metonymy4u

With each shooting and bombing we ask ourselves, “how could this happen?” And yet it is clear that this is the wrong question. The appropriate question is, “given the conditions under which we live, in which real needs are neglected and in which the system only responds with vigorous and visible actions when something this horrendous happens, why isn’t this sort of thing happening more often?” Our so-called social justice system is so far divorced from the realities of behavior and learning that it is analogous to a bunch of scientists trying to get a rocket into orbit through the use of their collective psychokinetic levitation powers. What we don’t seem to understand is that “outrage” tends draw attention to whatever it is directed at. If outrage follows physical violence, then violence will tend to be reinforced. But what would things be like if we were just as outraged by the daily violence of economic rape, the neglect of education, the poverty of social injustice? What would the world be like if every time a child was found to be suffering from malnutrition and bank fraud, the FBI were called in to investigate, and the mayor of every major city put their staff on high alert to seek out similar crimes in progress in their very own communities? A people are defined by what they find outrageous. What do we find most outrageous?

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in our judgmental world, i admire the courage of speech.

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Much of Foucault’s cultural critique centers on an archeology of form vs. function; as models for understanding human experience. These existential (explanatory) models changed significantly in post-Enlightenment Europe. The industrial revolution, Darwinian biology, the ascendancy of liberal republicanism—-all of these reshuffled the deck on human understanding. Whereas Adam Smith replaced formal economies of need and simple exchanges with a functional analysis of labor and capital, Darwinians replaced aesthetic appreciation of form with a functional genealogy of competition and reductive selection. I think Foucault’s point is simply that this had an effect on our view of ourselves. Perhaps salutary, perhaps not. But the dethroning of human aesthetic exceptionalism had far reaching implications that we have thus far failed to thoroughly interrogate. And perhaps—who knows?—to overcome?

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One of the oldest human problems has been the question of how to explain our penchant for suffering. Humans seem to suffer emotionally in ways that other animals do not. Although we do not think this is a true as we once did (we are now more aware of social cognition in dogs, grief in elephants, self-harming behaviors in apes and even a possible case of a dolphin suicide as described in the movie “The Cove”), still it seems that no other species can manage to be so unhappy in the midst of so much economic largess. Why is this? One cause, I believe, is the size of our brains. Our large brains which have more intense, long lasting and overwhelming emotions than other animals, and which also have the cognitive ability to derive hypothetical relationships between simple events. So we can learn not just to be afraid of things that terrify us, but we can also learn to be afraid of terror itself, and learn to wage war on it, even though it is wholly a pigment of our imagination. The ability to derive relationships that are never directly experienced was Kant’s revolutionary insight into human cognitive ability. It was the answer to the problem of the poverty of the stimulus (e.g. how do we get from counting apples in an orchard to the concept of numbers ad infinitum) that had stumped philosophers from Plato to Hume. And although I believe other animals exhibit this ability as well, no other animal has based their entire being upon it the way humans have. The problem is that the same ability which gives us the geometry to build a house or plan an orchard also enables fear of the inevitable “other,” and builds the bombs to kill it.

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i’ve never seen a people so surrounded by wealth, yet so poor.

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One of the ironies of the so-called postmodern world seems to be that, in the name of guaranteeing freedom, we have determined that we must stand for nothing in particular. The problem is that when one stands for nothing, it makes it very hard to stand up for anything. Including freedom.

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Humans commonly assume that we are superior to other species in our communicative abilities. That human language is more complex, more abstract, more precise, more useful, and more sophisticated in some fundamental way than non-human language. But does the data support this assumption? In what way is human communication essentially more advanced than animal communication? Elephants and whales perfected long distance communication millions of years before humans invented email and text messaging, canids are some of the most gregarious species on the planet, and were probably that way long before their domestication by humans 16,000 years ago, and birds and spiders regularly complete astonishing feats of engineering that would challenge the most advanced graduate student in our most prestigious universities. I think that the problem is that animals that seem to have a predilection for human study, like cetaceans, apes and elephants, just haven’t figured out how to teach us the complexities of their language yet. That, or they’re not sure yet whether they really want to have anything to do with those bat-ass crazy humans.

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One of the harsh facts of modern inquiry is the professionalization of the academy. Teachers must become more and more specialized in order to publish or perish and students are increasingly inclined to see their education as one commodity amongst many. And what has this produced? A world of specialists and certificate holders, many of whom have little inclination to encompass a broader sweep of human knowledge or the genealogy of such. The question of where our knowledge originated, and where it seems to be taking us is as little valued today as it is understood. All the while, ideas are used wholesale: for political advancement, for monetary gain, for terror, for destruction. What I regret is that we forget that every idea, which is a habit of thought, was ushered along by a person, and may represent, if we could only spend enough time with it, the one instance of enlightenment that each of us may bring into the world with our fears, our hopes, sufferings and joys. And what a thinking animal is these days seems to concern very few. So people, and their ideas, are shot en masse. And yet each idea has a history like a person: unique, significant, in every way important and remarkable to me. If it were not so, then it would no longer make sense to think or to love.

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How long has it been since we first discovered our biochemical nature? And still the dogma of human exceptionalism continues….

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