Terence quotes

"So the thing that I thought would be interesting to unpack a little this evening is what I call “the balkanization of epistemology” — or what [McKenna's son] calls simply the “curse of relativism.” This is the idea that you can’t tell what’s going on anyway, so no matter how squirrelly what you think, it’s no squirrellier or no less squirrelly than what anybody else thinks. All ideas are somehow on this even footing, including ideas that have taken hundreds of years and the talent of thousands of people to put together, and something somebody just channeled in from Francis Bacon, who’s living under Catalina Island in a state of suspended animation with a troupe of Atlantean engineers who are uploading human fetal tissue to who-knows-where.
"This balkanization of epistemology: it’s sort of like, if you believed in economic theory, thinking that it would be a good idea if everybody printed their own money. And then to the degree that you had vigor for the use of your printing press, you could run off more and more copies of whatever meme you had invested in, and I suppose these things would compete. In your imagination they would compete — but anybody who’s studied economics for ten minutes can tell you there’s something called Gresham’s Law, which is that “bad money drives out good money.” And I think it’s even more true with ideology. Squirrelly ideas drive out ideas of depth and substance. There’s a kind of danger of being gently — without quite noticing what’s going on — ushered into a world of increasingly more cartoonlike ontological and epistemological fantasies about what’s going on, or what’s partially going on.

- this came from somewhere online, abrupt something

"The plants seem to be the things that shake us out of these cultural conventions. We have this very bad habit of - when we encounter a new experience, we describe it; and as we describe it, we erase its reality, and replace it with a map. And foreverafter, when we encounter that input, we access the map and overlay it over the thing and say, "Ah, I know what this is." And so by the time a child is 5 years old, they have completely entered into a symbolic construct which hides the real world from them, and fortunately these plant teachers seem to have the unique ability of showing you the relativity of language, which, for us, is the relativity of being. And then, you're freed because you have seen something incontrovertible - there's no going back, then. That is the first great gateway on the path: to realize the relativity of language and the malleability of the world....
"Coming out into the desert is typical of people seeking visions. The first thing you have to do is leave the polis. Culture is this effort to hold back the mystery, and replace it with a mythology, which is then in the control of those who recite that mythology, whether they be shamans or priests."

This came from a 10/2010 psychedelic salon (plants talk)

Dumping relativism

I suppose I'm embarrassingly late on the intellectual and philosophical bandwagon, but I'm finally starting to see the ills of acquiescent liberal relativism. Of course this could easily be a preface to a xenophobic, nationalistic, racist rant, but it's not.

Relativism is quite alluring. I guess I'm talking cultural relativism, but that often translates into a moral relativism. But selecting a relativistic rather than a pluralistic approach is tempting to us American white middle classers who feel guilty about being American, white, and middle class. So we actually do reject many of those systems' values, but instead of moving towards a new value system, we just say "all values are equal."

(Contemporary radical leftism is partly guilty of imbuing us with this new value system; although most of the thinkers seem truly principled, the sympathy for our victims and eagerness to take their side comes sometimes close to overlooking their transgressions).

I think the contemporary liberal sympathy for Islam (e.g. putting footbaths in American airports) is less a true pluralistic or relativistic activism and more an overcompensation for our guilt for murdering thousands of their people. Thus we are faced with the choice of hating America and hating the East, or hating America and supporting the East. What a simplistic analysis, but I'll let it stand.

My renewed interest in dumping relativism has been a long time coming. I've been ethically passive for far too long, and I don't plan on becoming an activist anytime soon but relativism is not really a good solution. I agree with Arthur Schlesinger that belief in absolutes is a far greater threat and far more damaging than relativism, but a pluralistic perspective can tread a nice middle ground - making strong ethical assertions without refusing to hear the Other.

This thinking was provoked the last 2 days with a couple points I heard lately from Zizek and McKenna.

The McKenna point:

"The failure to teach mathematics, in practical, social, and political terms, boils down to a failure to teach logic and discriminating understanding. The great evil, in my humble opinion, which haunts our enterprise...that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism. And what is relativism? It's the idea that there is no distinction between shit and shinola. That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing. So one person is a chaos theorist, another is a follower of the revelations of this or that new age guru, someone else is channeling information from the Pleides, and we have been taught that political correctness demands that we treat all these things with equal weight...
"The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity, is the belief that we cannot point out pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community. And this problem is growing worse all the time...
"We have tolerated too many loose heads in our community [the psychedelic/shaman community I think]. We are not willing to take on the karma involved in argument and discourse that actually gores somebody's ox...
"We have perfected politeness. We have perfected the ability to listen to damn foolishness without betraying by so much as a flick of an eyebrow that we realize what we're in the presence of. Now I think it's time to refine our mathematical skills, learn to think straight, and not be afraid to denounce the pernicious forms of foolishness which are vitiating the energies of our community and making us appear marginal and absurd in the discourse about truly transforming society."

And Zizek:

(in his Guardian article):
"There is now one predominant centrist party that stands for global capitalism, usually with a liberal cultural agenda (for example, tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities). Opposing this party is an increasingly strong anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by overtly racist neofascist groups...[T]he main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society...Progressive liberals are, of course, horrified by such populist racism. However, a closer look reveals how their multicultural tolerance and respect of differences share with those who oppose immigration the need to keep others at a proper distance...After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as "unreasonable" and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse "reasonably" racist protective measures...This vision of the detoxification of one's neighbour suggests a clear passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face."

(and on Democracy Now):
"I think there is a failure in this standard, liberal, multicultural vision, which means every ethnic group, whatever, to itself, all we need is a neutral legal framework guaranteeing the coexistence of groups. Sorry if I shock someone, but I think we do need what Germans call Leitkultur, leading culture. Just it shouldn’t be nationally defined. We should fight for that. Yes, I agree with right-wingers. We need a set of values accepted by all. But what will these values be, my god? We neglected this a little bit. You know that it’s not just this abstract liberal model: you have your world, I have my world, we just need a neutral legal network—how we will politely ignore each other...[I]t’s absolutely crucial how this anti-immigrant explosion is linked to the withdrawal of leftist politics, especially in the matters of economy and so on. It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that "No, no, no, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism" and so on. They don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter."

McKenna's remarks imply that one should take a principled stand, or at least educate oneself as a defense against the preponderance of inaccurate (wrong) thought memes. As a Platonist, McKenna would I think be just fine with assailing innaccurate or destructive beliefs in favor of the proclamation of what's good, true and beautiful.
Zizek too gives permission to reject the views of others. For him, as for McKenna I imagine, firmly adopting a countercultural ethics is an absolute necessity to avert catastrophe (though the vehicles for the adoption of new views are likely to differ).

The problem is that acquiescence leaves a vacuum which may be filled by bad ideas or pernicious foolishness or by racist right wing groups.

I guess the idea is, consider your freedom to reject the view of the Other, but of course only after fair dialogue and reasoned contemplation. You do not have to kowtow in the favor of sensitivity. You should try to be respectful and keep your integrity, but rejection of an idea is OK! What will be tough is to square wu-wei with passioned disagreement. I have a feeling that, in practice, intervention in the favor of the good will be easier than it seems. That is, it should flow as part of an interaction, and not a strained intervention.

Some of my favorite fiction read lately

Looks like in large part individuals rebelling in some way against society huh?

- Lost Weekend
- John Barleycorn
- Frozen Woman
- Time Must Have a Stop

Couple things

1. Why would an egalitarian society breed discontent? The problem in conservatism is entitlement and refusal to bend one's way of life for the good of the community. Therefore if a leader calls for sacrifice from a member in order to contribute to the community (taxes, e.g.) then that member will rebel on the basis that he disagrees with his individual freedoms being violated. A system that promotes individual freedom over the public/communal good will breed this race of individuals who is resolutely opposed to individual sacrifice over the public good; or, they have their own conception of public (I don't want my tax money funding abortions or going to any gay groups, but I will support my money going to the military or to anti-immigration groups) that is opposed to the leader's conception of public. So even the most egalitarian society will have to ask someone to make a sacrifice of some sort, and that sacrifice will go to benefit "others" and those others may be people he does not want to see benefit, especially at his expense. Thus we see the germs of discontent. And I'm mostly looking at this from a leftist point of view (considering the working class people recruited by the military in Z, or the recent anti-gay, anti-integration uprisings in Serbia) as it is the conservative-minded who conceptualize themselves more rigidly as cohesive groups unwilling to compromise. We need a good definition of communal good that excludes racists and terrorists, i.e. that does not recognize their rights! We can of course use Habermasian discourse, or participatory exercizes emphasizing common values and mutual responsibilities. I would say that the germs of discontent from people who want to oppose communitarian good are valid only if the way of life that is being denied to them is not "harmful" to others, a metric that I cannot define right now.

2. What about the information seeking habits of the mystically minded? This is a massive group, and I'm defining it broadly to include Christians seeking to hear the voice of God, psychedelic people seeking to take trips, Buddhists deep in meditation to erode the conception of self, new agers holding a seance to contact the dead, and so on. In our discussion yesterday, we talked about outlying information-seeking habits: pornography, piracy, hacking, drug users - as these are all counterculture, they are wrought with slightly more risk. Mysticism too is often counterculture - people seeking a mindstate that is at union with the divine or at least alternative consciousnesses. What does this "group" do to search for information? What sources do they seek?