Deleuze electrified me this morning. I need to circle back to this after I finish my OOO binge:

Modern society clearly does not function on the basis of codes. Yet if we consider the evolution of Marxism or Freudianism (rather than taking Marx and Freud literally), we see that they are paradoxically launched in an attempt at recodification: recodification by the state, in the case of Marxism (“You have been made ill by the state, and you will be cured by the state” — but not the same state), and recodification by the family, in the case of Freudianism (“You have been made ill by the family, and you will be cured by the family” — but not the same family). Marxism and psychoanalysis in a real sense constitute the fundamental bureaucracies one public, the other private — whose aim is somehow or other to recodify everything that ceaselessly becomes decodified at the horizon of our culture.

Nietzsche’s concern, on the contrary, is not this at all. His task lies elsewhere: beyond all the codes of past, present, and future, to transmit something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified. To transmit it to a new body, to invent a body that can receive it and spill it forth; a body that would be our own, the earth ‘s, or even something written…

We are all familiar with the great instruments of codification. Societies do not vary much, after all, and they do not have so very many means of codification.

I’m reading an Object Oriented Ontology book. The OOO folks talk about withdrawal of objects from one another. Things are essentially hidden from one another prior to interaction. Is subjectivity part of what is withdrawn into the interiority of being?

We can certainly choose to fold subjectivity into the withdrawal, and this choice has interesting implications. But what if we choose not to? What if we brace ourselves and look at things dualistically as if subjects and objects are not reducible to one another as products or emergent properties, what then? What does this allow us to do? What does it inhibit? What are the trade-offs?

Choices? Uses? Trade-offs? That sounds like design, not philosophy.

I am, in fact, a designer. I used to be a designer strictly by profession, but increasingly I am a designer by confession. As I’ve lived a designer’s life, spending my working hours propping and poking at tricky stacks of multi-meta-level of design problems (“how can my collaborator and I get aligned on how to get our team aligned on how to get our client aligned on how to get their organization aligned on how best to satisfy their customer’s need?”) my mind has been trained to move in designerly ways. The domain of design has overgrown my life.

Now I see design problems everywhere I look. What does that mean? It means that I see nearly everything in terms of interactions among subjective and objective elements. To my eyes most problems are self-evidently design problems. And I find myself second-naturally evaluating things of all kinds as solutions to implicit design problems. A major part of this evaluation is determining if the solution is attempted to solve the best problem, or whether it just accepted the most obvious or or most conventional problem without reflection. Or if the solution seemed to be picked on the basis of the novelty, difficulty or complexity of the problem with too much reflection on the thinking part, and too little on the sense of urgency or applicability — a vice endemic to virtuosos. If I end up rejecting OOO it is likely because I’ve concluded that OOO is a virtuoso’s playground, and not a viable way to re-see reality in more effective ways.

In my world, subjects are characterized by inner-lives that determine their outer-behavior, whereas objects are characterized by algorithmic controllability. The mode of thought best suited to subjectivity is understanding; where the mode of thought best suited to objectivity is comprehension. What’s the difference? Understanding a subject entails acquiring some degree of ability to comprehend objectivity as that particular subject comprehends it. This is true for an individual subject and it is true for an academic subject.

An ideal subject is autonomous; an ideal object is automatic. To the degree a subject is freed from the compulsion to follow externally imposed rules it becomes more subjective and less objective. The goal of a designer is to work inside a free subjects’s objectivity so he or she autonomously chooses to participate in your design system along with the other autonomous, semi-autonomous (constrained) and automatic participants.

I think I am engaged in some pretty complex question-begging at this point. Because I choose to see philosophy as a species of design, I am evaluating OOO as a designed thing and wondering if it will help me think in a way helpful to a designer of philosophies (about design) or as a designer of other kinds of useful, usable and desirable systems for my fellow-beings.

I am playing around with the possibility of studying Science, Technology and Society at Tech.

From Tim Morton’s Hyperobjects:

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory spearheaded by Bohr holds that though quantum theory is a powerfully accurate heuristic tool, peering underneath this tool to see what kind of reality might underlie it would be absurd because quantum phenomena are “irreducibly inaccessible to us.”

“Powerfully accurate heuristic tool” jumps out of the page at me. It is one of many examples of Morton’s explicit philosophical instrumentalism: discover-creating — instaurating — ways to think realities that otherwise resist thought. This is philosophy’s product: conceivability from what has been inconceivable.

Morton’s justification — his background understanding — came earlier in the book, what I take to be a pluralism rooted in the most radical imaginable take on Heraclitus’s maxim “Nature likes to hide.” Reading this, I imagine reality as a hermeneutic holographic film, with each object existing as a parabolic cell of the interpreting and expressing the reality it encounters in its own dialect:

And as an object-oriented ontologist I hold that all entities (including “myself ”) are shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadows. Thus, no discourse is truly “objective,” if that means that it is a master language that sits “meta” to what it is talking about. There is also a necessarily iterative, circling style of thought in this book. This is because one only sees pieces of a hyperobject at any one moment. Thinking them is intrinsically tricky.

This book is a demonstration of thinking hyperobjects. But why think hyperobjects? Even here we must learn to think the importance of the purpose:

Lingis’s book The Imperative is a remarkable reworking of Kantian ethics, taking phenomenology into account. The phenomenology in question is Lingis’s own, developed from years of study and affiliation with Emmanuel Levinas, and very different from the Husserlian phenomenology, that is, its great-grandparent. In particular, Lingis makes it possible to think a truly ecological ethics.

So, back to this idea of philosophy being the instauration of heuristic tools. I looked up the etymology of “heuristic” and was delighted to discover that it is derived from heuriskein “to find”; and that “eureka” is a sibling word coming from heureka “I have found”, perfect tense of heuriskein. Concepts provide us abstract meaningful structures, through which we can find meaning in our experiences.

I really like Hyperobjects. I am going to have to go back and reread Graham Harman and make another attempt at reading Meillassoux. I think Speculative Realism might be more relevant to my philosophy and religious life than I’d imagined.

I am noticing how much I like it when cultures enjoy a relaxed and creative attitude toward themselves. I noticed it first with Jews toward their religion: Judaism belongs to Jews in a way that Christianity does not belong to Christians.

I’m seeing the same thing with the French and their historical buildings, and the Basque and their amazing food. These things matter to them and they are proud of it, but not in a pure or distanced way. They are in it, and of it, and they value it as participants and continuers, not as preservers.

…reality is like this (ontological background), therefore I am like this (practical foreground)…

…being like this (practical background) demonstrates to me that reality is like this (ontological foreground)…

“Nature likes to hide” – Heraclitus

“As an object-oriented ontologist I hold that all entities (including “myself ”) are shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadows…” – Morton

“Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — this is a recluse’s verdict: ‘There is something arbitrary in the fact that he came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he here laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper — there is also something suspicious in it.’ Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask.” – Nietzsche

“The second way in which Harman attacked the problem was by a thorough reading of the startling tool-analysis in the opening sections of Heidegger’s Being and Time. This reading demonstrates that nothing in the ‘later’ Heidegger, its plangency notwithstanding, topples the tool-analysis from the apex of Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger, in other words, was not quite conscious of the astonishing implications of the discovery he made in the tool-analysis: that when equipment—which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all—is functioning, or ‘executing’ (Vollzug), it withdraws from access (Entzug); that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand (vorhanden). This can only mean, argues Harman, that there is a vast plenum of unique entities, one of whose essential properties is withdrawal—no other entity can fully account for them. These entities must exist in a relatively flat ontology in which there is hardly any diference between a person and a pincushion. And relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious and hence aesthetic in nature.” – Morton

“The level of outrage is so high. It feels like talking to anyone, anywhere, in 2018 is just landmine hopscotch.” — Tina Fey, on David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction

It seems many folks I talk to these days believe disrespect is a kind of deduction from a person’s fund of social capital. If a person already possesses a great fortune in social capital — in the form of privilege, or prestige, or power — they can spare such withdrawals of respect.

And if they’ve inherited this social capital fortune from previous generations, and never earned it themselves, is it really theirs to have? And was the fortune accumulated legitimately? Perhaps they deserve to be divested of this ill-gained social capital. And look how impoverished other groups are… redistribution of respect is not only permissible, it is required!

Where did this belief come from? Were other conceptions of respect considered? Why did this way of seeing things prevail?

Do the people who use this “fund model” of respect even know they are using it? Are they aware that other conceptions are possible? Or that these models have practical consequences?

*

Here is my view on the matter:

Disrespect is immediately and intrinsically painful.

What do I mean by disrespect? I mean being regarded as unworthy of consideration. A disrespected person’s thoughts, feelings, interpretations, judgments and intentions do not matter.

When we amass power, wealth, prestige, etc. one of the primary benefits is receiving respect. If respect is withheld, we tend to use our other resources to regain it. This is where honor, revenge, etc. enters the picture.

Wherever a person seems able to absorb acts of disrespect with dignity, this does not come from some mysterious store of respect — it comes from a place of benevolent contempt. The disrespected person cares too little about the disrespectful person to even acknowledge the slight. It is this aloofness that creates the illusion of a prestige fund among folks who misunderstand the nature of respect.

So no, we cannot draw on some mysterious fund of social capital to balance out disrespect any more than we can draw on a fund of past pleasures to absorb pain.

*

The problem I see with the forms of disrespect I see permeating and dominating our society is the disrespect precludes all civil appeals.

Normal human indignation at being treated with disrespect is derided as “fragility” or demographic “rage”. And reasoned arguments against such treatment are summarily dismissed as self-interested “motivated reasoning” unworthy of consideration.

No normal people, and least of all people who respect enough to desire mutual respect, can tolerate this for long.

*

This is an incredibly dangerous situation, and it is caused by philosophical ignorance: never reflecting on hw we think or how we might think differently and better.

I was extremely saddened watching Hanna Gadsby’s Netflix special a couple of nights ago. My wife and I were watching her, and we agreed: we liked her. We weren’t cracking up, but we found her interesting and we cared about what she was saying. But then… as she began to move from relating her intensely personal story, to interpreting and generalizing her experiences, things went in a dark and starkly impersonal, political direction — to a collectivist, highly formatted, standardized diagnosis of her life’s pain. Who was her villain who broke her down? Was it anti-gay fundamentalists? Was it ideologues who refuse to engage with other people as individuals, preferring instead to view them as examples of some despised category? Was it people who succumbed to their tribe’s default hostility and prejudice instead of following their own consciences?

No, Gadsby reflexively reached for the crowd-pleasing all-purpose punching bag category that the identitarian left never tires of blaming and abusing for all injustice in the world: the Unholy Trinity of identity intersectionality: whiteness/maleness/heterosexuality. Sadly, I am pretty sure this is what her core audience responds to most powerfully in her “challenging” comedy, the part that dittos and reinforces how they already feel and think. They love how gratifyingly unchallenging it is. It is for them how Left Behind paperbacks and Jesus camps are for fundamentalist children.

And Gadsby is quite happy to alienate examples her despised category: “The only people I don’t reach on a very personal level are straight white men. They don’t really need another entertainer dedicated for them exclusively, so they’re fine.”

And here also she marches the party line: It is not the intrinsic offense of open scorn that offends the white male heterosexual… no, it is the thwarting of unbridled entitlement, that something in this world dares to be for someone else! It is not a constant barrage of generalized disparagement that is disheartening… no, it is that this disapproval signals the requirement to share unequally distributed power with other categories for a change. It is not frustratingly unjust that the people advancing these arguments scornfully reject objections to those arguments ad hominem — it is that these arguments threaten their hegemony. They’re just too unaware of the fact that their collective interests avoidably produce delusion and motivated reasoning to comprehend why their perceptions are invalid and their reasons unworthy of consideration.

This is not (as so many young leftists like Ezra Klein insist) a question of how far liberalism ought to be taken, a matter of where the line between moderate and extreme ought to be drawn. Klein doesn’t make liberalism “go too far” — he doesn’t take it far enough, or even allow it to go anywhere. His worldview is, in fact, radically anti-liberal. Klein has characterized objections to his approach to anti-racism as anti-anti-racism, but what he practices is not anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-prejudice, but in fact a theoretically justified enthusiastic embrace of prejudice and illiberalism. What Klein calls an “anti-anti-racist”, a liberal would call an anti-racist — a principled opposition of both Klein’s and Trump’s superficially different forms of demographic discrimination.

If we come out of this ordeal intact, we will look back at the illiberalism of the left with the same horror as we do the illiberalism of the right. It is, in fact, hate, and like all hate, it justifies, intensifies and galvanizes its counterpart. In Greek mythology, Ares was known to play both sides of a conflict to generate war. It is abundantly clear to all who are not actively possessed by illiberal left-wing or right-wing ideology that we have an illiberal feedback loop squalling itself up to full war volume.

*

We do not overcome an evil by simply reversing it. Reversed evil is just revenge, a second evil that opposes and feeds the first.

Evil always must be overcome. This unfortunately requires changes to how we think, not just what we think. Changing our opinions is not changing our minds.

I believe many people have become discouraged and angry that racism, sexism and homophobia still exist despite decades of effort to eradicate it, and that the once nearly ubiquitous faith that liberal strategies will overcome them is now in question if not outright rejected.

Increasing numbers of leftists are now rejecting the liberal commitment to remap our identities to encompass all fellow persons. A liberal will not tolerate seeing a fellow person, of any category — demographic, psychographic, ideological, or otherwise — suffering violation of individual rights. Only one category matters: individual. If it happens to someone, anyone, it is happening to a person like me: a fellow individual.

This means crimes are not done to groups, and certainly not to categories! And crimes are not done by groups much less by categories. (I cannot stress this enough: wherever a mind is inclined to see categories acting and being acted upon, that mind is succumbing to solipsism, responding to ideas instead of mind-transcending realities.) This is why Hannah Arendt said that “the physical extermination of the Jewish people… was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people.” Crimes are committed by individuals against individuals, even when — especially when — those individuals believe they are acting on behalf of a category against a category, for the sake of justice.

So, absolutely not: We will never overcome prejudice against groups of people by balancing them out with counter-prejudices. We will not overcome shame of being categorized as some despised thing by heaping shame on the category of person who made us feel ashamed. Martin Luther King said it best: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

The leftist identitarian insistence that white heterosexual masculinity is an identity, its eagerness to impose this identity on people who reject such identities, and its habit of using its own peculiar justificatory logic to strip involuntary members of this identity group of all rights to protest the imposition of identity on the basis of the protesters’s identity is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It is a serious offense to impose an unwanted identity on another person. “No, you are not who you claim you are; you are what I say you are.”

It is an even more serious offense to draw ad hominem conclusions based on imposition of categorization. “Because you belong to this category, you are not able to do or know what you claim you can do or know.”

Refusing to hear a person’s appeal to having an identity and its implications imposed upon them on the basis of that identity and its implications leaves a person with no reasonable recourse. “You would protest being identified as a member of this category, because it is in your interest to evade that identification!”

And then, finally, when the implication of the imposed identity is being treated with disrespect — beyond the disrespect of being aggressively subjected to imposition of an unwanted identity and its implications despite protests — the situation encourages political group identity formation.

Identitarianism breeds counter-identitarianism. Who knows “who started it”? Who even gives a shit? I see it all as one incredibly toxic, cynical, circular and retrogressive political worldview: Identitarianism.

I am deeply disgusted hearing my former allies on the left succumbing to this base nonsense. It seems normal only because it has become so common. And the more common it becomes the more necessary and unavoidable it seems.

There is only one moral response: liberalism.

*

Every individual has a right — a human-given right — to be an individual. No individual gets to decide for another who or what they are.

Wherever groups deny individuals their rights of individuality — including their right to choose the groups with whom they ally and identify — liberals must stand together to defend individuality.

*

Any person who dares tell me that Liberalism is not my true identity, and that my true identity is why they’ve decided it is has lost rights to my respect.

I enjoy the etymological implications of “concept”, “synthesis” and “comprehend” and I’ve taken these implications as hints indicating how these words can be used in a complementary and systematic way.

Concept means taking together. A concept is a tacit, formless capacity to recognize a complex phenomenon as a particular something.

Synthesis means putting together. Syntheses are formal (in the sense of “having form”). Most of what we call “concept” I would call conceptually-directed synthesis: using a tacit conceptual understanding to synthesize words with the intent to indicate the very concept that guided the assembly of words. But we can also play with syntheses in order to acquire a concept, a process well known to researchers in pursuit of original theory.

Comprehension is grasping together: conceptually recognizing a complex phenomenon as something, and then viewing the simpler components of the complex whole as parts of the whole, each related to the others and to the whole in a way illuminated by the concept.

By the way, if all this smells a little Hegelian, that’s because I’m reading Walter Kaufmann’s book on Hegel. Some of my most extraordinary reading moments were mediated via Kaufmann’s translations. (I remember my friend Shaffer asking me how I knew it was Nietzsche I was responding to so powerfully and not some distorted Kaufmann image of Nietzsche. My answer was that it was my reaction that was primary, so I was fine being considered a fanatical enthusiast of Kaufmannietzsche, which was actually pretty damn pomo of my as-yet-prepomo self.) This, plus several strikingly gorgeous bits of original thought scattered through the preface I was reading, made me suddenly curious about who Walter Kaufmann. I realized I couldn’t even match this familiar voice to a face. And what do you know? The wikipedia article on him provided me yet more material supporting my Jewish conversion.

One of the great pleasures of reading Richard Rorty is experiencing his precise neglect of nonhuman actors. The man lived in a wordworld of free-floating humans whose sole purpose was conversation. It helps make what I learned from Bruno Latour extra tangible, that what we converse about is rooted as much in our tacit interactions with things and people as it is in the explicit content of our language.

*

I think Latour made (somewhat) immediate sense to me because his own thinking was formed on his experiences doing ethnography in biology laboratories, and that happens to be my own sole exposure to scientific activity, which, fortuitously was 1) participatory, and 2) frustratingly contrary to my positivist scientistic expectations.

One thing I have discovered about myself over the decades is I am a highly concrete thinker. Anyone who thinks I’m “abstract” is just too psychologically removed to realize how concretely immediate philosophical problems are for me. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are “how do I think out this mess?” problems. If you are one of those unfortunate souls who must be supplied with a defined problem and a mature vocabulary to think, you’ll never experience philosophy, only its conclusions. One of my greatest worries about our times is this: I fear most students who could be philosophical are fed such philosophical conclusions (what x believed and argued) and never encounter the perplexities that motivate philosophical activity, driven by the “stick” of intense anxiety and the “carrot” of faith that something potentially knowable in principle but as-yet-unknowable in fact is uncannily right there. This awe-ful experience is what a religious soul should follow, not bliss. Following bliss turns you into yet another insufferable meditating narcissist with nothing better to do but to cultivate inner peace and emit positive vibes, in the manner of that expensive bronze buddha statue you ordered from dharmacraft.com, the one that looks just perfect sitting in the center of that zen garden you made meditatively, raking rocks, carrying water, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, really being present in the moment, and contemplating the superiority of doing the work instead of wasting your time conceptualizing. Fuck that so much. I am about to discuss misnorms of science, but this religion as seeking peace is a common misnorm of religion, and I detest it. But now I’m two self-indulgent digressions deep.

Back to being concrete. I have discovered working as a human-centered designer that when people talk semi-abstractly about concrete stuff of business — processes, technologies, budgets, etc. — until I’ve seen the people interacting with the systems, following processes, I do not get any of it at all. My mind just rejects it. It connects with nothing, and it all evaporates like a routine dream. I have to go stand on the rough ground, talk to people, ask questions, get confused and then unconfused and try to converse with people about what I’ve learned to develop the kind of working knowledge I need to design well. It’s mostly a disability, but like so many disabilities it produces compensatory alternative capabilities, and makes me “differently abled”. My differently-abled superpower is knowing exactly what I’m talking about, and even better, projecting my mastery of the materials to folks too dull or lazy to process the content of my talking. This applies to design, to philosophy, to religion, and happily, thanks to my brief immersion in laboratory life, to how science actually works.

I was hired to work part-time in a lab for a medical university. Mostly, I did a lot of boring basic IT stuff, but I did get to do one legit scientific task. My job was to use my limited PASCAL programming skills to make a program to measure the twitching of mouse heart cells.

I think I’ve described this before, but this time I want to describe it explicitly expanding that pat “measure the twitching of mouse heart cells” into the kind of actor-network Latour delights in tracing out.

First, let’s expand mouse heart cells. Unfortunately, I was not there to observe how labs work, so I never found out how the lab mice were procured, shipped, stored, etc. All I know is when it was time to do this experiment, lots of mice were brought into the laboratory and situated at the end of the lab benches, along with big vats full of liquid nitrogen. The lab benches were equipped with specially designed rodent guillotines. The lab techs would behead a large number of mice, cut out their still-beating hearts and plop the hearts into the liquid nitrogen. The frozen hearts were then somehow pulverized. I always avoided seeing these activities, so I cannot describe the specifics. The pulverized hearts were placed in a centrifuge, I believe to separate out the various kinds of heart cells. Some particular kind of heart cell (which was the focus of the study) was extracted. The extracted cells were placed in a dish with a collagen ring (no idea how these were produced, but a good ANT researcher would find out that, too) and I’m guessing they were placed in some controlled environment where the heart cells could grow together onto the collagen rings. And, disgustingly, and for biologists, fascinatingly, they would twitch.

Now, let’s expand “measure the twitching”. The heart-coated collagen rings were put onto an electronic caliper. This caliper would return some raw number between zero and some large binary-convenient number, probably 65,535. No constriction is zero, full constriction is 65,535. My program would, when told to start, would capture all these numbers at some interval of time I can’t remember, until it was told to stop, at which time it spat out the average twitch, converted to some unit which I also cannot remember, by a formula which I believe might have originated with the manufacturer of the caliper, but which was handed down to me by a series of forwarded emails. And just to give a sense of time, I checked my email by telnetting to a mainframe operated through command line. I hope this makes my forgetting of details more forgivable.

The problem for me was that these twitches were all over the place. The data seemed ludicrously messy. So being a 20-something smart ass I provided a list of averages calculated a number of different ways (mean, median, and other basic math known even to liberal arts students). I thought I was part of some pretty lame science. Science was supposed to be far more orderly and elevated. I’m not sure which number they used, or even if they used it as written. It had to have been enraging to use. I cannot believe I made it through my youth without being beaten up by an angry mob of reasonable people, but I continue to feel grateful I was spared what I deserved.

Presumably the numbers were recorded, visualized, situated in a paper, submitted journals, juried, and hopefully published, widely cited and used as evidence supporting more research funding, and increasing the prestige and salaries of my bosses. I learned this part only years later reading Latour. Back then I was just trying to earn $5/hour so I could pay my part of the rent for the ratty roach-infested un-air conditioned mansion I inhabited with six other classic late-80s era slackers.

But the more important thing I learned from Latour and other ANT people is that this was real, legitimate science! All these tenuous connected physical linkages, translations from movements to numbers to units to averages to graphs to inferences to arguments to papers to prestige to dollars, these bizarre supplies all converging in one place for obscure purposes — this is science as it is normally done. So many non-human actors — not only mice and instruments and programs, but concepts, procedures, aspirations — were in play here to produce something scientists could discuss. My standards of “good science” were misnorms, causing me to condemn science as it really works on the basis of standards that would condemn all science if viewed close-up.

And I believe Richard Rorty, through sheer practical ignorance, never heard the babble of the nonhuman actors in the human-language conversations among scientists.

I wouldn’t either if it weren’t for my random part-time job at the med school lab.

*

The reason I still adore Richard Rorty’s writing, despite the key omission I just described, is how precise it is and how well his ideas hold if you insert the omitted considerations the right way. I always read him with “what about the non-human interlocutors?” at the ready. And when I plug in my answer, the thoughts work correctly.

And this helps me grasp the importance of Actor-Network Theory as the talented heir to Pragmatism — a basically wonderful way to think that functions even with incomplete parts. And Pragmatism is the philosophical champion of Liberal Democracy, which is the political vision I love. And then I remember that the United States of America, the first nation founded on philosophical argument, was also the nation where Pragmatism was discovered-created-instaurated and then I get to feel intense patriotism like a normal person.

I need to replace my American flag bumper sticker on my car. It was lost when my bumper was repaired.

Maybe I’ll make some PRAGMATISM flag stickers. Text me if you made it to the end of this wildly rambling post, and I’ll get one printed for you, too.

*

We are going to work this crisis of American politics out, in our characteristic American way. Back to Liberalism. Let’s deepen and strengthen Liberalism in our return, by recognizing our fellow non-human citizens, given voice through science.

Every authentic religion eventually produces its own fundamentalism.

An authentic religion is a finite self’s whole-being response to infinite being. It is both actively receptive and receptively active toward reality which no self can contain, which contains all selves, in which self participates as one spark among myriad fellow-sparks, who are respected as messengers from beyond self. Religion is an aid for keeping a self responsive to infinite being. Religious existence is uncomfortable, elusive and perpetually challenging, and formal religion provides a moderate degree of comfort, definition and assistance in maintaining such an existence.

Fundamentalisms result when the basic toward-infinity response is forgotten and unconsciously replaced with a within-me set of concepts. The religion is everted, and all religious concepts are flipped with respect to their “image schema” relationships. Let’s just call this process dysfinition and the resulting state of mind dysfinitude.

In a state of dysfinitude, infinite reality is packed inside a self’s finite mind. Fellow participants in infinity are packed inside the mind as well, becoming messengers of what is already known, either a confirmation of truth or a known bearer of falsehood. And the locus of religious texts — always addressed to and read from and primarily applicable to the first-person self — is shifted to the third-person. One’s own known doctrine addressed to third-person others, to whom it is addressed, for whom it is read and applied. The Golden Rule is deformed to mean that everyone else is obligated to treat me however I believe is right to treat others, whether they like it or not.

*

How does dysfinitude happen? Miseducation. Students are no longer taught the relationship to infinite being through participation in religious existence. Instead they finished religious forms are thrust into their hands to master without ever first experiencing a need for such forms, which is the only way to recognize their purpose.

*

I believe Leftist Identitarianism is the fundamentalist deformation of postmodernism.