August 2011

Be There Now

By in alan watts, unintended consequences No Comments

We Americans take fierce pride in our individualism, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at our subdivisions and shopping malls. From Boston to Burbank, we buy the same nationally advertised products at the same chain stores and restaurants, happily embracing conformity as we proudly proclaim our uniqueness.
Why does our self-image fail to reflect reality? Researchers led by University of Virginia psychologists Shigehiro Oishi and Felicity Miao offer an intriguing answer. They argue our willingness to move far from home leads us to crave the comfort of sameness in our immediate surroundings.
Or, as Alan Watts grumpily observed:
We want to abolish the limits of time and space. We want to get rid of space. We call it the conquest of space. We want to be able to get from San Francisco to New York in nothing flat. And we are arranging to do just that. We do not realize what the result of doing that will be: San Francisco and New York will become the same place, and then it will not be worth going from one to another.
When you want to go on vacation, you want to go someplace that’s different. You might think of Hawaii, where you imagine sandy beaches, the lovely blue ocean, and coral reefs. But tourists are increasingly asking of such a place, “Has it been spoiled yet?” By this they mean, “Is it exactly like Dallas yet?” And the answer is “Yes.” The faster you can get from Dallas to Honolulu, the faster Honolulu is becoming the same place as Dallas and the less reason there is to make the trip. Tokyo has become the same place as Los Angeles. As you go faster and faster from place to place on the earth, they are all becoming the same place.

Effing the Ineffable (Slight Return)

By in atheism, language, religion No Comments

James Wood:

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God”, so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities.

Etc., etc. Stop me if you’ve heard this one bef— oh, you have? Countless times already? Yeah, me too.

In case I’ve never made it abundantly clear before now, I am perfectly in sympathy with the awkwardness of the lifelong struggle to fully grasp our deepest perceptions, let alone give eloquent voice to them. But when it comes to this thing people variously call God, religion, or spirituality, it seems to me that the so-called New Atheists are merely insistently asking two questions of people who profess to be believers: What do you mean by that? And How do you know? Maybe some perceptions don’t lend themselves well to such direct statements, and would require grappling with in the form of literature, art and music. But I can’t help but think that a lot of the flustered harrumphing over the audacity of these rude scoundrels is due to the embarrassment of finding themselves unable to even stammer out a passable answer because they’ve never been challenged before and don’t even know what they think about what are supposedly the most pressing questions of our existence. Caught out in all their lazy glory.

The Big Lie

By in augean stables, books, history, nietzsche, ohferfucksake No Comments

Amazingly, despite all the scholarship of the last several decades that even a sciolist such as myself has easy access to, I still see things like this from time to time. From Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World:

Nietzsche was indeed Hitler’s favorite philosopher, but he was not a philosopher of Enlightenment: He belonged to the Romantic tradition, a reaction against demythologizing rationalism.

Hitler had almost as little fondness for Nietzsche as he had for Ludendorff’s and Rosenberg’s ersatz religions. As became evident at a strained visit to Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, Hitler was not at all an admirer of the philosopher. In a conversation he held with Hans Schemm and Otto Wagener during the Kampfzeit, Hitler derided paganists and “the rubbish they dredge up from German prehistory! Then they read Nietzsche with fifteen year-old boys.” Hitler’s mentor Dietrich Eckart had rejected Nietzsche as early as 1917: “We Germans, who profess through and through our faith in the Christian worldview, reject this despiser of our religious foundations.” Even Rosenberg, in his Mythus, barely mentioned Nietzsche, and he showed little engagement with Nietzsche’s philosophy when he did.

Neither Nietzsche nor Hitler could be easily classified as Romantics anyway, though elements of it were in each man’s worldview (proving how much Romanticism has simply become part of our basic cultural and intellectual atmosphere, period). But just to add a dash more spice to the “Wheen doesn’t know what the sweet fuck he’s talking about” stew we’ve got simmering here, I liked this bit as well:

Just as Hitler had no time for Rosenberg’s plans to create a new, mystical religion to replace clerical Christianity, so he found Himmler’s dilettantish religious explorations absurd. As he told a circle of confidants, “What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind, and now he wants to start that all over again….To think that I may one day be turned into an SS saint!”

Hitler was equally dismissive of Himmler’s forays into German prehistory: “Isn’t it enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds.”

I see a blurb on the back cover of Wheen’s book from The Economist, though, that asserts “…Mr. Wheen is an accomplished stylist and his writing leaps off the page.” Well, perhaps, but it’s too bad his writing, in its overeagerness, somehow managed to tie its shoelaces together first.

Lucubrations, no. 4

By in lucubrations, the big sleep No Comments

Their dying is long and hard to finish: hard to surrender what you never received.

Their exit has no grace or mystery.
It’s a little death, hanging dry and measly
like a fruit inside them that never ripened.
Dying is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we’ve ripened none
within us.
– Rilke

Stephen Cave:

The real question posed by the “Torchwood” scenario is: what would happen to all our death-defying systems if there were no more death? The logical answer is that they would be superfluous. We would have no need for progress or art, faith or fame. Suddenly, we would have nothing to do, yet in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose and time its value. This is the true awfulness of immortality.
Let us be grateful that the elixir continues to elude us — and toast instead our finitude.

Ain’t No Doubt Jesus Sees Us Acting Foolishly

By in atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, ohferfucksake, religion, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Yeah, so I remembered seeing this earlier this month, but I was too busy to comment on it at the time:

Last night, Jon Stewart waded into the ongoing atheists vs. “9/11 Cross” debate brought on by a lawsuit by the American Atheists alleging that a cross-like beam that will be memorialized at Ground Zero doesn’t give equal representation to all faiths. The Daily Show host would have none of the atheists argument: “why do you give a s**t?” he quipped. He then added little more nuance to the sentiment: “It was found at Ground Zero, it has come to mean something to people who view it as a symbol of comfort. If it really bothers you why not just think of it as a metal T-shaped thingie?”

Well, what the fuck, you know. Constantine saw a flaming cross in the sky before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge all those centuries ago and dutifully conquered in that sign. We might as well plunk a cross down in memory of two big buildings too. Architecture, Jesus, and homicidal lunatics; they just seem to be inseparable.

Now then, I’m more atheist than all y’all, and I really don’t care about this particular issue either. I daresay I don’t want to be equally represented in a memorial to an event that will primarily be remembered as the trigger that sent us on a decade-long-and-going-strong global mass murder spree. Hell, if, as a subversive atheist, I wanted to put Myrrhkah’s infamous tartuffery on even more prominent display to further discredit Christianity, I’d be all for this.

But let’s take a moment here, shall we? In the wreckage of a couple skyscrapers, they found a piece of metal that just so happened to be in the form of a cross? OMG WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Clearly, as we all should have learned in geometry class, if two perpendicular steel beams intersect, therefore Jesus therefore freedom therefore war woohoo fuck yeah. Honestly, anyone who’s enough of a simpleton to be comforted by a random piece of twisted metal needs to be taken out back where George can soothingly tell them about the rabbits again, if you know what I mean.

A Celtic cross; now, that would have been impressive. But then the Druids would become insufferable assholes, I guess.

Different In Our Hearts; Same Planet, a World Apart

By in foolosophy, identity, music, nietzsche, religion, tribalism No Comments

Ultimately, however, it is indifferent whether the herd is commanded to have one opinion or permitted to have five. Whoever deviates from the five public opinions and stands apart will always have the whole herd against him.

– Nietzsche

Back when I was first in punk rock, the thing that irked me the most, and finally drove me out of punk rock altogether, was the fact that the philosophy we espoused was all about questioning things. And yet you were not allowed to question punk rock itself. It was great to question Reagan and nuclear proliferation and the cops and school. But if you started asking things like, why do we all have to wear leather jackets, or why can’t we have vocal harmonies in some of the songs, or why can’t I grow my hair long if I want, that was taboo.

American Buddhism as it stands today is pretty much the same way. Buddhism isn’t that way. But the stuff that lotsa people call “Buddhism” is. It’s a subtle distinction, I know. But an important one.

So when I started calling bullshit on the idea of mindfulness, and skillfulness and “dharma talks,” the reaction was almost identical to what used to happen when I’d go onstage at hardcore shows in the early 80s with long hair and bell-bottoms. You can’t do that! We can challenge everything in the world, but don’t you dare challenge us!

If Buddhism can’t be challenged it isn’t Buddhism anymore.

I grew up with heavy metal myself, but it’s the same story. I’ll always be grateful for what that music did for me at that juncture of my life, but gods above, you couldn’t find a more cloistered, homogeneous group of people than my fellow metalheads. Unless you count the goths. Or the punks. Or any others who form a group identity based on their marginalization from mainstream society and proceed to become more xenophobic than those who provoked their rebellion.

That kind of strong identification with musical genres, like with Buddhism-as-an-‘ism’, served as a raft for me. I’m on dry land now and don’t need them anymore.

Saturday Shuffle

By in music, saturday shuffle No Comments

  1. VAST — Bruise
  2. Mushroomhead — The Wrist
  3. Glen Porter — Forgive Me
  4. The Four Horsemen — Nobody Said It Was Easy
  5. G. Love & Special Sauce — Hobo Blues
  6. Fatboy Slim — The Journey
  7. Soundgarden — Zero Chance
  8. Ladytron — Sugar
  9. Omid — Chemical Wedding
  10. Ziggy Marley — Tomorrow People
  11. Carolina Chocolate Drops — Hit ‘Em Up Style
  12. Yeah Yeah Yeahs — Maps
  13. Alabama 3 — Way Beyond the Blues
  14. The Cardigans — Slow
  15. Down — Jail
  16. Rose Chronicles — Visions
  17. Masters of Reality — Lover’s Sky
  18. Quicksand — Freezing Process
  19. Thao and Mirah — Folks
  20. Saigon Kick — Down By the Ocean

Another Worldly Device That May Ruin Me

By in environment, foolosophy, getting and spending, identity No Comments

Chase Night:

Artificial thoughts aren’t limited to manufactured desire for certain products. No, it’s much worse than that. Our heads are being filled with manufactured desires for all manner of nonsense. Crazy religions. Psychotic politics. Sleazy new social mores. Consumerism is just the tip of the iceberg really. (Because these other things are often behind the push of consumerism.)

This is why it is imperative to practice an Ecology of the Mind. Spending time outdoors – where the only incoming messages are from the wind and the flowers and the birds – is an excellent first step in cultivating an unpolluted mental environment.

But as human beings lucky enough to live in developed countries, there is never a lasting respite from the relentless attempts to insert artificial thoughts into our brains. It’s apparently just part of the price way pay for running water and central heat and air. We might throw out our TV or radio or even unplug the Web at home, but as we move through the world we will be subjected to a constant onslaught of manufactured desires. At those times, awareness is our armor.

This is really one of the primary purposes behind Unbridled Existence: to make people think about the things they’re thinking.

Reminded me of a recent essay from Micah White:

Since Zola, however, mental environmentalism has been stuck in a philosophical morass. To claim that advertising is metaphorically mental pollution is one thing, namely an easily dismissible rhetorical flourish. To say that advertising is literally a kind of pollution and that TV commercials and highway billboards are more closely related to toxic sludge than to speech is another matter entirely. And while mental environmentalists have always tried to make the latter argument, they have more often been forced to retreat to the former. Where is the evidence that advertising is a species of pollution? Isn’t it obvious that a corporate slogan is nothing but glorified, commercialized speech?

Into this difficult question has stepped one of the greatest living philosophers, the eccentric Michel Serres, who has written the inaugural philosophical work of the mental environmentalist movement. Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? is a radical reconception of pollution that cements its primal relation to advertising. The big idea of this recently translated book is that animals, humans included, use pollution to mark, claim and appropriate territory through defiling it, and that over time this appropriative act has evolved away from primitive pollution, urine and feces, to “hard pollution,” industrial chemicals, and finally to “soft pollution,” the many forms of advertising.

It strikes me that “natural/artificial” is one of those almost subconscious distinctions that brook no opposition, much in the way that politicians talk about America — yer either fer it or agin it, and you dang sure ain’t agin it, is you, boy? Likewise, who wants to argue for nuance when it comes to all things “natural”?

But I don’t feel like making an issue out of literal nature-romanticism here. And I certainly am in favor of people “thinking about the things they’re thinking”, which happens to be one of my favorite definitions of philosophy. I just find this arbitrary Platonic (of course) divide to be so tiresome and silly: here, in this column, we have the true, the good, the beautiful wants and needs; for community, close-knit family, love, meaningful work and peaceful worship. In this column, the false, the contrived, the greed, the jealousy, the petty vanity and feuding. The ones that don’t “naturally” exist, of course, having been smuggled into Eden via some nefarious scheme that always goes unexplained. If only people would get in touch with their “true” nature, blah blah blah.

I trust I don’t have to remind you what I think about consumerism, the contemplative life, etc. All I want to offer here is an observation that I suspect a lot of people would find terrifying if they really took it to heart; namely, that your “self” is much more fluid and malleable than you’re likely willing to admit. The thoughts and desires you count as “yours” are part of the cultural atmosphere, likely absorbed from your parents or peers and are simply ones you’ve become habituated to over your lifetime; they predated you and will outlast you. Mental evolution, like its biological counterpart, is about adaptation, not progress. Perhaps the vast majority of people want a world of bright lights, sleek gadgets and an ever-changing array of personal accouterments. Maybe the “purpose” of human activity is to prepare the ground for a super-race of radioactive cockroaches to rule the planet for eons, didja ever consider that?

They Said All Teenagers Scare the Living Shit Out of Me

By in waiting for the barbarians No Comments

What concerned me as much as my students’ disdain for their teachers, though, was the quality of their writing. Potential ideas lay dormant and undeveloped on the page; basic rules of grammar and punctuation went unheeded; logic was all but absent. After reading that first round of essays, I began annoying my friends with dire, unprovoked brooding on the dismal state of high school education in this country. More than one friend warned me against committing what I have come to call the Breakfast Club fallacy. In that flawed, but seminal, ’80s high school film, the assistant principal is complaining to Janitor Carl that the kids have changed, gone bad, turned on him. “Bullshit,” replies Carl. “The kids haven’t changed. You have.” That’s the Breakfast Club fallacy: the kids aren’t getting worse; I’m just getting older and more cantankerous.

Maybe so. My own high school was hardly a proving ground for intellectual inquiry. Still, I’m concerned, and for the same reasons that led George Orwell to write the essay “Politics and the English Language”: bad writing leads to bad thinking, and vice versa; uncritical acceptance of others’ prejudices can lead to people marching around with signs displaying Hitler mustaches on an African-American president. In fact, the entire faith we put in democracy as a form of governance rests on the fragile assumption that, in the realm of free and open debate, conscientious thought will more often than not carry the day. And that assumption, as Thomas Jefferson saw more clearly than the other founding fathers, rests in turn on a viable system of public education.

At the risk of generalizing, it seems to me that two of the more serious problems afflicting American adolescents today are the fear of not fitting in and an astonishing lack of curiosity about the world beyond their cell phones. Popular culture instills high levels of passivity among its most vulnerable targets, the young. There is, to take one pervasive example, not a single item for sale at my local mall that asks the consumer to do something, make something, or master a skill (the store that sold telescopes and chess sets recently closed). Yet American teenagers have on average one hundred dollars a week of disposable income, which they typically spend at the mall. What they consume helps them adopt an easy, off-the-rack persona, but it does little to cultivate real self-invention, the unfolding of one’s nature that Emerson called the “chief end of man.” This passive shaping of the self leads, I think, to a flimsy narcissism that results in a lack of curiosity about the world outside the self: real life.

Isn’t a “fear of not fitting in” more or less universal? Do most adults ever outgrow it? Have adolescents in particular ever been immune to to it? Aren’t there a fair number of people for whom a world of constant entertainment and shiny gadgets would represent the ne plus ultra of human existence? Is the Jeffersonian vision of pure, rationally informed democracy just as much of a naïve pipe dream as his vision of America as a loose confederation of agrarian states defended by citizen militias?

Well. These are all perceptive queries, and I congratulate myself for asking them. But I’d merely like to state for now that even I, misanthrope that I am, don’t see any added reason to fear for the human race in general, let alone Western culture, American culture, however else you choose to subdivide it. The majority of people, whether due to the limitations of genetics or social class, have always been stupid and unreflective. With seven billion people on the planet, there’s simply a lot more of them to notice and despair over.

A Pair o’ Pathetic Peripatetics

By in omnigatherum No Comments

Jesse Miller:

The proponents for why we should be walking (and Solnit and Careri can certainly be counted among the first of their ranks) extol the act for its ethical, political and environmental implications: walking as a defense of free time against the dark arts of technology, walking (as the urban and environmental conservationists claim) as a practice that will get us out of air conditioned cars and away from computers so that we can begin to live together “in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.” Walking that will cause us to remember to remember the world around us, to take some time to smell the roses and rivers and historic buildings and thus begin to care about what happens to them. And for these advocates there is no better or more important time to walk than now, when the processes of globalization, the ascendancy of car culture, and the ubiquity of cheap communication technology are increasingly alienating us from our environments, our neighbors, and ourselves. Both histories are written in such a way that they place the reader at the end of the historic road, hand off a baton, and say, now it’s your turn, walk, you’re our last and only hope.

But in taking such an untempered romantic, nostalgic, and somewhat regressive stance towards walking and its relationship to technological progress, these writers fail to encompass the complexity of the issue in ways that contemporary art and literature of walking has. The narrator of Sergio Chejfec’s recent novel My Two Worlds sums up the dominant discourse on walking when he writes, “Even before I could understand it with any certainty, in all likelihood I sensed that the main argument in favor of walking was its pace; it was optimal for observation and thought, and furthermore it was the corporeal experience with the best syntax to accompany one in life.”

This statement sounds remarkably similar to Solnit’s when she writes, “I know these things have their uses, and use them—a truck, a computer, a modem—myself, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed…I like walking because it is slow and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”

Many of my favorite writers and thinkers have extolled the virtues of walking. I like the idea of it, it’s true. But alas, if I am honest with myself, the peregrinator’s progress is not conducive to the kind of thinking I like best. For some reason, I much prefer driving on long, lonely highways, and if I do go walking, preferably in the woods, I inevitably settle down before too long in a comfortable spot and stay there. Hiking for the sake of hiking smacks too much of striving, accomplishment, that good old Protestant busy-busy-busy bullshit. No, I just like to wander aimlessly at a disjointed pace. Hey, wait, am I talking about walking or life in general?

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