Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension.
(Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)
Occam’s Razor, in Newton’s formulation, says that ”We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” Put more directly, this means that when trying to understand things, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Occam’s Razor is credited to 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham.
Fuckem’s Razor, on the other hand, derives from the teachings of another Medieval monk, Robert of Fuckham, and it posits roughly the opposite of Occam’s Razor. To wit, when confronted with a problem, the most complicated and obscure explanation is probably correct. At the very least, all conceivable factors must be debated, on an equal footing, regardless of their plausibility or how much evidence supports them.
I’m sure this is all fairly confusing, so let me illustrate with a couple of examples. Say you’re in your house, it’s hot as hell and the place is collapsing around your head as you try and make out what’s going on. Occam’s Razor would note the flames leaping into the sky, the clouds of choking smoke and distant scream of approaching sirens in suggesting that your house is on fire. Fuckem’s Razor, on the other hand, obliges the objective observer to consider all the possibilities. Since scientists have not been able to conclusively rule out the possibility of either alien life or the existence of parallel dimensions, we must, in the interests of intellectual rigor, admit to the extreme likelihood that your house is under attack by bug people from the 18th Dimension.
Brilliant. From now on, when presented with yet more evasive hairsplitting from agnostics (especially those who get overcome with the vapors due to the impudence of those New Atheists), I’m just going to mutter “Fuckem’s Razor” to myself and crack up giggling.
On this slightly chilly September night, I can’t help but sit and reflect on the momentous significance of a certain anniversary coming up. One that changed the world as I knew it forever, with the ripples still evident to this very day. I don’t usually care for all that sort of melodrama surrounding arbitrary attachments to big round numbers, but life-altering events like this are so few and far between, I feel it’s only right to pause and acknowledge them. I do know people who were devastated by the seismic changes that followed in the wake of this event, clinging to their memories of what they feel was a happier, purer, more innocent time before, and I raise my glass in tribute to them tonight.
Yes, I speak of September 24th, 1991, when Nirvana’s Nevermind was released with an initial run of only around 200,000 copies (though it would later sell about 30 million copies worldwide). Within the next few years, L.A. hair metal was all but extinct as music fans everywhere shook their heads as if waking from a MTV-induced dream, twisting their fingers in their ears in disbelief that a decade had passed in collective musical madness as image completely trumped substance and bands produced what would quickly become some of the most atrocious, dated sounds imaginable. Hairdressers all over southern California were reduced to lives of homeless begging and sales of hairspray plummeted; landfills overflowed with skin-tight, zebra-patterned leather pants and purple suede high-heeled cowboy boots. Occasionally, one could hear guitar solos from the stereo of a passing muscle car, drifting forlornly on the wind like tumbleweeds composed of excessive, frenetic fretwork.
Has it really been twenty years already? O, youth…
The propensity for reflection also goes deeper still. Insofar as we reflect on our lives, we need to be able to make sense of them in the context of some wider framework of beliefs. This is a role which has traditionally been played in most societies by systems of religious belief, but these have over time become increasingly implausible, and the need remains. Most people are not intellectuals, and their alternative to religious belief often turns out to be an exceedingly vague and inarticulate thought that “There must be something”.
But there are questions which cannot be evaded, even if our answers to them are, like our life-narratives, implicit in the ways we live our lives. We need some way of understanding the place of human beings in the natural world, as a part of it or as set apart. We have either to see ourselves as subject to some higher purpose or as responsible for our own lives and our world. We have either to see our lives as a prelude to some future mode of conscious existence, or as ending with death and the merging of our bodies with the rest of the natural world.
…In conclusion, though, I want to switch perspective and say that as a humanist I find it annoying when people claim, as they frequently do, that none of this is enough, that a life of creative activity and supportive relationships, taking on a determinate shape over time, is not enough, because it lacks the essential element. It leaves out “spirituality”, people say, and has no room for God. What basis do they have for the claim that it’s not enough?
Regardless of what name they give it, what people seem to be saying is that it’s not enough because it’s not permanent. If the things that matter most to us don’t have some sort of everlasting, unchanging significance, they’re pretty much worthless. But this is a problem that comes from viewing time as an abstraction, something to want more of. It diminishes our sense of importance to think of the world moving on as always once we’re gone, erasing us from its collective memory. But the things that matter most to us can’t be justified by recourse to longevity or unchanging essence. They are their own explanation. They exist, at least for a brief period of time. That’s enough.
Beardedness was associated with older age, greater responsibility, and leftist political ideas. In Study 2, respondents were 50 Brazilian personnel managers (28 men and 22 women) who made hiring decisions at different companies in the city of Saõ Paulo. Personnel managers clearly preferred clean shaven over bearded, mustached, or goateed men as prospective employees. In a hiring situation for a conservative occupation, a man who signals disposition to conform to rules may be preferred by personnel managers over another who signals nonconformity.
Oh, you have no idea how subversive my dark heart really is. I’d like to bring back some Civil War-style facial hair, myself.
The closure narrative assumes that grief is bad and that it’s something that needs to end, and it assumes that closure is possible and that it’s something good and something that people need to have. Grief is a difficult, messy experience and can be very painful. A lot of people carry loss and grief for much of their lives, but that doesn’t mean that the pain is as intense as it was the first few months. You carry that loss and grief, but you learn how to integrate that into your life … .We grieve for a reason. We grieve because we miss the person who died, or because of whatever loss we’re experiencing. Our grief expresses how we’re feeling and allows us to acknowledge that loss. So asking or expecting someone to try and end that quickly is really misunderstanding the importance of those emotions.
Yes, thank you. “Closure” is one of those terms that make me want to punch people in the throat when they say it. Time doesn’t heal so much as bury.
Like contemporary anti-Cartesians, Nietzsche believes that the idea of objective knowledge as a “view from nowhere” is incoherent. He tries to bring this out by comparing knowledge as we actually have it to seeing a visual image, which is “perspectival” in a more straightforward but analogous way. When I look at something, I have to stand somewhere, and so what I see is only the image as it appears from that angle. I cannot see the back (or maybe even the front), nor can I see the whole thing at once.
In this sense, no perspective is “truer” than any other. If a snapshot taken from that angle results in an inaccurate image, this must be due to a faulty camera, not my standpoint. Nor can there be such a thing as a complete visual image, say constructed out of all the individual ones. (Of course I may move from one place to another until I have seen enough; but that is not at all the same thing.) Yet I may find one angle more revealing than another, and some of them may be misleading or useless. Still, these judgments and manipulations are after the (photographic) fact: they are not reducible to purely disinterested registering of how things are, visually speaking.
If cognition is like vision in this way, then just as there is no such thing as a single complete visual image, to be seen from no particular vantage point (which yet preserves the idea of accurate or faulty representations of what can be seen from each), then there is no such thing as a single complete way things are for us to know (a “world-in-itself”): all there are are interpretive perspectives and what can be seen from them.
One of my SNR friends uses a similar definition of “God” — she suggests it being something like the sum total of all the knowledge in the universe. But, as I tried to argue with her, knowledge in and of itself is senseless; knowledge means nothing without a knower, an interested perspective, a particular point of view. Facts matter to us not for what they are, but what they’re for.
Everyone talks about “spirituality,” but less often is it especially clear what we (or they) actually mean. That’s why, together with The Immanent Frame and the historians of religion Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern, Killing the Buddha has been quietly working since the beginning of the year to develop Frequencies, a new online “collaborative genealogy of spirituality.” Today, finally, the site is being unveiled.
While at times our task might have seemed as opaque as our object of study, the majesty of what we’ve managed to come up with will speak for itself. Over the course of 100 days, 100 never-before-seen essays will be appearing on Frequencies, each taking on some facet of the bigger-than-sky-sized constellation of things that came to mind when we dared say the word in question.
I am licking my chops and sharpening my utensils in anticipation of the most savory, Ouroboran word-salad ever assembled.
Officials in the rural Virginia city where Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are buried voted late Thursday to prohibit the flying of the Confederate flag on city-owned poles.
After a lively 2 1/2-hour public hearing, the Lexington City Council voted 4-1 to allow only U.S., Virginia and city flags to be flown. Personal displays of the Confederate flag are not affected. The Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose members showed up in force after leading a rally that turned a downtown park into a sea of Confederate flags, vowed to challenge the ordinance in court.
…”I am a firm believer in the freedom to express our individual rights, which include flying the flag that we decide to fly,” said Philip Way, a Civil War re-enactor dressed in a Confederate wool uniform despite the summer temperatures. “That’s freedom to me.”
Now, I’m no historian, but I have a dim inkling that the concept of “the freedom to express our individual rights” is more typically associated with the nation that the Confederacy was, uh, revolting against to begin with. Even more astonishingly, I suggest it to be the case that life in a theocratic, patriarchal, ancestor-worshipping agrarian society built on a permanent class of forced laborers would not be nearly so enamored of honoring one’s right to display whatever colored fabric of their choosing. Should I care to don my herringbone deerstalker cap and my pipe and go about some sleuthing, I suspect I would find that Mr. Way is as white as a catfish’s belly, and has never considered life from outside that privileged perspective.
I say it’s high time for secession to move beyond the boundaries of right-wing crankdom and become a mainstream, bipartisan issue. It should be encouraged. Not only that, but we should give additional fuel to their martyr complex by reenacting a Trail of Tears, if you will. Gather up all these Johnny Reb-come-latelies and put them on the road. I’m going to get things rolling by suggesting that we march them all to Texas and then sell the state back to Mexico, where they can pick marijuana buds in the fields for the drug lords. Sorry, my couple of Texan friends, but the wheels of history take no heed of lowly individuals, and it’s for the good of the nation, after all. I’ll make sure to secure you safe passage back to civilization anyway.
Doubt and its religious cousin agnosticism, a word rarely heard nowadays, may have fallen out of fashion, but they have much to teach us, despite the disdain of Richard Dawkins, who famously wrote in The God Delusion: “I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” He also quotes approvingly Quentin de la Bédoyère, science editor of the Catholic Herald, who in 2006 wrote that the Catholic historian Hugh Ross Williamson respected firm religious belief and certain unbelief, but “reserved his contempt for the wishy-washy boneless mediocrities who flapped around in the middle.”
To see doubters and freethinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, Thomas Huxley (who coined the word “agnostic”) and Darwin himself mocked in this way, given their intense engagement with complex human issues, only highlights the boldness of their thinking and the intellectual hubris of today’s unbridled certainty. The stridency of both Dawkins and de la Bédoyère misses how these and other Victorian intellectuals saw doubt as a creative force – inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, and a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and zealotry.
…A more astute contemporary thinker than Dawkins on the issue of agnosticism, in its broadest, existential sense, is the American playwright John Patrick Shanley. In the preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt (also a film), he argues that “doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite – it is a passionate exercise.” While such questioning takes us past a point of comfort, he claims, it is “doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things”, and thus represents “nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present”.
Hey, I’m not going to tell someone that they can’t indulge their masochistic fetish for being suspended indefinitely on existential tenterhooks, but, yuh know, on that note, it seems to this observer that those of us who have serenely accepted the nonexistence of any God worthy of the name are the ones who have moved on to the more pressing concerns of how to live in this world with only our fellow fallible humans to rely on for love, support and justice, whereas it is this particular type of doubter who wants to encase religious questions in amber, leaving them incapable of being resolved to any practical satisfaction. It’s people like Lane who dogmatically insist that anything less than 100% certain knowledge on this issue means we must remain open to the possibility that something like the Abrahamic religions just might be true after all. And I still say that if it weren’t for the oppressive, overbearing presence of a jealous, vindictive God haunting our collective cultural memory, no one would think it such a big deal to consider the matter settled for all intents and purposes and get on with it.
What I found really funny, though, was seeing yet another essay using Dawkins as the prime example of strident, intolerant atheism… with a link in the sidebar to related articles, including an interview with Dawkins on the same site that totally belies the claim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 acouple skyscrapers, they found a piece of metal that just so happened to be in the form of across? 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.
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.
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.
