Comments on: Rebecca Solnit on culture wars and environmentalism

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:17:20 +0000

wrong thread sorry

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:16:54 +0000

#136:“…serious issue, for example, with the (more or less unconscious) modernist metaphysics that the world is ‘made’ of passive inert stuff, reducible to particles, subject to ‘laws.’”
Actually that’s just late 19th/early20th c. physics. Professor David Deutsch, no slouch on the physics tip in his own write, is convinced and pretty convincing that there are many “other worlds” than this one. In their own universes.
He spreads it out as a kind of linear and parallel thing, but obviously if you have other worlds and universes especially many of them, you can easily have a meta-organization to which all those worlds belong. Must have, pretty much. And then there’s lots of room in that larger picture for all kinds of beings, divine or otherwise. Because its boundaries are infinite, or nearly so.
Those reduced-to “particles” are just the places where the antique instruments began to lose their resolution, bestowing an inaccurate and opportunistic finality on what they found.
“Quarks! The final particles!”
“Whoops! There’s more!”
And more and more, because it’s as infinite, or nearly so, down there, as it is above and beyond.
An assumption in many of the main critiques of religion, and in things like the rejection of telepathy by people like The Amazing Randi et al. is there’s nothing outside the laboratory but noise.
And since there are no such things anyway critics feel they have no responsibility to conjecture pre-existing conflict around them, resistance – opposition to the public explication.
No tension other than between scoffing and credulity.
If telepathy is a real capability in human beings it’s probably been around a long time, and probably developed into and among groups of the like-minded, behaving the way contraband economies or repressed sexual minorities do, and the lack of mainstream verifiability and examples may have more to do with occult business practices and weaponization than dipshit chimeras and delusional fantasies.
The Scots especially, and Gaels generally, have a long tradition of second-sight and prophetic dream, Native Americans as well. Polynesian kava-visions recorded the Europeans coming before it happened. No accident perhaps these cultures were broken violently.
The facts and hypotheses we’re getting now from the front lines of physics seem as weird and counter-intuitive as anything analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ever carried. It doesn’t take much more than an open mind to project that weird wonderfulness into some kind of much bigger than human reality, with much bigger than human players working in it. The Matrix being only one fairly mundane example.
Not that I’m saying that’s exactly what’s up, but the anally-clenched rationalism that refutes the childish beliefs of the religious won’t stand up to the blowback from its own team’s illuminations. There’s either other dimensions out there, or there’s something even stranger. No going back to the Edenic world of simple things.
The rationalists demand reasons to alter their views, which makes sense, as does the reliance on faith by believers. The conflict’s really about survival isn’t it? Or is that a diversion?
Faith abets the surviving of the faithful, as sceptical reason abets its adherents.
What everyone wants is insurance against being scammed. My personal experience is that the louder and more obvious sellers of that insurance are generally scammers themselves, and make dubious allies at best.
There’s something tender and open in the public faith of people like Lindsey. Something vulnerable that gets chopped up in the jaws of logic. Even though I don’t believe her view of things is accurate enough as it stands, I’ll insist it’s no more inaccurate than most rationalist worldviews. Just less rational, which you’d expect.
Rationalism gets its eminence from its immediate utility, and that gets reinforced in an educational system that makes it central to success, which constantly rewards logical patterning in the young, and all too often discourages and trivializes the intuitive and imaginative. By the time most of us get out of university the primacy of rational thought is asseverated like dogma, it’s in the air we breathe, even though most of our experience and behavior most of the time has little to do with conscious logic.
In the Church of Logical and Rational Positivity, as with any system of tenuous and unsupported beliefs, heresy gets met with scorn and violent denunciation, and given enough political strength, outright persecution.
Calls for humility and tolerance become brave in that context.

By: yehiel

yehiel — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:59:23 +0000

jazz, blues, etc are absolutely not ‘all over’ india. just over a very small section of the rich urban populace. but bollywood and those horrid tamil-pop songs absolutely are. and they are absolutely based in raag/ragam and have very little to do with the american south except very very superficially. maybe the same case can be made for china (SE asia, africa, arab countries) too but i’m on less firm ground there. local pop varieties are way more popular at least in asia (SE, arab countries, iran etc) than any rock/jazz/blues except for a few very obvious pieces.

as for the piece. prejudice cuts both ways. or else why would someone’s hairdo(n’t) offend anyone? good will and grassroots action may be able to change it (prejudice) somewhat but it has been and is being exploited to great political profit by everyone so i can’t see it ever stopping.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:20:29 +0000

[cue Monty Python] Is this the room for an argument…?

By: notsneaky

notsneaky — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:36:07 +0000

Alright. First “Broadway Musical” isn’t a musical genre, it’s a genre of a stage show, unless you think Jesus Christ Superstar, West Side Story, Dolly and The Lion King are in the same “genre”. Second, so what if PoO played to packed houses? I’m sure Pavarotti sold out shows as well but that doesn’t mean that opera is as universal as rock n roll. Hell, I’m sure there are plenty of Zydeco bands neither me nor you’ve ever heard of who “play to packed houses” (of a given size). Third, PoO played to packed houses in certain places and with certain people. People in rural Moldova didn’t see it (though they might’ve given the opportunity out of sheer curiosity and novelty aspect – the latter being sort of the point) but they still listen to rock n roll and to a lesser extent jazz and blues.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:06:27 +0000

You’re off your cake mate. Name me a city where Phantom of the Opera didn’t play to packed houses. And that’s a pale imitation of the genuine classics of the genre, fifty years after the peak of its popularity.

By: notsneaky

notsneaky — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:43:44 +0000

It’s similar as with Bob Marley and reggae. There’s a few of’em that have worldwide recognition but the genre as a whole doesn’t.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:20:36 +0000

And I’m claiming the genre they were a part of does not have worldwide popular appeal in the same way as other genres.

You’re claiming that the Broadway musical was a local taste that never really took off?

By: Words of a true Uniter « doop HQ

Words of a true Uniter « doop HQ — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:52:42 +0000

[...] H/T [...]

By: notsneaky

notsneaky — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:09:04 +0000

His songs were from Midwest/New York. And I’m claiming the genre they were a part of does not have worldwide popular appeal in the same way as other genres.

And it’s cool to not respect the Southerner’s faith in the divinity of JC, as long as you respect all the great songs that were written about it. Which I guess means a kind of a respect for the cultural faith in the divinity of JC of Southerners. So the official CT position still needs to be tweaked a bit.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:31:58 +0000

Well, no, I didn’t claim Cole Porter’s songs were “originally” from the South

well then you’re implicitly claiming that either they weren’t written in the twentieth century or they weren’t great music. C’mon, don’t get soft on me man.

By the way, the official position of CT (by which I mean the iron line which all contributors have to adhere to, as spotted by perceptive commenters like john m) is now that we have to respect and acknowledge the validity of all aspects of Southern white culture except for their belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. I am not 100% sure how well this is going to sell to be honest, but let’s give it the old college try, as they say at Kent State.

By: notsneaky

notsneaky — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:36:49 +0000

Well, no, I didn’t claim Cole Porter’s songs were “originally” from the South, or anybody else’s for that matter. I claimed jazz was “originally” from the South which is an altogether different thing.

And yes, there is the whole pile of sand problem in this. There were music halls and vaudeville’s in 1850’s and then there was jazz in the 20th century. But even though it wasn’t invented ex nihilo at some point the grains of sand did have to turn into a sand pile.

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:29:11 +0000

Previous musical generations tended to beat on the sides of a pianoforte, whereas in the 20th century the “keys” were discovered by innovative New Orleans musicians blazing new trails.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:22:51 +0000

This is basically unsustainable on anything other than some sort of musical version of the “one drop of blood principle”. For example if you’re going to say that Cole Porter’s songs count as being “originally” from the American South (because you’re claiming that there’s nothing in them but jazz, and you’re claiming that all jazz is from the South and New York City never developed anything important), then you can sustain this argument, but at the price I think of not being taken very seriously any more.

Also you have to pretend that all the jazz, blues and country forms were invented ex nihilo in the twentieth century, which is much less credible. They had music halls and vaudeville houses in the 1850s and they weren’t playing jazz, blues or country, but they were clearly influential in the South, among other places.

By: Angry African on the Loose

Angry African on the Loose — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:44:16 +0000

We should also look at other cultures that might suffer because of global warming – but that is caught in another type of Catch 22. Africa might suffer more from the changing climate than any other continent. Especially because of the lack of social safety nets provided by governments. Is there a solution for Africa when they have so much else to focus on – health, poverty, war and hunger? Or are we caught in a Catch 22 with no sustainable solutions? More on this in my blog at http://angryafrican.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/solving-the-changing-african-climate-a-catch-22/