I think American culture is deeply disoriented in regard to assessing standards of living. The basics of life — having a home in a safe neighborhood in reasonable proximity to one’s work, the choice of having a one-income household, having time and energy to invest in family life and parenting or in personal interests or in reflexion — are now beyond the reach of many people. However, luxuries — such as hi-fi home and portable stereo systems, home theaters, computers, multiple luxury cars, fine food — these items are relatively cheap.

Any comparison of how the middle-class is doing now versus ten, twenty or thirty years ago that only adjusts for inflation without adjusting for the relative costs of basics and luxuries, or considering the number of hours worked per household (or better, the amount of free-time available to members of the middle-class) is barely looking at the real issue.

The crisis of the middle-class has less to do with how much money each household has, and more to do with quality and sustainability of the middle-class life.

The right understands the masses infinitely better than the left. The left believes individuals are concerned with their well-being, where the right understands very well that the masses do not care about accomplishing happiness, but only infusing their unhappiness with the maximum intensity of meaning.

*

Contrary to popular opinion, the non-viability of Marxism has nothing at all to do with the underestimating the force of greed in individuals. It has to do with an inability to grasp the fundamentally non-functionalist orientation of the ordinary person, and the degree to which most people are dominated by symbols.

*

I believe metaphysical reductionism is the root cause of political extremism. Materialistic reductionism pushes toward the hard left, and idealist reductionism (common Platonism) pushes toward hard right. And dialectics, both materialist and idealist, amplifies the effect. Dialectic promises — and in actually delivers — unexpected and unexpectable deep shifts in one’s relationship to reality, at least at the level of individual consciousness. The natural extension of real individual experience to the theoretical possibility of analogous collective experience results in what Voegelin called “metastatic expectation“.

Continue reading Bread and circuses →

The New Oxford American Dictionary says this about the usage of conviction verses persuasion:

Although it is common to see convince and persuade used interchangeably, there are distinctions in meaning that careful writers and speakers try to preserve. Convince derives from a Latin word meaning ‘conquer, overcome.’ Persuade derives from a Latin word meaning ‘advise, make appealing, sweeten.’

*

Proof convinces. Proof produces agreement through intellectual coercion. There are kinds of truth that are subject to proof, and these are objective truths. With a valid proof, to accept the premises is to accept the conclusion. One cannot resist the argument if one is intellectually decent. To reject the argument is to betray civility. With proof agreement is necessary.

But not all truths fall inside the jurisdiction of proof.

In fact, the most important truths — the ideas most significant to us, which in fact lend significance to objective truths — are outside the reach of proof’s coercive powers. They reside in the realm of freedom, where only persuasion has sway.

Appeals persuade. Appeals invite agreement. Appeals address the other as free beings, who decide out of desire, not necessity.

*

Some people covet their freedom, but lack faith that freedom is theirs regardless of what is proven to them.

They see truth as a threat to their autonomy. And so they choose intellectual indecency.

And indeed, there are many people who cannot imagine voluntary agreement, who look for proofs that support their deepest convictions. They wish to convince others that their most important truths are the only valid truth, and to make others convicts of their own beloved beliefs. They attempt to argue others into submission.

*

The easiest things to prove matter least.

The things that matter most are impossible to prove.

*

If we wish to come to agreement on the things that matter most to us, we will have to rethink our notions of truth, and especially how this truth is established. We will not have certainty where we most desire it. We will never compel the types of agreements we crave.

, but we must come voluntarily and we must learn to invite others to agreement. As long as we will only come to an agreement when we cannot escape agreement — that is where we’ve been argued into submission —

*

Compulsion by proof is only one mode of persuasion.

The modes of persuasion available to a person affects every aspect of his social existence. It determines the types of appeals he makes and accepts.

Splitting open an over-ripe peach I discovered the pit, broken and dry. I cut away the fragments of shell and the dessicated kernel, and ate the rest of it. It was maybe a little too sweet.

“I could conceive of another Abraham — to be sure, he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer —  an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away, being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready; but without having his house ready, without having something to fall back on, he cannot leave — this the Bible also realized, for it says: ‘He set his house in order.'”

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for Thee.

Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into action ;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.

All may of Thee partake;
Nothing can be so mean
Which with his tincture (for Thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.

Yesterday one of Susan’s students, a bright and usually undramatic nine-year-old girl, walked up, stood before her, stared straight into her eyes, and with great gravity pronounced: “YOU HAVE ANCESTORS.”

Susan was startled. The girl explained, “My grandfather did that to a foreign guy once, and he fainted.”

We need a word for the practice of recalling what memory cannot possess. It should be simpler than “recalling the immemorable.”

I password-protected my blog for a week to see what would happen.

Perfection is a glorious and superficial crown placed on the head of deep rightness.

When perfection is the material of which a thing is constructed, that thing will have a hollowness that can never be filled.

*

It is true: best practices are often found in the best work. But the atomist interpretation — that this means that best work is somehow composed of best practices — is not only factually wrong, it is practically counterproductive.

Unfortunately, the atomist interpretation is not so counterproductive that its results fail entirely. And indeed, the atomist world defines success by avoidance of failure and evasion of blame. Atomism produces acceptable work, and it does so reliably and linearly.

*

The error becomes more obvious when we consider it in the realm of art. Musical best practices are certainly found in the best music — once the music has come into being. But when those best practices are the generative principle of the music, the music is dull.

There’s nothing wrong with the music. The music might even be perfect.

It’s just that there’s nothing intensely right about it.

There’s nothing to hate, but there is nothing to love.

But without some particular thing to hate, when we “can’t put our finger” on what is wrong, most people become a little flustered and ashamed and feel compelled to accept the thing as good.

*

Fact is, the best things are the best, not by virtue of  being composed of best practices, but by virtue of discovery of the right kind of being for that particular creation, and manifesting that being fully. The flawed accomplishment of this, sets the stage for removal of flaws within the limits of fidelity to the particular spirit of the creation.

*

According to Bill Callahan:

There is no love
Where there is no obstacle
And there is no love
Where there is no bramble
There is no love
On the hacked-away plateau
And there is no love
In the unerring
And there is no love
On the one true path

*

In the musical world, a muzo is someone who constructs music from best practices and reliably plays this error-free music without mistakes.

*

Musicians take risks to create what needs creation. The process produces flaws, but the process also transfigures flaws into new beauty.

Maybe the true product of art is transfiguration of flaws.

Perhaps what makes us love art is the discovery of new love for what was taken for flaw.

The doing of art enriches the world in outspiraling consecration.

*

Business grows to grow. It doesn’t know any constraints besides material self-interest. (This, by the way, is not a universal property of human beings, only the common but limited soul of the born merchant.)

But business compulsively serves demand with supply. It cannot stop itself, even if this will ultimately end its own dominance.

Business grew and overgrew art and choked it out. (By art I do not mean entertainment. Entertainment is passive. Art requires effort.)

Now business has to fill the vacuum it has created, because this vacuum is demand.

Business will have to change fundamentally to fill this demand.

It will have to learn to transcend the functional. This will require a changing of the guard.

Business’ hardest lesson will be learning the difference between a musician and a muzo.

*

The irruption of art into business is brand.

Brand is changing because we have changed, as a culture and as individuals.

Brand began as the identifying mark. Then it became a value proposition, and later a promise. Then it became style — an association of feeling with a thing or a function.

Now it is something else. And what it is becoming is hard to talk about.

We won’t learn to talk about it until we learn to think differently.

*

An atomist couple wanted to have a baby together. They began with an inventory of best-of-breed babies. Based on their findings concluded that their baby would be assembled out of ten fingers and ten toes, two arms and two legs a torso and a sizable head. Attached to the head would be two eyes, two ears, one mouth (teeth TBD) and one nose with no more than two nostrils. The torso would be stuffed with an assortment of organs, organized according to biological best practices. Their initial budget was only enough for a small handful of baby, so they realized they needed to take a phased approach. They identified objectives — adorability, cuddlability, and scalability (a.k.a. growability) — and used these objectives to prioritize the various body parts.

*

Muzos aren’t musicians with a missing something.

Muzos are musicians with a missing everything.

A musician can grow to be as perfect as a muzo, but the perfection only honors their art, it does not make it.

A man whose meaning is rooted beyond another’s horizon of conceivability appears to be a nihilist. But to the nihilist, the other is ensnared in illusion.

Thus the worlds drawn by the pen of invective divides into the evil and the shallow. The complementary inner worlds divide into the profound and the good.

(For sure, this is nothing new, yet it always is new. This is how recall of memory-resistant ideas happens. We are permitted to repeat, with new mouths to new ears, the old words.)

To live in a philosophy is unavoidable.

To think about philosophy is not thinking philosophically.

To think out a philosophy is not thinking philosophically.

To live out one philosophy into another: that is philosophy.

Philosophers live thinking consequentially.

Philosophers — good and bad, novel and redundant — live thinking consequentially.

“It’s all a matter of height,” said the astronaut. “That horizon that surrounds you on all sides — it eventually shrinks to a circle. Higher still it reduces to a point, and then to nothing at all. Then the human dream of being like a god, without no confining horizon is finally ours. From within this chamber we look out on infinity in all directions and experience limitless vision.”

From a remote midpoint, a navigator circumspects the surrounding ocean. His eye steps along the horizon, trailing a stutter of vanishing-point stitches, sealing the seam between upper and lower waters.

Already having the answer is often failure to see the question.

Seeing no problem is more often caused by blindness than clarity.

Having no doubt is often failure to detect dubitability.

Having seen it before is often failure to see it now.

Category conceals difference behind the glare of relevance.

Being experienced can make experience past-tense.

*

I remember being struck 20ish years ago by this passage from The Media Lab by Stewart Brand:

He [Minsky] said he was trying to attract people to the Lab interested in working on constraint languages, or at least attract hackers who might grow into it. “But I don’t know whether it’s possible anymore, because good hackers are very quickly aware of their hundred-thousand-dollar value making products for people. I look for selfish people who don’t give a damn what happens in the outer world for five years. At some point you need a hero who will actually work for himself rather than make it easier for others to work. All the people who have short-range goals will be forgotten.”

All of Minsky’s examples of hard problems seemed to circle back on semantic questions, problems of meaning and cognition rather than just signal processing. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “the heuristic for making discoveries is start with a distinction that people make and argue that there are three ways rather than two. Probably all good ideas start by making a distinction, and then they usually die by stopping there and dividing everything up into those two. Information theory is interested in signal and noise. Maybe we should make a tri-stinction — signal, noise, and meaning.”

After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading the Koran with some dismay at its violent inquiry-blunting formulae, sermonized, “Religion is a teaching machine — a little deadly loop for putting itself in your mind and keeping it there. The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. It’s interested in solving deep problems, not in understanding them. And it’s correct in a sense, because the problems it deals with don’t have solutions, because they’re loops. ‘Who made the world?’ ‘God.’ You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’ ”

I said, “Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot.” That lively loop has been cycling in my mind ever since.

The point Minsky is making is a great one, if you ignore his mind rot concerning similarities among religions.

“Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot.”

Automatic life accepts what is given it and works within what is given to accomplish its ends. “Its” ends? — what is the antecedent for this possessive pronoun? The automatic life.

An automatic life can be active or reflective.

An automatic life can be resigned and mechanical, but many are ambitious and ingenious.

What is the alternative to automatic life? It begins with an earnest question: What is the alternative to this reality I live — which I live in and live out?

*

A very vivid example of automatic life, obvious for having outside-in perspective is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It is possible to take from this experiment a set of facts about human nature, and these facts will be true. They are sociological facts about a situation observed from a distance, that is, objectively.

However, objective truth is not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

We must also consider the immediate experience of the participants, and ask how their own experience relates to the social dynamic we observe, which unconsciously dominates not only the participants’ behaviors, but also their attitudes, conceptions and their feelings. We must note, too, the plurality of perspectives on the same situation, and the part power distribution plays.

But this hybrid-truth synthesized from objective truth about the situation and the personal stories of “those who were there” — it is still not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

We must link our own experience to that of each participant, so we can find with their subjective reports true subjective content (cautiously — staying aware that such connections are approximate at best, and often completely wrong).

Now we begin to enter the subjective realm. But even this is not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

Now we must look for where we are a prisoner and guard. And we must look for where we missed moral choices, because we already knew what we were supposed to do, and just did it. We must experiment.

But even this is not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

We must look at the worst situations in history, and recognize the probability that we might have been among the perpetrators, for the very reason that what they did was in accordance with “how things are” in past tense. Every one of these perpetrators were realists.

But even this is not enough. Now we must look at right now and ourselves, and ask ourselves: Is this order, which is working out for me, working out for those around me? Do I actually care, so long as it continues to work out for me? How are my own behaviors, attitudes, conceptions and feelings passively determined by this order? And what besides misery or sheer fear or direct force will wake me from blind incuriosity?

How do my deepest convictions on what is Real and what is Right make me a convict — and a guard?

What do I do about this? (It has no precedent!)

What ought I aim for? (There is no “going back” — it has never been!)

Now we have a beginning…

*

The automatic life acts within passivity.

The automatic life does things (active tense), but what it does is determined by what is given (passive tense). Automatic responsibility means discharging the responsibilities it is given.

To take responsibility (active tense) means to replace what is given (passive tense) with what one makes (active tense) of things. That means taking responsibility for one’s own responsibilities — determining where one cooperates and where one resists the given.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man becomes king, not for the simple fact that he sees, but exclusively because of what he can do perceptibly within a sightless world.

The king tells his subjects that they will soon hear, feel and smell an approaching herd of horses, and subsequently his subjects do hear, feel and smell according to his prediction.

But if he tells his subjects of the beauty of a sunrise, or he makes a painting of the world he sees, these utterances have no significance beyond being characteristic behaviors of a man able to prophesy the coming of horses to a silent, intangible, odorless present. They are attributes of a visionary.

Eventually the one-eyed king dies, and then later, all who knew him. The world loses its eye-witness.

People will repeat his word on sunrises. They will preserve his paintings. Thousands will line up to feel the contours of the frame and the texture of the paint, and will reverently savor the aroma of wood, paint and canvas.

Knowledge about sunrises will grow. Many new paintings will be painted. The saying and doing will be innocent, with no sense that anyone can see a difference between their products and the example they imitate.

Others will call bullshit on sunrises and paintings, and they will be mostly right.

*

Some might witness this spectacle and try to talk about it to someone else, in half-blind-half-monocular bastard language. But unlike the utterances of old one-eyed kind, this speech will have no practical value whatsoever. Who cares about a world “seen” from the “eye” of a king? Does such talk even have sense, let alone truth?

As far as I can tell, most lives are divided between toil and entertainment — and both are forms of escapism.

From what are we escaping? Awareness of life beyond escape.

*

Deeper understanding and better ways of living are impossible under the tightening spiral of harassment of automatic contemporary existence.

*

Those with time waste their time; those who need time are wasted.

*

The purposeless have the power to impose on those with purposes of their own.

*

You and I inhabit different worlds.

From mine, your world looks too small to accommodate my purpose. From yours, I am useless. Yet, you can find a use for me.

If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it, it does make a sound — but the sound of the present does not penetrate to the future and become past.

Truth becomes concrete to us when:

1. Our theory is self-consistent, so we find little self-contradiction in its internal logic.
2. Our theory is consistent with our experience, so we find little gap between our theoretical interpretations and our (relevant) perceptions.
3. Our theory is consistent with our practice, so the theory is consistently useful in actualizing intentions.
4. Our theory is consistent with our language, so we do not have to think about speaking when articulating our theory theoretically, perceptually or practically.
5. Our theory is consciously believed and advocated by those around us.
6. Our theory is matches the perceptions of those around us.
7. Our theory is matches the practices of our collaborators.
8. Our theory is embedded in the language of our culture.
9. Our theory is generally accepted as an accurate image of objective truth.
10. Our theory doesn’t exist at all, because it is simply reality itself.
11. Reality is challenged by malcontents who claim there are multiple realities.
12. Our theory is challenged by malcontents who claim their theory more accurately reflects reality.
13. Our practice is challenged by malcontents who claim their practices will improve our reality.