Thursday, 31 January 2008
Upsetting
Leading environmentalists have revealed the shocking news that the environment is bad for the environment. "The best we can do", a spokesman added, "is feel guilty and helpless. Anyway, what with the shameless renaissance of western fascism, there's other apocalypses as likely as not to get us first." He quipped.
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Evolution and the Open Window
Imagine a fly near both an open and closed window trying to return to the outside world. Which would we conceive to be the greater act of intelligence?- the physical ability to fly and the magnificent feat of bodily engineering that that entails- or the ability to correctly discern the open window as the means of departure? From our perspective, the ability to correctly choose the open window barely qualifies as an act of intelligence. The relevant intellectual process is effectively simultaneous to the act of perception; there is nothing to figure out.
However, this most basic act of intelligence is beyond the capacity of the fly for the simple reason that he is not equipped with the requisite mental apparatus to perform the intellectual actions. Comparative to the most simple exercise of choosing the open window however, the fly is able to perform the astonishing act of flight. How did a creature of such a stupid level of conscious intelligence come to be such a genius at the bodily level?
From there to look at the standard view on Darwinian type logic which is that things evolve so as to give themselves the gratest chance for survival, adapting to the environment and the like. In a sense, things exist so as to exist, and 'improve' their existence so as to continue to exist, which a more cynical mind than mine might describe as tautological nonsense. Another view is that evolution is specifically directed towards heightened intelligence( though not perhaps as a matter of course), and in a sense the physical structure develops as a vessel suitable for, or within which, more refined levels of consciousness can exist. Life is clearly intrinsically charged or motivated towards this progressive evolution of consciousness, such as from the simplest organisms to the higher animals and, for now, ultimately the human.
But to return to our fly at the window, possessed of a physical work of engineering at the level of astonishing genius, but an intellect of almost absolute idiocy. Which isn't to say he is without intelligence, but this is almost purely at the level of automatic response, or an intelligence intrinsic to his unconscious nature. When called upon to carry out the most simple of 'higher intelligence' acts such as recognising the open window as opposed to the closed, or learning from experience that the phsycial impediment of the closed one will continue to prevent his desired departure, then such a conscious action is beyond him.
So how did he get to the stage of development of genius on the one hand, while allied to an obvious dearth of conscious intelligence. In other words, how did he become the organism that he is: who is doing the evolving, adapting to environment, etc? Adaptation to his environment, or whatever paradigm we use, is an intellectual process infinitely beyond his ken. He couldn't possibly formulate or understand the theory or desirability of this adaptation, never mind then instigating the proceses necessary to this evolution. And resorting to even less intelligent beings such as micro-organisms as the vehicles of change is simply a deepening of the quandary, as what in the way of brilliantly directed intelligence are we to expect from a lower species again? Fuck all says you, and you'd be right.
Even traditional evolutionism accepts that life is being propelled by certain forces, though the forces it tends to resort to, or the governing principle, are clearly intelligently incapable of effecting the processes. It would be like if I suddenly appeared in two places at once, here and the local shop, and the explanation for this occurence were that "Oh, this was beneficial to his existence. Bi-location is a very effective survival technique. One self can get food while the other writes this shite." Perhaps it is desirable- even if a ludicrously reductionist explanation- but the desirabilty of bi-location and my ability to become capable of bi-location are two enormously different things. And similarly, for us animals on earth to have become the animals we are involved intelligent processes infinitely beyond our own conscious capacities. So what is this unconscious intelligence that is manifestly present directing operations?
Likewise our finest minds push themselves to their limits endeavouring to understand processes like gravity, and we would have no reservation about describing an Einstein as a genius. Naturally as an extension of this, he is being called a genius because of his capacity, flawed though it may be, to form fragmentary intellectual pictures of the nature of reality. But what about reality itself? We most likely wouldn't describe a critic of Beethoven as a greater genius than Beethoven himself, which to a degree is what an Einstein is. He is reaching into and endeavouring to understand, depending on one's perspective, aspects of an almost terrifying depth of intelligence which is intrinsic to and indeed is reality itself. The only justified sense of self for man within this reality is the utmost humility, and there is a line by the philosopher Plotinus that is apt where he describes the mystical experience as "the flight of the alone into the Alone," but which is also appropriate for the scientific exploration of reality.
However, this most basic act of intelligence is beyond the capacity of the fly for the simple reason that he is not equipped with the requisite mental apparatus to perform the intellectual actions. Comparative to the most simple exercise of choosing the open window however, the fly is able to perform the astonishing act of flight. How did a creature of such a stupid level of conscious intelligence come to be such a genius at the bodily level?
From there to look at the standard view on Darwinian type logic which is that things evolve so as to give themselves the gratest chance for survival, adapting to the environment and the like. In a sense, things exist so as to exist, and 'improve' their existence so as to continue to exist, which a more cynical mind than mine might describe as tautological nonsense. Another view is that evolution is specifically directed towards heightened intelligence( though not perhaps as a matter of course), and in a sense the physical structure develops as a vessel suitable for, or within which, more refined levels of consciousness can exist. Life is clearly intrinsically charged or motivated towards this progressive evolution of consciousness, such as from the simplest organisms to the higher animals and, for now, ultimately the human.
But to return to our fly at the window, possessed of a physical work of engineering at the level of astonishing genius, but an intellect of almost absolute idiocy. Which isn't to say he is without intelligence, but this is almost purely at the level of automatic response, or an intelligence intrinsic to his unconscious nature. When called upon to carry out the most simple of 'higher intelligence' acts such as recognising the open window as opposed to the closed, or learning from experience that the phsycial impediment of the closed one will continue to prevent his desired departure, then such a conscious action is beyond him.
So how did he get to the stage of development of genius on the one hand, while allied to an obvious dearth of conscious intelligence. In other words, how did he become the organism that he is: who is doing the evolving, adapting to environment, etc? Adaptation to his environment, or whatever paradigm we use, is an intellectual process infinitely beyond his ken. He couldn't possibly formulate or understand the theory or desirability of this adaptation, never mind then instigating the proceses necessary to this evolution. And resorting to even less intelligent beings such as micro-organisms as the vehicles of change is simply a deepening of the quandary, as what in the way of brilliantly directed intelligence are we to expect from a lower species again? Fuck all says you, and you'd be right.
Even traditional evolutionism accepts that life is being propelled by certain forces, though the forces it tends to resort to, or the governing principle, are clearly intelligently incapable of effecting the processes. It would be like if I suddenly appeared in two places at once, here and the local shop, and the explanation for this occurence were that "Oh, this was beneficial to his existence. Bi-location is a very effective survival technique. One self can get food while the other writes this shite." Perhaps it is desirable- even if a ludicrously reductionist explanation- but the desirabilty of bi-location and my ability to become capable of bi-location are two enormously different things. And similarly, for us animals on earth to have become the animals we are involved intelligent processes infinitely beyond our own conscious capacities. So what is this unconscious intelligence that is manifestly present directing operations?
Likewise our finest minds push themselves to their limits endeavouring to understand processes like gravity, and we would have no reservation about describing an Einstein as a genius. Naturally as an extension of this, he is being called a genius because of his capacity, flawed though it may be, to form fragmentary intellectual pictures of the nature of reality. But what about reality itself? We most likely wouldn't describe a critic of Beethoven as a greater genius than Beethoven himself, which to a degree is what an Einstein is. He is reaching into and endeavouring to understand, depending on one's perspective, aspects of an almost terrifying depth of intelligence which is intrinsic to and indeed is reality itself. The only justified sense of self for man within this reality is the utmost humility, and there is a line by the philosopher Plotinus that is apt where he describes the mystical experience as "the flight of the alone into the Alone," but which is also appropriate for the scientific exploration of reality.
Monday, 28 January 2008
Tea Less Fashionable
Chinese tea-growers have expressed dismay at the falling into redundancy of the expression, "for all the tea in China", which could typically have been rendered:
I wouldn't help that man for all the tea in China.
The implication being that the possession of all the tea in China being greatly to be desired, such is the bountifulness of tea's abundance therein, and inferentially that the man who wouldn't be helped must be of a character extremely distasteful to he who wouldn't help him. That he would sacrifice such a prodigious reward speaks volumes for his antipathy. In the modern world, it would seem this extraordinary abundance of tea no longer evokes the former desired sense of desire, and consumers are more likely to use a more prosaic variation such as:
I wouldn't help that man if you paid me.
I wouldn't help that man for all the tea in China.
The implication being that the possession of all the tea in China being greatly to be desired, such is the bountifulness of tea's abundance therein, and inferentially that the man who wouldn't be helped must be of a character extremely distasteful to he who wouldn't help him. That he would sacrifice such a prodigious reward speaks volumes for his antipathy. In the modern world, it would seem this extraordinary abundance of tea no longer evokes the former desired sense of desire, and consumers are more likely to use a more prosaic variation such as:
I wouldn't help that man if you paid me.
Saturday, 26 January 2008
Pithy Summation of the BBC and its Brethren
Stupidly spending some minutes watching the BBC last night naturally did me nothing that could be described as good, and has belatedly prompted the resurrection of the following few lines:
That state propaganda machines are state propaganda machines should cease to surprise, once one awakens from the somnabulent delusion of imagining that state propaganda machines are not state propaganda machines.
This naturally more true the more the state is engaged in acts of war and the centralisation of its autocratic powers, where the necessity of the disemmination of lies and the lack of outpouring of truth is of a very high level of priority.
A slight variation of the above to describe almost the global media industry, which is in ever fewer hands of ever greater power:
That the privately owned propaganda machines are privately owned propaganda machines should cease to surprise once one awakens from the somnabulent delusion of imagining the privately owned propaganda machines are not privately owned propaganda machines.
That state propaganda machines are state propaganda machines should cease to surprise, once one awakens from the somnabulent delusion of imagining that state propaganda machines are not state propaganda machines.
This naturally more true the more the state is engaged in acts of war and the centralisation of its autocratic powers, where the necessity of the disemmination of lies and the lack of outpouring of truth is of a very high level of priority.
A slight variation of the above to describe almost the global media industry, which is in ever fewer hands of ever greater power:
That the privately owned propaganda machines are privately owned propaganda machines should cease to surprise once one awakens from the somnabulent delusion of imagining the privately owned propaganda machines are not privately owned propaganda machines.
Friday, 25 January 2008
Vow of Silence
Much feared former West Indian fast bowler Curtly Ambrose used to refuse countless interview requests with the most statesmanlike of lines, "Curtly don't talk to no man."
Whenever Curtly took a Test wicket, his mother would rush onto the balcony of her home in Swetes Village, Antigua, to triumphantly ring a special bell to celebrate. Curtly now plays bass guitar in the reggae band, Big Bad Dread and the Baldhead.
Whenever Curtly took a Test wicket, his mother would rush onto the balcony of her home in Swetes Village, Antigua, to triumphantly ring a special bell to celebrate. Curtly now plays bass guitar in the reggae band, Big Bad Dread and the Baldhead.
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
The Celts and Their Aversion to Straight Lines
The Celts attitudinal individuality precluded nationality. They fought too frequently amongst themselves; inhabited a kindred system too individual, too undisciplined, too lacking in organisation to permit the global ambition necessary to Empire. They never created a lasting political nation: Ireland the most cohesive single Celtic national presence, owed any autonomy as much to the country's geography- a lone island territory- as to any national political impulse among the Irish people or their leaders.
Frank Delaney- The Celts.
To such an individual ethos, the subsuming of the person within the apparatus of a state machine is abhorrent to the entire sense of life, and the very success of a nation as an imperial power, dependent on efficiency and obedience, rather than a proof of that people's superiority is to the Celtic sense proof of that people's atrophied nature. They have surrendered to a dead abstraction- the glory of the state- and this hostility towards the surrender of self a dead abstraction mirrored in Nietzsche's words, "The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye."
Delaney also notes that "Just as they never organised into one political unit, they never created a single religion or pantheon."
The necessity of a cohesive religious or philosophical belief system is also something alien to the Celtic sense of life. The living faith in life renders far less important a rational filter into which experience is placed and understood.
An amusing example of the above imperviousness to rigid belief systems is a friend's grandmother saying at a family gathering in a discussion of death, that, sure, didn't we believe we might be reincarnated as a cow, or bird, etc; a lifetime of immersion in Catholicism failing to penetrate her core with the belief that, no, Catholics aren't supposed to believe in re-incarnation.
Delaney also writes:
Celtic art combined the dark and uncanny with the abstract and simplicistic: above all else it responded to the natural world. They abhorred the straight line, pushed organic influences to deliciously abstracted infinity. In Celtic art are very few natural animals, most are fantastic...to the Greeks a spiral is a spiral and a face a face, and it is always clear where the one ends and the othre begins, whereas the Celts 'see' the face into the spirals or tendrils; ambiguity is characteristic of Celtic art.
By contrast, the Roman and British Empires could be described as exactly a faith in the straight line that the Celts abhorred. Another point of interest is what Delaney decribes as "the Celts' practical and mystical" sense of life. The Celtic mystical sense is wholly at odds with the idea of life as illusory or maya, or meditation designed to remove one's consciousness from its bonds to the natural world. The Celt's intimate connection with the natural world renders a desire to overcome it ridiculous; a diseased abstraction, and notions like Manicheanism, or gnosticism, which lead the thinker to posit a fallen world, the creation of a flawed demiurge, are again the product of slaves to reason, with an atrophied sense of the life-force that should course through the veins of their animal nature.
Frank Delaney- The Celts.
To such an individual ethos, the subsuming of the person within the apparatus of a state machine is abhorrent to the entire sense of life, and the very success of a nation as an imperial power, dependent on efficiency and obedience, rather than a proof of that people's superiority is to the Celtic sense proof of that people's atrophied nature. They have surrendered to a dead abstraction- the glory of the state- and this hostility towards the surrender of self a dead abstraction mirrored in Nietzsche's words, "The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye."
Delaney also notes that "Just as they never organised into one political unit, they never created a single religion or pantheon."
The necessity of a cohesive religious or philosophical belief system is also something alien to the Celtic sense of life. The living faith in life renders far less important a rational filter into which experience is placed and understood.
An amusing example of the above imperviousness to rigid belief systems is a friend's grandmother saying at a family gathering in a discussion of death, that, sure, didn't we believe we might be reincarnated as a cow, or bird, etc; a lifetime of immersion in Catholicism failing to penetrate her core with the belief that, no, Catholics aren't supposed to believe in re-incarnation.
Delaney also writes:
Celtic art combined the dark and uncanny with the abstract and simplicistic: above all else it responded to the natural world. They abhorred the straight line, pushed organic influences to deliciously abstracted infinity. In Celtic art are very few natural animals, most are fantastic...to the Greeks a spiral is a spiral and a face a face, and it is always clear where the one ends and the othre begins, whereas the Celts 'see' the face into the spirals or tendrils; ambiguity is characteristic of Celtic art.
By contrast, the Roman and British Empires could be described as exactly a faith in the straight line that the Celts abhorred. Another point of interest is what Delaney decribes as "the Celts' practical and mystical" sense of life. The Celtic mystical sense is wholly at odds with the idea of life as illusory or maya, or meditation designed to remove one's consciousness from its bonds to the natural world. The Celt's intimate connection with the natural world renders a desire to overcome it ridiculous; a diseased abstraction, and notions like Manicheanism, or gnosticism, which lead the thinker to posit a fallen world, the creation of a flawed demiurge, are again the product of slaves to reason, with an atrophied sense of the life-force that should course through the veins of their animal nature.
Sunday, 20 January 2008
Bela Tarr on the Simplifying Collective
In answer to the previous question- 'What did it mean- the people?'- the Hungarian film director, Bela Tarr, describes the collection of short films, Visions of Europe:
This film tells us that each human being has a life, that each human being has a face, a critical look and a name that are inalienable - that each human being has a dignity. We must try to protect this dignity. Should anyone be deprived of it, we must try to conquer it back for them. This film is about human dignity, it shows humiliated, offended people, it is a film from Hungary.
And do yourself a favour and watch the following few minutes of "Prologue" by Tarr.
This film tells us that each human being has a life, that each human being has a face, a critical look and a name that are inalienable - that each human being has a dignity. We must try to protect this dignity. Should anyone be deprived of it, we must try to conquer it back for them. This film is about human dignity, it shows humiliated, offended people, it is a film from Hungary.
And do yourself a favour and watch the following few minutes of "Prologue" by Tarr.
The Simplifying Collective
He distrusted the simplifying collective. What did it mean, the people?
Wolfgang Koeppen
Another use of the simplifying collective:
America and Britain have invaded Iraq.
Could preferably be rendered:
The twisted souls that run the governments, both in front of and behind the scenes, of America and Britain have ordered the invasion of Iraq, to be carried out by people within the military about whom they couldn't give a shit.
Nobel Peace winner Henry Kissinger distrusted the simplifying collective also, and clarified what he considered to be the true meaning of that implied by the the word 'military':
Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.
Woodward and Bernstein The Final Days in chapter 14 .
Wolfgang Koeppen
Another use of the simplifying collective:
America and Britain have invaded Iraq.
Could preferably be rendered:
The twisted souls that run the governments, both in front of and behind the scenes, of America and Britain have ordered the invasion of Iraq, to be carried out by people within the military about whom they couldn't give a shit.
Nobel Peace winner Henry Kissinger distrusted the simplifying collective also, and clarified what he considered to be the true meaning of that implied by the the word 'military':
Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.
Woodward and Bernstein The Final Days in chapter 14 .
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Good Writing Help
Use words like fabulous as often as possible, so as to induce the release of quantities of the chemical serotonin in the mind-body system of the reader, and consequently feelings of well-being will result which will ensure positive feelings towards your writing.
For example:
The sky was a fabulous hue, rich and vibrant in the most marvellous sense. He inhaled both in the normal sense, but also in the sense of visually with his eyes. He felt both fabulous and fantastic in equal measure.
This works as literature in too many ways to discuss for now, but if one is to methodically examine the piece, the most strikingly thematic and poetically unifying element is the use of highly charged positive words such as fabulous, rich, vibrant, marvellous, fabulous again, and finally fantastic. The second daring use of fabulous particularly helps the piece achieve something quite extraordinary. But be aware that this use of repetition is not without its dangers; employing such a device is to walk a tightrope, and in the hands of one unsure of his craft may be enough to unbalance the whole, and Icarus-like, send it crashing to disaster.
The discerning reader may have noticed the echoing of 'sense' in the middle period of the piece, which also helped indissolubly bind the threads of the reader's reality to that of the writing, though the effortlessness with which I achieved such subtleties of expression may fool the undiscerning as to the difficulties such alchemical workings may pose to the lesser creator.
For example:
The sky was a fabulous hue, rich and vibrant in the most marvellous sense. He inhaled both in the normal sense, but also in the sense of visually with his eyes. He felt both fabulous and fantastic in equal measure.
This works as literature in too many ways to discuss for now, but if one is to methodically examine the piece, the most strikingly thematic and poetically unifying element is the use of highly charged positive words such as fabulous, rich, vibrant, marvellous, fabulous again, and finally fantastic. The second daring use of fabulous particularly helps the piece achieve something quite extraordinary. But be aware that this use of repetition is not without its dangers; employing such a device is to walk a tightrope, and in the hands of one unsure of his craft may be enough to unbalance the whole, and Icarus-like, send it crashing to disaster.
The discerning reader may have noticed the echoing of 'sense' in the middle period of the piece, which also helped indissolubly bind the threads of the reader's reality to that of the writing, though the effortlessness with which I achieved such subtleties of expression may fool the undiscerning as to the difficulties such alchemical workings may pose to the lesser creator.
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps, by Naomi Wolf
If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Rest of Wolf's article here, and here she delivers a talk on the same issue, ie the closing down of a democracy.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Rest of Wolf's article here, and here she delivers a talk on the same issue, ie the closing down of a democracy.
War's Spiritual Nature?
Earlier on this very blog here, the issue of human sacrifice rituals were examined and seen necessarily as propitiatory offerings to particular deities. And that if such spiritual entities actually do exist, they are nourished by these offerings of human blood. On the other hand, even if they don't exist this is still the projected reason for such practices.
Perhaps one could see practices like war and torture in a similar light, that besides being means towards ends, they are also ends in themselves; this end in the case of war being orgiastic human sacrifice rituals with perhaps pride of place to the dropping of the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki over civilian populations, ordered by President Truman in 1945. Truman was a 33rd Degree Freemason and Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri 1940-1941; having succeeded to the post of President from 32nd Degree Freemason, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
American diplomats and negotiators in June 1945 told President Truman that the Japanese were seeking to surrender on one condition--that they be allowed to keep their emperor. But President Truman and the United States refused these initial Japanese offers, demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally and agree to give up their emperor- whom the Japanese saw as an inviolate link to the sacred, and of absolute value. Instead of accepting the Japanese desire to surrender, in June and July 1945 American planes, using saturation bombing, firebombed and destroyed 59 out of Japan's 66 largest cities, killing over one million people and leaving 20 million homeless. General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of American forces in Europe, told Secretary of War Stimson "that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary." In July 1945 Eisenhower met with Truman and advised him not to use the bomb. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Leahy, also advised Truman not to drop the atomic bomb, arguing again that Japan was already defeated.
Back to Truman, and it might be helpful to understand where he saw his priorities. On February 22, 1950 when dedicating the Washington Statue at Memorial Hall, he said the following:
The greatest honor that has come to me, and that can ever come to me in my life, is to be Grand Master of Masons in Missouri.
Grand Master Truman later described the far from benevolent atomic scientist Oppenheimer as "a crybaby scientist", after Oppenheimer became deeply troubled subsequent to the use of the atom bombs over Japan.
Freemasonry views Truman as having ascended towards the very heights of spiritual advancement. In the expectation of seeing some kind of consistency in his character, rather than a schizophrenically divided soul of public and private persona, what might Truman's callousness- pitched to such an extraordinary extreme- tell us about the nature of this spiritual advancement?
Perhaps one could see practices like war and torture in a similar light, that besides being means towards ends, they are also ends in themselves; this end in the case of war being orgiastic human sacrifice rituals with perhaps pride of place to the dropping of the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki over civilian populations, ordered by President Truman in 1945. Truman was a 33rd Degree Freemason and Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri 1940-1941; having succeeded to the post of President from 32nd Degree Freemason, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
American diplomats and negotiators in June 1945 told President Truman that the Japanese were seeking to surrender on one condition--that they be allowed to keep their emperor. But President Truman and the United States refused these initial Japanese offers, demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally and agree to give up their emperor- whom the Japanese saw as an inviolate link to the sacred, and of absolute value. Instead of accepting the Japanese desire to surrender, in June and July 1945 American planes, using saturation bombing, firebombed and destroyed 59 out of Japan's 66 largest cities, killing over one million people and leaving 20 million homeless. General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of American forces in Europe, told Secretary of War Stimson "that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary." In July 1945 Eisenhower met with Truman and advised him not to use the bomb. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Leahy, also advised Truman not to drop the atomic bomb, arguing again that Japan was already defeated.
Back to Truman, and it might be helpful to understand where he saw his priorities. On February 22, 1950 when dedicating the Washington Statue at Memorial Hall, he said the following:
The greatest honor that has come to me, and that can ever come to me in my life, is to be Grand Master of Masons in Missouri.
Grand Master Truman later described the far from benevolent atomic scientist Oppenheimer as "a crybaby scientist", after Oppenheimer became deeply troubled subsequent to the use of the atom bombs over Japan.
Freemasonry views Truman as having ascended towards the very heights of spiritual advancement. In the expectation of seeing some kind of consistency in his character, rather than a schizophrenically divided soul of public and private persona, what might Truman's callousness- pitched to such an extraordinary extreme- tell us about the nature of this spiritual advancement?
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
The State and the State
In Of the New Idol I wrote of the dual meaning of the word state, and essentially that there is a kind of battle for reality itself, or the understanding of its nature; the processes, which can be seen as arms of the state in the broadest sense, from birth inculcating the individual with an absolute immersion in unrealities that keep him from a true experience of the state in the sense of the human condition.
Me old perennial, Aldous Huxley, wrote:
The non-stop distraction of the various forms of media deliberately used to prevent people from paying too much attention to the reality of the social and political situation.
Think of Sky News as a consciousness swamping drip-feed in so many various establishments, from banks to pubs and petrol stations. Or the blanket over reality of the ubiquitous radio station with a dj speaking in a fake awful accent, the incessant ads, plastic saccharine music, and the same bad news on the hour/half-hour on every station getting their 'news' from all the same sources. But Huxley could have added, as he most certainly would have thought, that the non-stop distractions are deliberately used to prevent people from experiencing reality itself, rather than just preventing knowing about the political and social situations. It is as much and more an existential issue as an information one. Whether the philosophical nature of the distraction culture is entirely understood in its subtleties by its chief protagonists is debatable, but at a crude level it is certainly understood.
As Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, and a svengali in the worlds of thought applied to consumerism and 'democracy' in the last century wrote:
If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it... The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
The battle for the nature of reality is admirably described by my other perennial, Victor Pelevin, thus:
The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination)...
Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.
One example of the battle for reality is the illegalisation of marijuana, and the hallucinogen family of intoxicants which were intrinsic to the unleashing of so much consciousness and its inevitable creative outflowing in the 1960s. Such catalysts of the mind have always been gateways to the divine or higher reality, and while defiling and limiting avenues for the mind have the more than solid approval and fostering of and by the organs of state, the experiencing of the mind itself, reality, and even God could without exaggeration be said to be illegal in the current age.
Me old perennial, Aldous Huxley, wrote:
The non-stop distraction of the various forms of media deliberately used to prevent people from paying too much attention to the reality of the social and political situation.
Think of Sky News as a consciousness swamping drip-feed in so many various establishments, from banks to pubs and petrol stations. Or the blanket over reality of the ubiquitous radio station with a dj speaking in a fake awful accent, the incessant ads, plastic saccharine music, and the same bad news on the hour/half-hour on every station getting their 'news' from all the same sources. But Huxley could have added, as he most certainly would have thought, that the non-stop distractions are deliberately used to prevent people from experiencing reality itself, rather than just preventing knowing about the political and social situations. It is as much and more an existential issue as an information one. Whether the philosophical nature of the distraction culture is entirely understood in its subtleties by its chief protagonists is debatable, but at a crude level it is certainly understood.
As Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, and a svengali in the worlds of thought applied to consumerism and 'democracy' in the last century wrote:
If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it... The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
The battle for the nature of reality is admirably described by my other perennial, Victor Pelevin, thus:
The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination)...
Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.
One example of the battle for reality is the illegalisation of marijuana, and the hallucinogen family of intoxicants which were intrinsic to the unleashing of so much consciousness and its inevitable creative outflowing in the 1960s. Such catalysts of the mind have always been gateways to the divine or higher reality, and while defiling and limiting avenues for the mind have the more than solid approval and fostering of and by the organs of state, the experiencing of the mind itself, reality, and even God could without exaggeration be said to be illegal in the current age.
The Death of Russian Parliamentary Democracy
Assassinated journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, on democratic progress under Vladimir Putin- Time Man of the Year- in her posthumous book, A Russian Diary:
The checks and balances within the state vanished, and the only restraint was the President's conscience. Alas, the nature of the man and the nature of his former profession( major in the KGB) meant that was not enough.
One of the checks and balances being the sinking into abject propaganda of the mainstream press- which presumably explains why Putin would appeal to the ethos of a Western propaganda giant like Time- and Politkovskaya was the 13th Russian journalist to be killed in a contract-style killing since Putin came to power in 2000. Presumably just an extraordinary run of bad luck for journalists.
In a reference to the KGB's successor, the federal security service FSB, Viktor Shenderovich, a well-known radio and television commentator, said "The culprits will never be found, because the people who will be investigating this murder walk down the same corridors as those who ordered it."
Putin touchingly paid tribute to Politkovskaya the next day: "The degree of her influence on the country’s political development was insignificant. And her assassination harms the leadership a lot more than her publications ever did."
The checks and balances within the state vanished, and the only restraint was the President's conscience. Alas, the nature of the man and the nature of his former profession( major in the KGB) meant that was not enough.
One of the checks and balances being the sinking into abject propaganda of the mainstream press- which presumably explains why Putin would appeal to the ethos of a Western propaganda giant like Time- and Politkovskaya was the 13th Russian journalist to be killed in a contract-style killing since Putin came to power in 2000. Presumably just an extraordinary run of bad luck for journalists.
In a reference to the KGB's successor, the federal security service FSB, Viktor Shenderovich, a well-known radio and television commentator, said "The culprits will never be found, because the people who will be investigating this murder walk down the same corridors as those who ordered it."
Putin touchingly paid tribute to Politkovskaya the next day: "The degree of her influence on the country’s political development was insignificant. And her assassination harms the leadership a lot more than her publications ever did."
Monday, 14 January 2008
Wise Wisdom
Stupidity is no match for vanity, or as was actually rendered, Her stupidity was no match for her vanity.Wolfgang Koeppen
One should not swallow poison out of politeness.
Me
One should not swallow poison out of politeness.
Me
Sunday, 13 January 2008
Knighthood, Dame, etc
Where in return for services rendered, the state takes possession of one's name.
Triumph Amidst Advertisements
Triumph Amidst Advertisements
Scientists in Norway have, after much conscientious and rigorous research, awarded the title of Most Demeaning Human Occupation to the Professional Television Watcher, or 'television critic' as is alternatively known. AA "Double A" Gill of The Times accepted the award on behalf of the profession in a ceremony in the Norwegian Embassy in London on Thursday night, saying he was "proud to watch so much television", that "it is a great way of killing time" and "I am even more proud to be paid to write about watching so much television, which is, as said, a great way of killing time." As a philosophical addendum, he added that "Time is the enemy."
Some scientists from Finland, in expression of the notoriously bitter internecine Scandinavian scientific rivalry, have poured scorn on the scientific nature of the Norwegians' research, describing the process as "hopelessly subjective." A Norwegian representative claimed in response that the research was "very scientific" and had "the data to prove it." The Finn accepted defeat, saying this was "fair enough."
Scientists in Norway have, after much conscientious and rigorous research, awarded the title of Most Demeaning Human Occupation to the Professional Television Watcher, or 'television critic' as is alternatively known. AA "Double A" Gill of The Times accepted the award on behalf of the profession in a ceremony in the Norwegian Embassy in London on Thursday night, saying he was "proud to watch so much television", that "it is a great way of killing time" and "I am even more proud to be paid to write about watching so much television, which is, as said, a great way of killing time." As a philosophical addendum, he added that "Time is the enemy."
Some scientists from Finland, in expression of the notoriously bitter internecine Scandinavian scientific rivalry, have poured scorn on the scientific nature of the Norwegians' research, describing the process as "hopelessly subjective." A Norwegian representative claimed in response that the research was "very scientific" and had "the data to prove it." The Finn accepted defeat, saying this was "fair enough."
Saturday, 12 January 2008
Of the New Idol
From Nietzsche's chapter of that name in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'
It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it a state.
Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye.
The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies- and whatever it has, it has stolen.
Everything about it is false, it bites with stolen teeth, even its belly is false.
Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this as the sign of the state. Truly, this sign indicates the will to death! Truly it beckons to the preachers of death! Just see how it lures them. How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them.
'There is nothing greater on earth than I, the regulating finger of God'- thus the monster bellows. It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences- this cold monster.
A cunning device of Hell has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours.
I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called- life.
Just look at these superfluous people! They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves.
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another and so scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
They all strive towards the throne: it is a madness they have- as if happiness sits upon the throne! Often filth sits upon the throne- and often the throne upon filth, too.
One element of focus I would like to add to this fine diatribe: the necessary expulsion of healthy disgust, that would otherwise gnaw away at one's insides. A poison should be vomited out. Before I disappear over the hill in pursuit of that tangent, the element of focus, which is the word state itself, which contains an unfortunate two-faced nature which surely works in the favour of Nietzsche's idol workers.
In the above usage we have the body politic as organized for civil rule and government, or the operations or activities of a central civil government. Though, as Nietzsche argues it is no longer connected to life, or the culture of a living people, but is an abstract and artificial behemoth imposed upon life.
However we also have state as the condition of a person or thing, as with respect to circumstances or attributes, or the condition of matter with respect to structure, form, constitution, phase, or the like.
The second meaning is in relation to the human condition itself, or life as is. One is born into the human state. However, the rulers of the body politic perpetrate a kind of intellectual or existential coup over pure reality, or 'the state'.. Instead one is born into the state in the political sense, and as Nietzsche says, "this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'" One is not a free being of pure existence, an autonomous absolute value, but instead a property of the body politic, which places itself as the absolute in value terms, or even life itself. Reality is not 'the state', the state is 'the state'.
The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'
It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it a state.
Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye.
The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies- and whatever it has, it has stolen.
Everything about it is false, it bites with stolen teeth, even its belly is false.
Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this as the sign of the state. Truly, this sign indicates the will to death! Truly it beckons to the preachers of death! Just see how it lures them. How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them.
'There is nothing greater on earth than I, the regulating finger of God'- thus the monster bellows. It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences- this cold monster.
A cunning device of Hell has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours.
I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called- life.
Just look at these superfluous people! They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves.
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another and so scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
They all strive towards the throne: it is a madness they have- as if happiness sits upon the throne! Often filth sits upon the throne- and often the throne upon filth, too.
One element of focus I would like to add to this fine diatribe: the necessary expulsion of healthy disgust, that would otherwise gnaw away at one's insides. A poison should be vomited out. Before I disappear over the hill in pursuit of that tangent, the element of focus, which is the word state itself, which contains an unfortunate two-faced nature which surely works in the favour of Nietzsche's idol workers.
In the above usage we have the body politic as organized for civil rule and government, or the operations or activities of a central civil government. Though, as Nietzsche argues it is no longer connected to life, or the culture of a living people, but is an abstract and artificial behemoth imposed upon life.
However we also have state as the condition of a person or thing, as with respect to circumstances or attributes, or the condition of matter with respect to structure, form, constitution, phase, or the like.
The second meaning is in relation to the human condition itself, or life as is. One is born into the human state. However, the rulers of the body politic perpetrate a kind of intellectual or existential coup over pure reality, or 'the state'.. Instead one is born into the state in the political sense, and as Nietzsche says, "this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'" One is not a free being of pure existence, an autonomous absolute value, but instead a property of the body politic, which places itself as the absolute in value terms, or even life itself. Reality is not 'the state', the state is 'the state'.
Friday, 11 January 2008
Religio-Philosophical Principle of Art
The All is in all.
'The All' being Absolute Reality and 'all' being life in its individuality or particulars.
The true artist has absolute faith in this truth; that he does no need to force truth from beyond the natural confines of his artistic universe to demonstrate something approaching absolute reality. The general is contained within the particular.
For example, the difference between the devil scenes in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Mann's scene is interesting for its ideas but wholly unconvincing in artistic terms; one could argue his very eloquently effusive and somewhat stuffy bore of a devil exists in the form necessary to the refined intellectual hero figure but he is little more than a mouthpiece of ideas and doesn't touch the flame of reality. Which isn't to downplay Mann's novelistic talents but his art is very much in thrall to the overarching ideas, and is perhaps more in the way of essay than fiction, or that his fiction is lopsided in the sense of being a clear vehicle for his ideas. Which isn't from my point of view off-putting as Mann found the form most suited to his temperament, and for him to write in a less literary style would be unnatural, and to weaken his actual strengths.
Dostoevsky in contrast says far less but also far more in his much more intriguing scene of Ivan's encounter with his sanity challenging devil. Et cetera.
What is contained within the et cetera is, you will agree, far-reaching and profound, and summing up, the All is not in all in Mann's scene whereas it is in Dostoevsky's.
'The All' being Absolute Reality and 'all' being life in its individuality or particulars.
The true artist has absolute faith in this truth; that he does no need to force truth from beyond the natural confines of his artistic universe to demonstrate something approaching absolute reality. The general is contained within the particular.
For example, the difference between the devil scenes in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Mann's scene is interesting for its ideas but wholly unconvincing in artistic terms; one could argue his very eloquently effusive and somewhat stuffy bore of a devil exists in the form necessary to the refined intellectual hero figure but he is little more than a mouthpiece of ideas and doesn't touch the flame of reality. Which isn't to downplay Mann's novelistic talents but his art is very much in thrall to the overarching ideas, and is perhaps more in the way of essay than fiction, or that his fiction is lopsided in the sense of being a clear vehicle for his ideas. Which isn't from my point of view off-putting as Mann found the form most suited to his temperament, and for him to write in a less literary style would be unnatural, and to weaken his actual strengths.
Dostoevsky in contrast says far less but also far more in his much more intriguing scene of Ivan's encounter with his sanity challenging devil. Et cetera.
What is contained within the et cetera is, you will agree, far-reaching and profound, and summing up, the All is not in all in Mann's scene whereas it is in Dostoevsky's.
Bigotry
One definition: Killing the legitimate usage of the mind's application to reality by inferring that such usage implies the user of the logic is a bigot, thereby ensuring that the sanctum of that which should go unexamined remains free from the impurity of intellectual reasoning. If, however, the conclusions reached appeal to the accuser of bigotry, then he welcomes such usage, and is no doubt a champion of Reason. The infidel/bigot accusation is only brought into play when the conclusions reached are disagreeable to his static, unexamined worldview. Thus Salman Rushdie's fatwah for airing his opinions, or in a less obvious variation, GWB's "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."
The protectors of strangulatory systems of thought upon makind do not relinquish easily the straitjacket upon the natural liberty of the mind. As Jesus said, "I came that they might have life and might have it abundantly." The enemy of truth wishes that man may have mind stultifying obedience, and have it abundantly.
The protectors of strangulatory systems of thought upon makind do not relinquish easily the straitjacket upon the natural liberty of the mind. As Jesus said, "I came that they might have life and might have it abundantly." The enemy of truth wishes that man may have mind stultifying obedience, and have it abundantly.
Thursday, 10 January 2008
Putrid Stench
Tedious and sick as the world of politics tends to be- or soap operatic masquerade for the masses as it is affectionately known- in response to the glimpse of the gaze of the starry-eyed herd at the shiny and uplifting wonder of American politics at work at the moment- democracy via the magic of television, I feel the faint urge to quote from Wolfgang Koeppen's The Hothouse, set in post-war Germany, though the urge is at best faint as the necessity of the following observation to exist in the first place is somewhat depressing, but anyways:
All politics were squalid, it was like gang warfare...There is no such thing as truth here. Just tangles of lies.
No, too tedious. If people want to gorge themselves on the most hopeless of hallucinations, sobeit. Though I'll throw in Gore Vidal's "It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.”
A more interesting extract from Koeppen is the following- since I began with him I may as well justify his announced presence:
And then a man was back in the cage he'd been born into, the cage called Fatherland which dangled along with a bunch of other cages called Fatherland, all on a rod, which a great collector of cages and peoples was carrying deeper into history...You were swung on the pole that the great cage bearer had over his shoulder. Who could say where he was going? And did you have any say in the matter? You and your cage might wind up on the pole of the other cage-bearer who was just as unpredictable as the first( and who knows what daemon, what idee fixe was actuating him) in heading for the unknown- an expedition that would be taught to the children in time.
All politics were squalid, it was like gang warfare...There is no such thing as truth here. Just tangles of lies.
No, too tedious. If people want to gorge themselves on the most hopeless of hallucinations, sobeit. Though I'll throw in Gore Vidal's "It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.”
A more interesting extract from Koeppen is the following- since I began with him I may as well justify his announced presence:
And then a man was back in the cage he'd been born into, the cage called Fatherland which dangled along with a bunch of other cages called Fatherland, all on a rod, which a great collector of cages and peoples was carrying deeper into history...You were swung on the pole that the great cage bearer had over his shoulder. Who could say where he was going? And did you have any say in the matter? You and your cage might wind up on the pole of the other cage-bearer who was just as unpredictable as the first( and who knows what daemon, what idee fixe was actuating him) in heading for the unknown- an expedition that would be taught to the children in time.
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
Circumcision Again
To look upon the act of circumcision as a pure existential act, without recourse to an unknown God element. The act of inflicting a disfiguring wound upon an infant would normally be considered a criminal and insane act. The child is an individual with legal rights, and has obviously no capacity of assenting to such an injury upon his being. Without the possibility of consent, a biologically useless, potentially dangerous, and disfiguring wound is being imposed upon him. It seems clear that on legal grounds this is a criminal action.
A more interesting avenue though is to admit of the God element in the examining of the issue. As stated in THE EXILE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR JEWISH MONOTHEISM*, by Iakov Levi, "The Jews, before the First Exile, were no less polytheist than the Canaanites they came to supplant. As is richly described in the Books of Judges and Kings, the worship of Baal, Astarte and Asherah was the rule and not the exception."
So the Jewish God was an individual spiritual entity in a spiritual universe of many other deities, and the Jewish people were this particular figure's chosen people, who in turn have a chosen land which is presumably of special interest to this deity for some reason. However powerful such an entity may be, he is certainly a parochial figure who has a particular limited area of especial interest to himself.
Now to posit that the act of circumcision does actually create the bond between the individual and God- as in this particular God. Why is this so?
It cannot be construed as the act being a spiritual rites of passage, as the child is wholly uninvolved as an active conscious agent in the disfiguring ritual. If a bond is indeed forged, it must be simply on the basis of the blood ritual itself. We all know of the ancient and not so ancient human sacrifice rituals which were seen as offerings to particular deities. Again assuming in the actual existence of these deities as real spiritual entities, it would seem that they are nourished by propitiatory offerings of human blood. Perhaps it is natural to assume such deities' necessary sustenance to their life-force is precisely such offerings. The act of circumcision it would seem natural to view in similar light of a blood offering.
However, if a Jewish person is not circumscribed as an infant and has not had this ritual upon his body carried out before his adult death, then he is said to have lost his connection to the divine entity. So it is seen as more than a momentary nourishing: a channel has been opened up to this deity through the action of the ritual. Once again assuming this is all true, is it reasonable to wonder whether it is genuinely in one's interests to open up a spiritual pathway of intimate connection to an entity that is nourished by human blood through genital disfigurement of human infants?
Another apt question might be if these children are the perfect creation of an assumed perfect creator, why would he want them painfully physically altered almost immeditately upon entry into human life? Is a human armed with a sharp blade expected to work an improvement upon the somewhat more skilled artisan of a divinely inspired nature?
A more interesting avenue though is to admit of the God element in the examining of the issue. As stated in THE EXILE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR JEWISH MONOTHEISM*, by Iakov Levi, "The Jews, before the First Exile, were no less polytheist than the Canaanites they came to supplant. As is richly described in the Books of Judges and Kings, the worship of Baal, Astarte and Asherah was the rule and not the exception."
So the Jewish God was an individual spiritual entity in a spiritual universe of many other deities, and the Jewish people were this particular figure's chosen people, who in turn have a chosen land which is presumably of special interest to this deity for some reason. However powerful such an entity may be, he is certainly a parochial figure who has a particular limited area of especial interest to himself.
Now to posit that the act of circumcision does actually create the bond between the individual and God- as in this particular God. Why is this so?
It cannot be construed as the act being a spiritual rites of passage, as the child is wholly uninvolved as an active conscious agent in the disfiguring ritual. If a bond is indeed forged, it must be simply on the basis of the blood ritual itself. We all know of the ancient and not so ancient human sacrifice rituals which were seen as offerings to particular deities. Again assuming in the actual existence of these deities as real spiritual entities, it would seem that they are nourished by propitiatory offerings of human blood. Perhaps it is natural to assume such deities' necessary sustenance to their life-force is precisely such offerings. The act of circumcision it would seem natural to view in similar light of a blood offering.
However, if a Jewish person is not circumscribed as an infant and has not had this ritual upon his body carried out before his adult death, then he is said to have lost his connection to the divine entity. So it is seen as more than a momentary nourishing: a channel has been opened up to this deity through the action of the ritual. Once again assuming this is all true, is it reasonable to wonder whether it is genuinely in one's interests to open up a spiritual pathway of intimate connection to an entity that is nourished by human blood through genital disfigurement of human infants?
Another apt question might be if these children are the perfect creation of an assumed perfect creator, why would he want them painfully physically altered almost immeditately upon entry into human life? Is a human armed with a sharp blade expected to work an improvement upon the somewhat more skilled artisan of a divinely inspired nature?
Tuesday, 8 January 2008
The Devil's Dilemna 2: The Great Gullibility Test
Here's an interesting scenario. An airliner is heading for a skyscraper under the command of crazy suicidal hijackers. It hits the building and a huge fireball instantly ensues. However, a break for the authorities: a hijacker's passport sails safely out of this instantaneous infernal chaos and falls to the ground below to be acquired by the FBI, which somehow puts them on the trail of the hijackers' identities.
A coward, as described in Devil's Dilemna Part 1, responded when told of this that this was fabrication by conspiracy theorists, and show the proof that the authorities are making such ridiculous claims as to a terrorist's passport falling to safety from the fireball. In response, he was directed to the official 911 Commission Report, and shown the lines therein:
Four of the hijackers’ passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered
from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a
hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an
NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth
passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to
Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American Airlines Flight 11.
Our poor coward was then shown this footage of the crash site of Flight 93 from where, as shown, the 911 Commission claims two more passports were recovered. As FOX reporters described "There's just a hole in the ground. There was nothing you could distinguish that a plane had crashed there." "All you could see was a large crater and just the tiniest, tiniest debris."
Our coward then responded by saying yes, this was all quite plausible, and no, there was no question that this all amounted to planted or fabricated evidence.
One might have thought that the authorities could have gone to somewhat greater depths to create a credible plotline for their version of events, but presumably knowing of the impenetrability of the intellectual defence mechanisms of so many of the cowards, they didn't feel it worth the effort.
It might be interesting to imagine a conversation.
"How are we gonna link to the supposed hijackers."
"Simple. We'll say we found a passport that fell out of one of the planes outside the World Trade Centers, that turns out to be that of a dangerous terrorist."
"Come again."
"We find a passport, and that gives us the lead."
"You can't be serious. They'll never buy that."
"They're fucking morons. They'll buy anything."
"Yeah but there's limits."
"There's no fucking limits. Just watch them swallow whatever shit we feed them."
A coward, as described in Devil's Dilemna Part 1, responded when told of this that this was fabrication by conspiracy theorists, and show the proof that the authorities are making such ridiculous claims as to a terrorist's passport falling to safety from the fireball. In response, he was directed to the official 911 Commission Report, and shown the lines therein:
Four of the hijackers’ passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered
from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a
hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an
NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth
passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to
Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American Airlines Flight 11.
Our poor coward was then shown this footage of the crash site of Flight 93 from where, as shown, the 911 Commission claims two more passports were recovered. As FOX reporters described "There's just a hole in the ground. There was nothing you could distinguish that a plane had crashed there." "All you could see was a large crater and just the tiniest, tiniest debris."
Our coward then responded by saying yes, this was all quite plausible, and no, there was no question that this all amounted to planted or fabricated evidence.
One might have thought that the authorities could have gone to somewhat greater depths to create a credible plotline for their version of events, but presumably knowing of the impenetrability of the intellectual defence mechanisms of so many of the cowards, they didn't feel it worth the effort.
It might be interesting to imagine a conversation.
"How are we gonna link to the supposed hijackers."
"Simple. We'll say we found a passport that fell out of one of the planes outside the World Trade Centers, that turns out to be that of a dangerous terrorist."
"Come again."
"We find a passport, and that gives us the lead."
"You can't be serious. They'll never buy that."
"They're fucking morons. They'll buy anything."
"Yeah but there's limits."
"There's no fucking limits. Just watch them swallow whatever shit we feed them."
Circumcision
The first obvious sign of being placed within the Jewish faith as a male infant is to have inflicted upon oneself an act of genital mutilation. Personally, were I in said situation and of sufficient intellectual development as to defend my person in word if not in deed, I think I would choose to have my body unmutilated and remain a spiritual free-agent, so to speak.
I would, it is claimed however, receive the punishment of Kareit, which means "excision", by which one loses one's spiritual connection with the divine source. The blood sacrifice creates a spiritual pathway to God.
Why would God require the sacrificial bond of infants' blood? Is this how he recognises his chosen people? Like a cattle brand. Also trying to place myself in the position of the perpetrator of the act: inflicting quite a grievous and bloody injury upon an eight day old infant seems an action I might consider on the barbaric side of things.
I would, it is claimed however, receive the punishment of Kareit, which means "excision", by which one loses one's spiritual connection with the divine source. The blood sacrifice creates a spiritual pathway to God.
Why would God require the sacrificial bond of infants' blood? Is this how he recognises his chosen people? Like a cattle brand. Also trying to place myself in the position of the perpetrator of the act: inflicting quite a grievous and bloody injury upon an eight day old infant seems an action I might consider on the barbaric side of things.
Ascribing Greatness
When people extol the genius or greatness of another, it is often merely a form of vanity. The great is simply seen as an eloquent espouser of what the person feels to be his own opinions, and so his own greatness is reflected in the ascribed greatness of the other.
Knowing One's Limits
One comes across writers that are possessed of an intellect that is fine at its proper level, but deluded by the apparent success of their minds when within their limits, they attempt to philosophise beyond their capacity. The larger the attempted scope, the more embarrassing the results; a bit like a reasonable miniature work of art blown up to epic proportions where its inherent flaws become magnified to monstrous and farcical levels. Or perhaps a party balloon persuading itself it is of the full blown hot-air variety.
Monday, 7 January 2008
The Devil's Dilemna
A certain kind of person asks himself are other kinds of people people disingenuous, stupid or cowards. In attempting to explain the nature of their existential inner reality and avoid the apparently more damning negatives of cowardice and stupidity, he might begin a little idealistically with disingenuousness but in the light of direct experience he must soon give up on this and admit to a combination of stupidity and cowardice as the psychological basis or ambient background to such people's thought and worldview. He is probably eventually led to believe that stupidity and disingenuousness are the defence mechanisms of cowardice. But he then might ponder whether it is cowardice and disingenuousness that guard the citadel of a conscious stupidity, or intentional ignorance; cowardice and disingenuousness being the instruments of an inviolate Will to Ignorance. But then he realises that conscious stupidity is disingenuousness raised to a kind of absolute power, which in turn is probably cowardice after all.
He might even recall Dostoevsky's words:
Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. I am deeply convinced of it. He's made that way and arranged for it. And not in the present time owing to some chance circumstances, but generally in all times a decent man must be a coward and a slave. That is the natural law of all decent people on earth. If one of them does happen to get a bit of pluck in something, let him not be eased or pleased with that: he's still quail before something else.
Notes from Underground.
And with that in mind, John Pilger's article on what he calls the murdochracy of modern Britain.
He might even recall Dostoevsky's words:
Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. I am deeply convinced of it. He's made that way and arranged for it. And not in the present time owing to some chance circumstances, but generally in all times a decent man must be a coward and a slave. That is the natural law of all decent people on earth. If one of them does happen to get a bit of pluck in something, let him not be eased or pleased with that: he's still quail before something else.
Notes from Underground.
And with that in mind, John Pilger's article on what he calls the murdochracy of modern Britain.
Sunday, 6 January 2008
Time-Travel
Televisions and the like are time-travel machines. They record a stretch of time in terms of its visual and audio information and this can be played over within another later time. Perhaps our reality is a more complex recording of an earlier time being played back within a later video machine device.
A Once Upon a Time Tale
There was a planet which through a combination of astonishing astronomical circumstances experienced a total eclipse lasting for several days. As a consequence every living thing eventually happened to be asleep at the same time, and from this sleep noone was ever to awaken. Reality needed to exist in the mind of someone and when the last exhausted mind disappeared into the calming oblivion of sleep, reality disappeared with him. There being no reality into which anyone could awaken, noone could awake.
I suppose I could have an alien visitation to the planet and with reality having a mind within which it could exist, everyone awakens- a variation on the Sleeping Beauty tale. Or ponder a collective dreamworld evolving in the minds of the sleeping populations. And perhaps within that dreamworld the given scenario could occur.
I could also hint at the scenario being an analogy to the vision of Huxley's Brave New World parable-prophecy.
I suppose I could have an alien visitation to the planet and with reality having a mind within which it could exist, everyone awakens- a variation on the Sleeping Beauty tale. Or ponder a collective dreamworld evolving in the minds of the sleeping populations. And perhaps within that dreamworld the given scenario could occur.
I could also hint at the scenario being an analogy to the vision of Huxley's Brave New World parable-prophecy.
Thursday, 3 January 2008
More on Imperialism and Culture
The natural conclusion regarding the ruling idea of the British Empire, and any empire is a supremacist racial or nationalist sense in the host country, which axiomatically justifies one's political expansionism. That this bigotry was the very mental atmosphere that ordinary citizens breathed was exemplified in Charles Dickens' reaction to the Indian Mutiny, where he wrote he would “do my utmost to exterminate the [Indian] Race” and “with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution…blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.”
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (1991: Mineva), p. 844
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a period of armed uprising against the expansion of the British East India Company control in India between early 1857 and mid 1858.
That the East India Company was the main beneficiary of the subjugation of the east is obvious, though imperialism is always masked with claims of loving cultural benevolence. As Aldous Huxley wrote "Idealsim is the noble toga political gentlemen drape over their will to power" and so foreign aggression becomes educating the natives, spreading democracy and the like.
In 1854, three years before the rebellion, Sir Arthur Cotton writing in "Public Works in India" noted: "Public works have been almost entirely neglected throughout India... The motto hitherto has been: 'Do nothing, have nothing done, let nobody do anything....." Adding that the Company was unconcerned if people died of famine, or if they lacked roads and water.
John Bright in the House of Commons on June 24, 1858, said "The single city of Manchester, in the supply of its inhabitants with the single article of water, has spent a larger sum of money than the East India Company has spent in the fourteen years from 1834 to 1848 in public works of every kind throughout the whole of its vast dominions."
W. Digby, noted in "Prosperous British India" in 1901 that "stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread." In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17 in the 2000 years before British rule; this naturally coinciding with the massive exportation of foods that would have fed the native populations. The same occured as in Ireland where even during famine years British colonial rulers continued to export foodgrains to Britain ensuring genocidal results. One third of the Bengal population was lost through famine and the Irish population halved in 50 years, during which time the English population nearly doubled. A 1927-28 report noted that "all but the most highly skilled workmen in India receive wages which are barely sufficient to feed and clothe them. Everywhere will be seen overcrowding, dirt and squalid misery..." and the Whitley Report found children as young as five - working a 12 hour day.
Roger Scruton writes in his apparently unironically titled The Glory of the West is that life is an open book, "Unlike Islamic culture, western culture has gone out to the stranger, has tried to understand, to sympathise, to learn, in every arena where learning is available." This champion of Empire amongst the wealth of information with which to provide a reasonably accurate depiction of attitude to the colonised peoples and cultures, chooses to highlight "at the moment in the 18th century when ’Abd al-Wahhab was founding his particularly obnoxious form of Islam in the Arabian peninsula, burning books and beheading “heretics”, Sir William Jones was collecting and translating all that he could find of Persian and Arabic poetry and preparing to sail to Calcutta, where he was to serve as a judge and to pioneer the study of Indian languages and culture." And this is apparently sufficient to Scruton to have proven the case of the defence or prosecution as the case may be.
Strangely, this completely at odds with the Irish experience where to mention but one aspect of this sympathising understanding attitude, the language was killed off in an obvious process of cultural sabotage, and under things like The Penal Laws the people forbidden to practice their religion or receive education. Was India's cultural heritage, however, appreciated and fostered?
The architect of Colonial Britain's Educational Policy in India, Thomas Macaulay, wrote that he had "never found one among them (speaking of Orientalists, an opposing political faction) who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". "It is no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England".
Strangely at odds with Scruton's summation of reaching out, understanding, etc.
Part of a successful colonization process is the colonization of the natives' minds, thus the killing off of the Irish language. The masses are kept or made uneducated and illiterate, but there is more to a successful colonisation of the subjugated mind than that. From History of British Rule and Colonization in India:
In India, Britain needed a class of intellectuals meek and docile in their attitude towards the British, but full of hatred towards their fellow citizens. It was thus important to emphasize the negative aspects of the Indian tradition, and obliterate or obscure the positive. Indians were to be taught that they were a deeply conservative and fatalist people - genetically predisposed to irrational superstitions and mystic belief systems. That they had no concept of nation, national feelings or a history. If they had any culture, it had been brought to them by invaders - that they themselves lacked the creative energy to achieve anything by themselves. But the British, on the other hand epitomized modernity - they were the harbingers of all that was rational and scientific in the world. With their unique organizational skills and energetic zeal, they would raise India from the morass of casteism and religious bigotry. These and other such ideas were repeatedly filled in the minds of the young Indians who received instruction in the British schools.
In 1835, Macaulay wrote "We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect."
J.N Farquhar (a contemporary of Macaulay) was to write: "The new educational policy of the Government created during these years the modern educated class of India. These are men who think and speak in English habitually, who are proud of their citizenship in the British Empire, who are devoted to English literature, and whose intellectual life has been almost entirely formed by the thought of the West, large numbers of them enter government services, while the rest practice law, medicine or teaching, or take to journalism or business."
Charles Trevelyan in his testimony before the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Government of Indian Territories on 23rd June, 1853: "..... the effect of training in European learning is to give an entirely new turn to the native mind. The young men educated in this way cease to strive after independence...They cease to regard us as enemies and usurpers, and they look upon us as friends and patrons, and powerful beneficent persons, under whose protection the regeneration of their country will gradually be worked out..."
An aberration in the 'correct' indoctrination of the subjugated mind explains the annoyance of Roger Scruton where he counters Edward Said's Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. "Yet Said was born of Christian parents in Jerusalem before the war; he was educated in English-language private schools in Egypt and America and at Harvard University; he was brought up to love western music, western literature and western art. He was a cosmopolitan in the mould of Conrad, Turgenev and Lawrence Durrell, and his attack on the culture that formed him was an act of repudiation towards a legacy that he nevertheless gladly inherited and manifestly enjoyed."
It is incomprehensible to Scruton that such an ungrateful beneficiary of western imperialism and its culture could exist, and he wholly fails to mention anything of the cultural erasure which occured to the orient as a matter of policy. And that one of their number should bite the hand that fed... Scruton writes with belittling sense of those to whom might appeal Said's anti-imperialsist sentiments: "intellectuals in those incendiary areas like the Middle East where grievances against the “West” gain an easy hearing." The tone being that any such sense of grievance is a further manifestation of these people's ill-bred and lowly nature, rather than the natural reaction they might feel for the rape of their countries economically, and the parallel process of cultural disinheritance. This echoing Disraeli's "The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion...etc." Ingratitude towards one's cultural or racial betters further proof of one's inferiority.
Below again from British Education in India:
Similarly, Charles Grant, who exercised tremendous influence in colonial evangelical circles, published his "Observations" in 1797 in which he attacked almost every aspect of Indian society and religion, describing Indians as morally depraved, "lacking in truth, honesty and good faith". British Governor General Cornwallis asserted "Every native of Hindostan, I verily believe, is corrupt".
As a result of the cultural assault on the Indian consciousness, British-educated Indians grew up learning about Pythagoras, Archimedes, Galileo and Newton without ever learning about Panini, Aryabhatta, Bhaskar or Bhaskaracharya. The logic and epistemology of the Nyaya Sutras, the rationality of the early Buddhists or the intriguing philosophical systems of the Jains were generally unknown to the them. Schooled in the aesthetic and literary theories of the West, many felt embarrassed in acknowledging Indian contributions in the arts and literature. What was important to Western civilization was deemed universal, but everything Indian was dismissed as either backward and anachronistic, or at best tolerated as idiosyncratic oddity."
Elaborating on the phenomenon of cultural colonization, Priya Joshi (Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India) writes: "Often, the implementation of a new education system leaves those who are colonized with a lack of identity and a limited sense of their past. The indigenous history and customs once practiced and observed slowly slip away. The colonized become hybrids of two vastly different cultural systems. Colonial education creates a blurring that makes it difficult to differentiate between the new, enforced ideas of the colonizers and the formerly accepted native practices."
It is easy to see champions of the British Empire transmuting their loyalty to what is a veritable extension of said Empire, ie the current American Empire, which tends to be arm in arm with the British. What was all that fuss about the Americans gaining freedom in the War of Independence from Britain again? The two political regimes still share the most incestuous of relationships. There are endless examples of this transmutation of loyalty and faith in the modern day from Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen to Scruton and a continuous army of others; this being inevitable due to the admittedly diluted but onflowing strains of the supremacist strains of the earlier intellectual atmosphere shown by the likes of Dickens and Charles "White Chimpanzees" Kingsley. To pick one rather harmless but obvious portrayal of this transmutation- from Bryan Appleyard's short piece New Jersey's Death Penalty:
I have always been intuitively against the death penalty. But, I reasoned, this was little more than a visceral reaction and the Americans in particular have their reasons and their traditions.
The Americans in particular have their reasons and traditions. Why is it that this particular body of humans are intrinsically more justified? Why else but they are of a superior strain, however fuzzy such logic might be.
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (1991: Mineva), p. 844
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a period of armed uprising against the expansion of the British East India Company control in India between early 1857 and mid 1858.
That the East India Company was the main beneficiary of the subjugation of the east is obvious, though imperialism is always masked with claims of loving cultural benevolence. As Aldous Huxley wrote "Idealsim is the noble toga political gentlemen drape over their will to power" and so foreign aggression becomes educating the natives, spreading democracy and the like.
In 1854, three years before the rebellion, Sir Arthur Cotton writing in "Public Works in India" noted: "Public works have been almost entirely neglected throughout India... The motto hitherto has been: 'Do nothing, have nothing done, let nobody do anything....." Adding that the Company was unconcerned if people died of famine, or if they lacked roads and water.
John Bright in the House of Commons on June 24, 1858, said "The single city of Manchester, in the supply of its inhabitants with the single article of water, has spent a larger sum of money than the East India Company has spent in the fourteen years from 1834 to 1848 in public works of every kind throughout the whole of its vast dominions."
W. Digby, noted in "Prosperous British India" in 1901 that "stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread." In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17 in the 2000 years before British rule; this naturally coinciding with the massive exportation of foods that would have fed the native populations. The same occured as in Ireland where even during famine years British colonial rulers continued to export foodgrains to Britain ensuring genocidal results. One third of the Bengal population was lost through famine and the Irish population halved in 50 years, during which time the English population nearly doubled. A 1927-28 report noted that "all but the most highly skilled workmen in India receive wages which are barely sufficient to feed and clothe them. Everywhere will be seen overcrowding, dirt and squalid misery..." and the Whitley Report found children as young as five - working a 12 hour day.
Roger Scruton writes in his apparently unironically titled The Glory of the West is that life is an open book, "Unlike Islamic culture, western culture has gone out to the stranger, has tried to understand, to sympathise, to learn, in every arena where learning is available." This champion of Empire amongst the wealth of information with which to provide a reasonably accurate depiction of attitude to the colonised peoples and cultures, chooses to highlight "at the moment in the 18th century when ’Abd al-Wahhab was founding his particularly obnoxious form of Islam in the Arabian peninsula, burning books and beheading “heretics”, Sir William Jones was collecting and translating all that he could find of Persian and Arabic poetry and preparing to sail to Calcutta, where he was to serve as a judge and to pioneer the study of Indian languages and culture." And this is apparently sufficient to Scruton to have proven the case of the defence or prosecution as the case may be.
Strangely, this completely at odds with the Irish experience where to mention but one aspect of this sympathising understanding attitude, the language was killed off in an obvious process of cultural sabotage, and under things like The Penal Laws the people forbidden to practice their religion or receive education. Was India's cultural heritage, however, appreciated and fostered?
The architect of Colonial Britain's Educational Policy in India, Thomas Macaulay, wrote that he had "never found one among them (speaking of Orientalists, an opposing political faction) who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". "It is no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England".
Strangely at odds with Scruton's summation of reaching out, understanding, etc.
Part of a successful colonization process is the colonization of the natives' minds, thus the killing off of the Irish language. The masses are kept or made uneducated and illiterate, but there is more to a successful colonisation of the subjugated mind than that. From History of British Rule and Colonization in India:
In India, Britain needed a class of intellectuals meek and docile in their attitude towards the British, but full of hatred towards their fellow citizens. It was thus important to emphasize the negative aspects of the Indian tradition, and obliterate or obscure the positive. Indians were to be taught that they were a deeply conservative and fatalist people - genetically predisposed to irrational superstitions and mystic belief systems. That they had no concept of nation, national feelings or a history. If they had any culture, it had been brought to them by invaders - that they themselves lacked the creative energy to achieve anything by themselves. But the British, on the other hand epitomized modernity - they were the harbingers of all that was rational and scientific in the world. With their unique organizational skills and energetic zeal, they would raise India from the morass of casteism and religious bigotry. These and other such ideas were repeatedly filled in the minds of the young Indians who received instruction in the British schools.
In 1835, Macaulay wrote "We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect."
J.N Farquhar (a contemporary of Macaulay) was to write: "The new educational policy of the Government created during these years the modern educated class of India. These are men who think and speak in English habitually, who are proud of their citizenship in the British Empire, who are devoted to English literature, and whose intellectual life has been almost entirely formed by the thought of the West, large numbers of them enter government services, while the rest practice law, medicine or teaching, or take to journalism or business."
Charles Trevelyan in his testimony before the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Government of Indian Territories on 23rd June, 1853: "..... the effect of training in European learning is to give an entirely new turn to the native mind. The young men educated in this way cease to strive after independence...They cease to regard us as enemies and usurpers, and they look upon us as friends and patrons, and powerful beneficent persons, under whose protection the regeneration of their country will gradually be worked out..."
An aberration in the 'correct' indoctrination of the subjugated mind explains the annoyance of Roger Scruton where he counters Edward Said's Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. "Yet Said was born of Christian parents in Jerusalem before the war; he was educated in English-language private schools in Egypt and America and at Harvard University; he was brought up to love western music, western literature and western art. He was a cosmopolitan in the mould of Conrad, Turgenev and Lawrence Durrell, and his attack on the culture that formed him was an act of repudiation towards a legacy that he nevertheless gladly inherited and manifestly enjoyed."
It is incomprehensible to Scruton that such an ungrateful beneficiary of western imperialism and its culture could exist, and he wholly fails to mention anything of the cultural erasure which occured to the orient as a matter of policy. And that one of their number should bite the hand that fed... Scruton writes with belittling sense of those to whom might appeal Said's anti-imperialsist sentiments: "intellectuals in those incendiary areas like the Middle East where grievances against the “West” gain an easy hearing." The tone being that any such sense of grievance is a further manifestation of these people's ill-bred and lowly nature, rather than the natural reaction they might feel for the rape of their countries economically, and the parallel process of cultural disinheritance. This echoing Disraeli's "The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion...etc." Ingratitude towards one's cultural or racial betters further proof of one's inferiority.
Below again from British Education in India:
Similarly, Charles Grant, who exercised tremendous influence in colonial evangelical circles, published his "Observations" in 1797 in which he attacked almost every aspect of Indian society and religion, describing Indians as morally depraved, "lacking in truth, honesty and good faith". British Governor General Cornwallis asserted "Every native of Hindostan, I verily believe, is corrupt".
As a result of the cultural assault on the Indian consciousness, British-educated Indians grew up learning about Pythagoras, Archimedes, Galileo and Newton without ever learning about Panini, Aryabhatta, Bhaskar or Bhaskaracharya. The logic and epistemology of the Nyaya Sutras, the rationality of the early Buddhists or the intriguing philosophical systems of the Jains were generally unknown to the them. Schooled in the aesthetic and literary theories of the West, many felt embarrassed in acknowledging Indian contributions in the arts and literature. What was important to Western civilization was deemed universal, but everything Indian was dismissed as either backward and anachronistic, or at best tolerated as idiosyncratic oddity."
Elaborating on the phenomenon of cultural colonization, Priya Joshi (Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India) writes: "Often, the implementation of a new education system leaves those who are colonized with a lack of identity and a limited sense of their past. The indigenous history and customs once practiced and observed slowly slip away. The colonized become hybrids of two vastly different cultural systems. Colonial education creates a blurring that makes it difficult to differentiate between the new, enforced ideas of the colonizers and the formerly accepted native practices."
It is easy to see champions of the British Empire transmuting their loyalty to what is a veritable extension of said Empire, ie the current American Empire, which tends to be arm in arm with the British. What was all that fuss about the Americans gaining freedom in the War of Independence from Britain again? The two political regimes still share the most incestuous of relationships. There are endless examples of this transmutation of loyalty and faith in the modern day from Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen to Scruton and a continuous army of others; this being inevitable due to the admittedly diluted but onflowing strains of the supremacist strains of the earlier intellectual atmosphere shown by the likes of Dickens and Charles "White Chimpanzees" Kingsley. To pick one rather harmless but obvious portrayal of this transmutation- from Bryan Appleyard's short piece New Jersey's Death Penalty:
I have always been intuitively against the death penalty. But, I reasoned, this was little more than a visceral reaction and the Americans in particular have their reasons and their traditions.
The Americans in particular have their reasons and traditions. Why is it that this particular body of humans are intrinsically more justified? Why else but they are of a superior strain, however fuzzy such logic might be.
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
Justified and Ancient
Robbing a KLF title to excuse a lazy post which is simply a re-posting of an ancient post from the fondly remembered nascent period of this blog so as to form a new post comprised of said post with these few words placed on top.
The Thing in Itself in the Light of a Mirror
Everybody talks about the objective fact or thing in itself all the time; the thing that exists distinctly from and independent of perception. In response, I would like to consider two people looking at a mirror in which each sees the other's reflection. Both looking at the same object which reflects two entirely separate visual realities simultaneously. We could add two more people gazing at the mirror and we have two more entirely separate visual realities in the one object. Or an infinite number of possible points of perspective, each resulting in a distinct visual reality in the entity of the mirror.
So which is the mirror in itself? Are there an infinite number of mirrors and separate realities existing simultaneously or is there one mirror which is a "thing in itself"? If we are to believe in the thing in itself as an objective reality then we seem to be forced to separate this thing's existence from the visual field, and likewise we would seem to have to separate our perception from any contact with reality. Reality retreating from all known experience of it into some kind of idealised realm beyond our perception.
Which would seem to be forming a philosophy to justify a pre-conception, ie that external reality is an objective fact. This possibly explains the desire behind Plato's bizarre world of ideal forms; an escape route from undesired and unsettling implications arising from perception.
The Thing in Itself in the Light of a Mirror
Everybody talks about the objective fact or thing in itself all the time; the thing that exists distinctly from and independent of perception. In response, I would like to consider two people looking at a mirror in which each sees the other's reflection. Both looking at the same object which reflects two entirely separate visual realities simultaneously. We could add two more people gazing at the mirror and we have two more entirely separate visual realities in the one object. Or an infinite number of possible points of perspective, each resulting in a distinct visual reality in the entity of the mirror.
So which is the mirror in itself? Are there an infinite number of mirrors and separate realities existing simultaneously or is there one mirror which is a "thing in itself"? If we are to believe in the thing in itself as an objective reality then we seem to be forced to separate this thing's existence from the visual field, and likewise we would seem to have to separate our perception from any contact with reality. Reality retreating from all known experience of it into some kind of idealised realm beyond our perception.
Which would seem to be forming a philosophy to justify a pre-conception, ie that external reality is an objective fact. This possibly explains the desire behind Plato's bizarre world of ideal forms; an escape route from undesired and unsettling implications arising from perception.
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