I'm quite lost, can’t find my own comment or yours, Marge... [Can’t handle the Substack program in such a way as to conduct a cogent conversation…] Anyway, when it comes to blundering around, colliding with one belief, getting tripped by another, putting one's foot in a puddle and sinking in up to one's middle... why... the question is, “Who's sighted?”
At best, we’re like the blind man healed by Jesus who could not at first make sense of what he was seeing... trees or people?
This thing of taking beliefs for truth, taking representations for what they represent, taking ideas for concrete realities... then taking the harmless neighbor—wrong kind of face, wrong color skin, wrong politics, wrong religion (or worse, no religion...) anyway something “different”, something “not one of us...”—then, because you hate yourself, taking the neighbor you’re commanded to love “as yourself” for a horrific Hannibal Lecter demon out to murder you and store bits of you in his deep freeze... and reacting accordingly... Why, that's not just blindness... that's getting turned into a figment of DT's psychotic nightmare...!
So much fear-and-hate-filled madness, so much blindness, turning the land into a smoke-filled labyrinth of dark distorting mirrors...
*
When we look around us, we’ll do well to remember Diogenes carrying a lantern in brilliant Athenian daylight. When asked why, he answered:
I agree with you, Peter, on the idiocy of our national conversation and the difficulty of a substack conversation! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You have a lot to say.
A lot too much. Nevertheless, I'm sharing a package more...
*
“In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men [murdered there by the KKK] had been found.
‘I believe in states' rights,’ he said. ‘I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.’ ”
For people used to reciting the (basically Nicene) Creed every Sunday (without understanding most of its content or the political and social function of this text and its recital dating back to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire) Reagan’s triple Credo will have gone down like a well-sugared happy-pill.
Yet… what is a belief? What are our beliefs? Here I’m going to veer off.
Everything we think is true or not true is… a belief.
Belief is the mind being asked to engage with a particular object… through force of habit.
Conventions about how we cope with appearances, enforce conformist doxa and ignore anomalies, even in the face of evidence.
Some insights into how the mind is kept straight and narrow are to be found in a little book published in the late 19th century: Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott.
Another angle on this phenomenon: to animals, we ascribe stupidity and ignorance, given the infrangible limitations of animal life; yet human beings suffer from what one might term “higher stupidity”—built-in forms of misapprehension to which only we have access—we can get it right, we can get it wrong, and we have highly developed skills for justifying getting it wrong. This higher stupidity confuses appearances with realities, concepts with truth, representations with what’s represented, the extrinsic with the intrinsic, what’s secondary with what’s essential.
Only human beings have hubris, only human beings can take a misleader, a conman, for a true leader. Wolves, baboons, wild dogs cannot do this. Because of this built-in flaw which represents the other side of the coin that confers powers of mental discernment, civilized human beings’ survival skills are distinctly inferior to those of social animals...
And you don’t even need to believe in Darwinian evolution to understand this…
If I insist on the binary, at once positive and negative polarity of human intelligence—both-it-is-and-it-is-not—it is because I see this as a constant. Yet, this constant is accompanied by a secondary feature, namely, many or most modern human beings’ inability to perceive or deliberately distinguish more than one aspect of it at a time… If-it’s-not-this-it-must-be-that. If we had been a Creator deity we’d have designed birds with one wing, then wondered why they can’t fly. Frequently, we remain stuck with that one positive or negative, even in the face of overwhelming evidence… We’ve lost the ability to cope with paradox.
A failing that leaves us ill-equipped to meet with the demands of life…
Also, I can picture a new American Crusade against Muslim countries. Can’t you? Of course they wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to call it that. Or maybe they would…
We’ll be back to “an eye for an eye” and everyone will be blind. That’s what the oligarchs and theocrats dream of!
I'm quite lost, can’t find my own comment or yours, Marge... [Can’t handle the Substack program in such a way as to conduct a cogent conversation…] Anyway, when it comes to blundering around, colliding with one belief, getting tripped by another, putting one's foot in a puddle and sinking in up to one's middle... why... the question is, “Who's sighted?”
At best, we’re like the blind man healed by Jesus who could not at first make sense of what he was seeing... trees or people?
This thing of taking beliefs for truth, taking representations for what they represent, taking ideas for concrete realities... then taking the harmless neighbor—wrong kind of face, wrong color skin, wrong politics, wrong religion (or worse, no religion...) anyway something “different”, something “not one of us...”—then, because you hate yourself, taking the neighbor you’re commanded to love “as yourself” for a horrific Hannibal Lecter demon out to murder you and store bits of you in his deep freeze... and reacting accordingly... Why, that's not just blindness... that's getting turned into a figment of DT's psychotic nightmare...!
So much fear-and-hate-filled madness, so much blindness, turning the land into a smoke-filled labyrinth of dark distorting mirrors...
*
When we look around us, we’ll do well to remember Diogenes carrying a lantern in brilliant Athenian daylight. When asked why, he answered:
“I'm looking for a man...”
I agree with you, Peter, on the idiocy of our national conversation and the difficulty of a substack conversation! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You have a lot to say.
A lot too much. Nevertheless, I'm sharing a package more...
*
“In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men [murdered there by the KKK] had been found.
‘I believe in states' rights,’ he said. ‘I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.’ ”
For people used to reciting the (basically Nicene) Creed every Sunday (without understanding most of its content or the political and social function of this text and its recital dating back to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire) Reagan’s triple Credo will have gone down like a well-sugared happy-pill.
Yet… what is a belief? What are our beliefs? Here I’m going to veer off.
Everything we think is true or not true is… a belief.
Belief is the mind being asked to engage with a particular object… through force of habit.
Conventions about how we cope with appearances, enforce conformist doxa and ignore anomalies, even in the face of evidence.
Some insights into how the mind is kept straight and narrow are to be found in a little book published in the late 19th century: Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott.
[cfr. https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Abbott/paper.pdf and https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Abbott/]
Another angle on this phenomenon: to animals, we ascribe stupidity and ignorance, given the infrangible limitations of animal life; yet human beings suffer from what one might term “higher stupidity”—built-in forms of misapprehension to which only we have access—we can get it right, we can get it wrong, and we have highly developed skills for justifying getting it wrong. This higher stupidity confuses appearances with realities, concepts with truth, representations with what’s represented, the extrinsic with the intrinsic, what’s secondary with what’s essential.
Only human beings have hubris, only human beings can take a misleader, a conman, for a true leader. Wolves, baboons, wild dogs cannot do this. Because of this built-in flaw which represents the other side of the coin that confers powers of mental discernment, civilized human beings’ survival skills are distinctly inferior to those of social animals...
And you don’t even need to believe in Darwinian evolution to understand this…
If I insist on the binary, at once positive and negative polarity of human intelligence—both-it-is-and-it-is-not—it is because I see this as a constant. Yet, this constant is accompanied by a secondary feature, namely, many or most modern human beings’ inability to perceive or deliberately distinguish more than one aspect of it at a time… If-it’s-not-this-it-must-be-that. If we had been a Creator deity we’d have designed birds with one wing, then wondered why they can’t fly. Frequently, we remain stuck with that one positive or negative, even in the face of overwhelming evidence… We’ve lost the ability to cope with paradox.
A failing that leaves us ill-equipped to meet with the demands of life…
Also, I can picture a new American Crusade against Muslim countries. Can’t you? Of course they wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to call it that. Or maybe they would…