Monday, February 21, 2005
The Longest Post Yet...
If we humans could just think long enough and hard enough, we could fix not only our problems but the world’s problems. That is much of the story of us, a story that has been most conspicuously written over the last 300 years. But this idea of thinking—“rationalism”—has only led us down the path of irrationalism and non-thinking. So says Bruce Thornton, a classics professor at Cal State Fresno, in his book Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge.
This idea of self-destructive rationalism is misleadingly narrow at first. But it has slowly infected nearly every facet of our lives, ultimately aiding the present postmodernist intellectual chaos—what is up is down; what is down is up. Here’s a wonderful description of postmodernism:
---“Early 20th-century Modernism—painting that does not reflect what the eye sees; poetry that has neither rhyme nor meter; novels whose characters speak and act like real people or perhaps far worse than real people; rebellion against traditional social protocols—was a rejection of classical ideas of culture, literature, and art. Yet modernists were rebels against a system, and often had once mastered what they later rejected—so a T.S. Eliot or a Salvador Dali really understood meter or perspective.
“But contemporary postmodernism…rejects the rejection, claiming that there is no objective standard to judge anything inasmuch as power alone adjudicates arbitrary notions of artistic, literary, or cultural ‘excellence.’ Thus the postmodernist is really a nihilist: all cultures are relative; it is impossible to have objective criteria to say that this is ‘bad’ or that is ‘good.’ Literature has no aesthetic or transcendent power, but is a mere narrative that can be deconstructed to determine how issues of race, class, and gender are manipulated to privilege particular positions (usually associated with white capitalist males). ‘Theory’ is the Holy Grail: since there are no such things as ‘facts’ that can lead to a disinterested investigation, analysis, and conclusion, one instead offers ‘truth’ based on a priori recognition of the role of power and its insidious machinations.”
Victor Hanson, classicist and Hoover Institution fellow---
This sort of thinking is the direct corollary to our modern fetish with rationalization. (You might have heard the famous line from the movie The Big Chill: “Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”) We have, in effect, out-thought ourselves into nothingness. Quite the opposite of Descartes, who though himself into existence—“Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).” But what are the more tangible effects of this disease?
Thornton argues that the result is a culture of therapy, not tragedy; emptiness and selfishness, not fullness, and charity; and perhaps worst of all, misunderstanding, rather than understanding.
The story of the human experience is tragedy. Whether it is MacBeth, Oedipus Rex, The Sound and the Fury etc. etc. etc., it is the story of a tragedy. Thornton quotes from the Iliad where Apollo sums up the human existence: “…[Y]ou would not consider me sensible , if I should fight with you because of wretched mortals, who like the leaves now flourish full of fire, eating the fruit of the earth, and now wither and perish.”
The Greek poet Aeschylus gave us the only way for humans to seek comfort in their tragic existence—God. “Even in our sleep,” he wrote, “pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” (Robert Kennedy spoke these words immediately after the death of Martin Luther King Jr.)
Yet, rationalism rejects God simply because his existence cannot be quantified on a spreadsheet. And with God out of the picture, who is the next smartest entity on Earth? Us. We have replace God with ourselves and the result has been a whole slew of things: the murderer is no longer responsible his actions because of the people in his life, his childhood. The proliferation of the self-help book is another.
Thornton juxtaposes Joyce Brothers’s declaration, “Love, power, riches, a good marriage, exciting sex, fulfillment are not impossible dreams. They can be yours if you want them.” With the Greek playwright Euripedes’s “To suffer is necessity for mortals.”
In this world, writes Daniel Boorstin, “We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxury cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable; powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thing, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a ‘church of our choice’ and yet fell its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God.”
Our insistence of self-help and rationalization has led us to be nothing more than selfish narcissists. Our problems, however individual and unique, must be everyone’s problems. The ignorant preoccupation with AIDS in the third world is a prime example. AIDS is not the number one killer of people living in the third world, although that may come as a surprise. Malnutrition, starvation, and malaria are bigger problems. So why the preoccupation? Simply because in the West (the people with money and worldly power) AIDS became a chic fashionable disease.
It was the disease of the artists, the poets, the playwrights. Gay males, who represent no more than 4% of America’s population, became the poster children for the disease. So hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into science to study and eradicate what is a terrible illness. But what does that say of our culture?
One of the biggest diseases of our time was a disease that 99% of the people contracted by choice—risky sex or drug use. AIDS is our problem, so it must be everyone else’s problem. Wrong. The narcissism and arrogance of the Western elites made AIDS the issue of the third world, in particular Africa. And while millions in Africa die each year of lack of food, water, and malaria eradication techniques that saved Western countries, billions of dollars go to AIDS research and therapy for Africans.
Finally, our preoccupation with rationalizations has led to more misunderstanding, rather than knowledge. Quoting from Freud, Thornton makes the case against Western humanity’s ignorant distaste for civilization: “This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.”
We have become worshipers of nature; the environmentalist movement is merely a symptom of this larger disease. Western culture tends to have a fascination with the pureness of nature. We go camping; we enjoy the national parks. But how many of us have ever chosen to go live there? Physically living off of the land? There is a notion that in nature is all truth, and if we go visit it and cherish it enough, it will enlighten our ignorant selves.
The real truth, however, is much different. Nature is a completely indifferent place. It exists but that is all. It is neither cruel, nor loving. Those are abstract notions that humans put on it. Nature does not know what it is, because it cannot think or reason. It just is.
We have anthropomorphized nature. Countless Disney movies and an irrational environmentalist movement has persuaded far too many people that nature is the very thing that is not. Nature is simply indifferent, much like the indifference in our interactions with computers. Computers don’t “know” anything. They merely respond to input. They cannot care; they cannot love; they cannot be just precisely because they have no concept of it. Nature is the same way.
How then, is it a place to learn any transcendent knowledge? If you think that by camping, for instance, you are experiencing nature in any real sense, you are mistaken. Your car, the food you brought, the clothes you wear, your phone, the road to your campsite all say otherwise. You are able to “experience” nature only through the umbilical cord of civilization.
You are removed from civilization only in the most direct and literal sense. Yes, you are not in the city; but neither are you subjugated to indifference of nature. IF you seek any transcendental understanding of your world from nature, then it is only through the discussion you have about it with other people. That intellectual interaction is where you will truly learn. Unless you are willing to return, as Freud suggested, to the primitive ideal of living naked off the land, then you are only fooling yourself if you hold that you are connected to nature in any real way. “Forgive me, my dear friend,” wrote Plato, “You see I am fond of learning. Now the country places and the trees won’t teach me anything, and the people in the city do.”
So there’s a summary of the basic ideas of the book and my response to them. I think our culture is at a low-point right now. But its nothing insurmountable. Plagues, whether of the body or mind, must take their course, and then are gone.
[Note: Unless specifically quoted otherwise, this post is based on my ideas and understandings of Thornton’s book. I don’t want any charges of plagiarism.]
If we humans could just think long enough and hard enough, we could fix not only our problems but the world’s problems. That is much of the story of us, a story that has been most conspicuously written over the last 300 years. But this idea of thinking—“rationalism”—has only led us down the path of irrationalism and non-thinking. So says Bruce Thornton, a classics professor at Cal State Fresno, in his book Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge.
This idea of self-destructive rationalism is misleadingly narrow at first. But it has slowly infected nearly every facet of our lives, ultimately aiding the present postmodernist intellectual chaos—what is up is down; what is down is up. Here’s a wonderful description of postmodernism:
---“Early 20th-century Modernism—painting that does not reflect what the eye sees; poetry that has neither rhyme nor meter; novels whose characters speak and act like real people or perhaps far worse than real people; rebellion against traditional social protocols—was a rejection of classical ideas of culture, literature, and art. Yet modernists were rebels against a system, and often had once mastered what they later rejected—so a T.S. Eliot or a Salvador Dali really understood meter or perspective.
“But contemporary postmodernism…rejects the rejection, claiming that there is no objective standard to judge anything inasmuch as power alone adjudicates arbitrary notions of artistic, literary, or cultural ‘excellence.’ Thus the postmodernist is really a nihilist: all cultures are relative; it is impossible to have objective criteria to say that this is ‘bad’ or that is ‘good.’ Literature has no aesthetic or transcendent power, but is a mere narrative that can be deconstructed to determine how issues of race, class, and gender are manipulated to privilege particular positions (usually associated with white capitalist males). ‘Theory’ is the Holy Grail: since there are no such things as ‘facts’ that can lead to a disinterested investigation, analysis, and conclusion, one instead offers ‘truth’ based on a priori recognition of the role of power and its insidious machinations.”
Victor Hanson, classicist and Hoover Institution fellow---
This sort of thinking is the direct corollary to our modern fetish with rationalization. (You might have heard the famous line from the movie The Big Chill: “Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”) We have, in effect, out-thought ourselves into nothingness. Quite the opposite of Descartes, who though himself into existence—“Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).” But what are the more tangible effects of this disease?
Thornton argues that the result is a culture of therapy, not tragedy; emptiness and selfishness, not fullness, and charity; and perhaps worst of all, misunderstanding, rather than understanding.
The story of the human experience is tragedy. Whether it is MacBeth, Oedipus Rex, The Sound and the Fury etc. etc. etc., it is the story of a tragedy. Thornton quotes from the Iliad where Apollo sums up the human existence: “…[Y]ou would not consider me sensible , if I should fight with you because of wretched mortals, who like the leaves now flourish full of fire, eating the fruit of the earth, and now wither and perish.”
The Greek poet Aeschylus gave us the only way for humans to seek comfort in their tragic existence—God. “Even in our sleep,” he wrote, “pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” (Robert Kennedy spoke these words immediately after the death of Martin Luther King Jr.)
Yet, rationalism rejects God simply because his existence cannot be quantified on a spreadsheet. And with God out of the picture, who is the next smartest entity on Earth? Us. We have replace God with ourselves and the result has been a whole slew of things: the murderer is no longer responsible his actions because of the people in his life, his childhood. The proliferation of the self-help book is another.
Thornton juxtaposes Joyce Brothers’s declaration, “Love, power, riches, a good marriage, exciting sex, fulfillment are not impossible dreams. They can be yours if you want them.” With the Greek playwright Euripedes’s “To suffer is necessity for mortals.”
In this world, writes Daniel Boorstin, “We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxury cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable; powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thing, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a ‘church of our choice’ and yet fell its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God.”
Our insistence of self-help and rationalization has led us to be nothing more than selfish narcissists. Our problems, however individual and unique, must be everyone’s problems. The ignorant preoccupation with AIDS in the third world is a prime example. AIDS is not the number one killer of people living in the third world, although that may come as a surprise. Malnutrition, starvation, and malaria are bigger problems. So why the preoccupation? Simply because in the West (the people with money and worldly power) AIDS became a chic fashionable disease.
It was the disease of the artists, the poets, the playwrights. Gay males, who represent no more than 4% of America’s population, became the poster children for the disease. So hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into science to study and eradicate what is a terrible illness. But what does that say of our culture?
One of the biggest diseases of our time was a disease that 99% of the people contracted by choice—risky sex or drug use. AIDS is our problem, so it must be everyone else’s problem. Wrong. The narcissism and arrogance of the Western elites made AIDS the issue of the third world, in particular Africa. And while millions in Africa die each year of lack of food, water, and malaria eradication techniques that saved Western countries, billions of dollars go to AIDS research and therapy for Africans.
Finally, our preoccupation with rationalizations has led to more misunderstanding, rather than knowledge. Quoting from Freud, Thornton makes the case against Western humanity’s ignorant distaste for civilization: “This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.”
We have become worshipers of nature; the environmentalist movement is merely a symptom of this larger disease. Western culture tends to have a fascination with the pureness of nature. We go camping; we enjoy the national parks. But how many of us have ever chosen to go live there? Physically living off of the land? There is a notion that in nature is all truth, and if we go visit it and cherish it enough, it will enlighten our ignorant selves.
The real truth, however, is much different. Nature is a completely indifferent place. It exists but that is all. It is neither cruel, nor loving. Those are abstract notions that humans put on it. Nature does not know what it is, because it cannot think or reason. It just is.
We have anthropomorphized nature. Countless Disney movies and an irrational environmentalist movement has persuaded far too many people that nature is the very thing that is not. Nature is simply indifferent, much like the indifference in our interactions with computers. Computers don’t “know” anything. They merely respond to input. They cannot care; they cannot love; they cannot be just precisely because they have no concept of it. Nature is the same way.
How then, is it a place to learn any transcendent knowledge? If you think that by camping, for instance, you are experiencing nature in any real sense, you are mistaken. Your car, the food you brought, the clothes you wear, your phone, the road to your campsite all say otherwise. You are able to “experience” nature only through the umbilical cord of civilization.
You are removed from civilization only in the most direct and literal sense. Yes, you are not in the city; but neither are you subjugated to indifference of nature. IF you seek any transcendental understanding of your world from nature, then it is only through the discussion you have about it with other people. That intellectual interaction is where you will truly learn. Unless you are willing to return, as Freud suggested, to the primitive ideal of living naked off the land, then you are only fooling yourself if you hold that you are connected to nature in any real way. “Forgive me, my dear friend,” wrote Plato, “You see I am fond of learning. Now the country places and the trees won’t teach me anything, and the people in the city do.”
So there’s a summary of the basic ideas of the book and my response to them. I think our culture is at a low-point right now. But its nothing insurmountable. Plagues, whether of the body or mind, must take their course, and then are gone.
[Note: Unless specifically quoted otherwise, this post is based on my ideas and understandings of Thornton’s book. I don’t want any charges of plagiarism.]
