we talked, you said that history repeats itself. It does. You meant that the history of decades repeats itself -- the shallow left-right swings of generational politics. Absolutely. But history repeats itself by century as much as by decade. My students naïvely believe that the horrors of World War 2, which happened only a generation ago, are impossible today. I ask them: has humankind been miraculously struck wise and moral once and for all in the last short fifty years? Lucky us! -- to have grasped that holy grail that mankind's pursued for all human history. Of course, if we have NOT been struck wise and good, hold on to your seat: the next disaster's coming, and it'll be fought with suitcase nukes in our home towns. Humans are clever, but as a whole we've still not learned to put truth before greed. And truth is holy, and greed is a sin -- and, as wise Christians once said without hypocrisy, the wages of sin are death. Either we love and nurture and educate and communicate or we all go to hell in war. Mark my words: Switzerland or Iran. Name a epoch in human history when the choice has not been that.
So vote for sham irrational "Order," look out the window and say goodbye. "Order" isn't coming; it's here, and simply coming into power.
Friday, January 14, 2005
CCC: Christian crusade against campuses
Campus Crusade for Christ http://everystudent.com/features/isthere.html > reassures us that: “Just once wouldn't you love for someone to simply show you the evidence for God's existence? No arm-twisting. No statements of, ‘You just have to believe.’ Well, here is an attempt to candidly offer some of the reasons which suggest that God exists.” Their six reasons follow.
“1. Throughout history, in all cultures of the world, people have been convinced there is a God."
Fallacious appeal to the popular. Throughout history, most people have also believed that foreign races and/or women were inhuman, that weather and earthquakes were gods’ punishment for human conduct, &c ad nauseam. Or we can take another tack, accepting the appeal and pointing out that most people have believed in gods other than Jesus.
“2. Does God exist? The complexity of our planet points to a deliberate Designer who not only created our universe, but sustains it today.”
Intelligent design's appeal to complexity is a non-starter. Every physical phenomenon CCC cites has a physical explanation. The place where physics peters out is a place few people have the scientific wherewithal to discuss; it’s certainly not the sort of Newtonian-scale physical operations to which CCC (like most who make the argument from I.D.) refer. Worse: any definition of what counts as "complex" is anthropocentric and ad hoc.
“3. Does God exist? Mere "chance" is not an adequate explanation of creation.”
See 2.
“4. Does God exist? Humankind's inherent sense of right and wrong cannot be biologically explained.”
Incorrect. Altruism is widely observed in nature. Theories of group and kin selection account for it nicely. For humanity's many less obviously altruistic moral codes, with which religions are replete, cf political economy for starters.
“5. Does God exist? God not only has revealed Himself in what can be observed in nature, and in human life, but He has even more specifically shown Himself in the Bible.”
A deeply historico-political text, well-documented as such, though it may perfectly well simultaneously be an extremely fine piece of literature. Also, citing the Bible as proof of God's existence is circular. Also, as noted earlier, other religious texts have more adherents -- if you’re going to make the popular appeal, which is in most contexts fallacious.
“6. Does God exist? Unlike any other revelation of God, Jesus Christ is the clearest, most specific picture of God.”
Highly subjective. Also assumes what’s at issue (Christ = God). Worst of all, presumes that best “picture” of God is one that's "clear" and "specific." Of GOD, for heaven's sake? The ultimate transcendental principle of the universe? Clear and specific? Unlikely. Simplicity is, however, a quick path to a deficit of awe, as is grossly apparent in our spiritually impoverished society: cf Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny.
In what sense is this the reasoning of a “campus” crusade for Christ? These aren’t even clever or pertinent religious questions; this isn’t even middle-school-quality thinking, much less “campus” anything. It’s obviously less a “campus crusade for Christ” than a Christian crusade against education. Students, teachers and administrators should have the courage and honesty to call it that.
“1. Throughout history, in all cultures of the world, people have been convinced there is a God."
Fallacious appeal to the popular. Throughout history, most people have also believed that foreign races and/or women were inhuman, that weather and earthquakes were gods’ punishment for human conduct, &c ad nauseam. Or we can take another tack, accepting the appeal and pointing out that most people have believed in gods other than Jesus.
“2. Does God exist? The complexity of our planet points to a deliberate Designer who not only created our universe, but sustains it today.”
Intelligent design's appeal to complexity is a non-starter. Every physical phenomenon CCC cites has a physical explanation. The place where physics peters out is a place few people have the scientific wherewithal to discuss; it’s certainly not the sort of Newtonian-scale physical operations to which CCC (like most who make the argument from I.D.) refer. Worse: any definition of what counts as "complex" is anthropocentric and ad hoc.
“3. Does God exist? Mere "chance" is not an adequate explanation of creation.”
See 2.
“4. Does God exist? Humankind's inherent sense of right and wrong cannot be biologically explained.”
Incorrect. Altruism is widely observed in nature. Theories of group and kin selection account for it nicely. For humanity's many less obviously altruistic moral codes, with which religions are replete, cf political economy for starters.
“5. Does God exist? God not only has revealed Himself in what can be observed in nature, and in human life, but He has even more specifically shown Himself in the Bible.”
A deeply historico-political text, well-documented as such, though it may perfectly well simultaneously be an extremely fine piece of literature. Also, citing the Bible as proof of God's existence is circular. Also, as noted earlier, other religious texts have more adherents -- if you’re going to make the popular appeal, which is in most contexts fallacious.
“6. Does God exist? Unlike any other revelation of God, Jesus Christ is the clearest, most specific picture of God.”
Highly subjective. Also assumes what’s at issue (Christ = God). Worst of all, presumes that best “picture” of God is one that's "clear" and "specific." Of GOD, for heaven's sake? The ultimate transcendental principle of the universe? Clear and specific? Unlikely. Simplicity is, however, a quick path to a deficit of awe, as is grossly apparent in our spiritually impoverished society: cf Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny.
In what sense is this the reasoning of a “campus” crusade for Christ? These aren’t even clever or pertinent religious questions; this isn’t even middle-school-quality thinking, much less “campus” anything. It’s obviously less a “campus crusade for Christ” than a Christian crusade against education. Students, teachers and administrators should have the courage and honesty to call it that.
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