see?

"See?? See the snow goons? I didn't make them! I mean, I made one, sort of by accident, but the rest made themselves! They were building an army, see? See, that's why had to freeze them last night! I had to get them while they were sleeping! It was my only chance, see? See, it all makes sense! "

"See? See???"

"They never see."

Q. and A. Time

I have written quite a bit over the last week, and I even published a long post, but then I read something in the paper about local bloggers who actually send their comments to the newspaper where Mark's friend Allison works. Here is a sample:

RACISM, IGNORANCE SURFACE IN LOCAL BLOGS

"Take for example, the story about the Hernandez family of LaSalle who received a monetary gift from a Secret Santa who showed up on their doorstep. The family was ecstatic and wanted very much to thank the man who gave them the money, and most importantly, opportunity to give their children something they really wanted for Christmas. In just a few hours after the story appeared on the News Tribune Website, bloggers criticize the Hernandez family for their financial choices and chastised them by assuming they could not speak English.

"Another example is in the cockfighting story or an anonymous person with the handle, "Deport all of them" stated, "DEPORT THEM ALL and if they should be found in the United States of America again illegally, shoot them."


Since I have worked with the Mexican-American community ever since I got here, this kind of stopped me in my tracks and I felt strongly that what I had written the day before was entirely too silly, so to speak, and gravely inappropriate. So I trashed the original blog, hoping that no one would see it. I posted it the night before right after writing it, and although I had a frankly delirious time creating it, I withdrew it from the blogosphere.. I then dictated the newspaper article above and added some comments -- which no one will ever see thankfully -- and this post completely disappeared when I tried to paste it into the blog.

I have come to the conclusions that:

1. None of this happened by chance

2. nothing happens by chance

3.there is no such thing as luck

4. the devil cannot make you do anything c.f. Screwtape can write letters better than I can, but Wormwood can't seem to carry out orders. Absolutely super!

5 . There is such a thing as free will even though not everything exhibits it, and certainly few people use it.
5.5 Corollary to the above: there is such a thing as love;
5.77 sub-corollary to the above: all real love is free love; good news for hippies! (+ir1)

7 "the holy spirit made me do it "is also an oxymoron.

6 There are numerous scientists who say we have no free will and no soul.

There are at least as many scientists who would disagree, one prominent example being Michael Polyani and quite a large number of mathematicians as well.

8. an honest agnostic is hard to find; but gnostics are, as H.L.Menken once said of fundamentalists, coming out of the woodwork
8.5 I am an agnostic. Everyone is an agnostic. Regardless of labels we throw around without thinking what we are really saying. Gnostics are also a-gnostic. I once studied "anthroposophy" also known as "spiritual science," the tool of the scientists of this genre is, unsurprisingly, clairvoyance. As with most similar groups, it is assumed that only a small group of people are able to "gnosis" higher knowledge; but with due diligence and much meditation, one can attain to a spiritual plane; but only if you were destined to be such a person and you work really really hard at it. On the other hand, I never met anyone in anthroposophy who thought they knew everything, not even close. So there you are, regardless of the self-designation. Still agnostic. What's in a name inter alia. There are some really lovable people in this society; and unlike theosophy from which they emerged, Rudolph Steiner claimed to be a Christian and actually started his own church whose format is not too unlike a Roman Catholic Mass, rewritten by his friendly mystics ne' ghost writers of course. Google: Christian Community/Anhroposophy...



I could go on and on; more bullet points to follow from Baby Bullet Bill.

What does this have to do with the substance of the newspaper report on Hostile Blogging?

Once again let me try to explain. Most people who would read this article, except for the racist minded bloggers themselves, would say "that's just plain wrong!!!" At least that was my reaction. And for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, at least on the Newtonian level, which is after all where we live. The question is, "what's wrong with this picture?"

By "wrong," do we simply mean, not correct? An errata? But in order to be correct, there has to be a point of reference, or the word is not only meaningless but useless. To be able to say, "You are lying," there has to be some type of a standard in contradistinction to what is not true. Similarly, to use "wrong," as meaning unethical or immoral, does require some type of consensus-- or once again using the word is futile even in the most obvious context, since there is no agreement within the general or even subcultural readership. Lewis Carroll used one of his Alice in Wonderland characters to say in essence: "a word means what I mean it to mean, so there." As I recall, Alice at that point was not very tall, and was not able to answer this argument. This is the essence of the postmodern view i.e. that everything revolves around power, politics, values that are not valuable but entirely at the mercy of the culture which controls the individual. This is not at all unlike Tolstoy's theory of history in which the individual, such as Napoleon, is at the mercy of forces that he can neither control nor understand. Rather it like being at the wrong place at the wrong time, sorry about that, chief.

Yet we continue to speak in terms of right and wrong, true and false. Even the most committed relativist will admit that he cannot live life that way, the hypothetical performance of pure relativism which is to say, ironically, absolute relativism, is not consistent with any known societal arrangement; even anarchy presupposes a frame of reference; man does not live by Brownian Movement alone. In none of our present incarnations is there any indication of people acting at random, in fact, I don't think it is physically possible using the most complex organism in the known universe according to Isaac Asimov et al., given the actual physical structure that we have, to even create random patterns. There is also the factor of the "Ghost in the Machine,"; it is probably not physically or mathematically likely that the 3 pound brain that we all have can understand itself even if it thinks it understands everybody and everything else. Man simply does not have the capacity to either create or even understand a "theory of everything," our limitations are as awe-inspiring as our capacities.

As far back as high school or college I used to experiment with some of my colleagues and I would ask them to write a sentence completely at random. We would then look at this. Usually the writer would be unable to make any sense of what he wrote. However, as an outside reviewer, it was actually quite easy to see the connections between the dots of their attempt at stream of consciousness. Of course this is the tool that Freud used -- that free association would basically be entirely analyzable and make sense in terms of the unconscious, that is the things that we do not know about ourselves. In the book, Lost in the Cosmos, author Walker Percy (who studied both Kierkegaard and Freud intensively and was trained in science himself) amplified as this technique adding many other tools including the Socratic method, and the result is both amusing and alarming -- most of us don't know how to answer his questions -- which shows a lot about us. He pointed out that we know more about the planet Saturn than we know about ourselves; and although we can size up the manuscript written by someone else by reading a few sentences, we generally don't even have a clue about even what color shirt looks good on us whether we are blind or like a cherubim in a house of mirrors! "A Wrinkle In Time" describes this creature --are you, "all ears"? Imagine: ALL EYES...all the time..and a half a time...........

The difference between a newborn baby with Down Syndrome and the "Smartest Man in the World" a.k.a. the uber mensch that can lick all the others (borrowing from Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous pronouncement on his opinion of right and wrong which is essentially the same as Nietzsche's)
would be
undetectable even if one compares the sum total of the collective knowledge -- conscious, subconscious, and unconscious -- collected by every 3 pound brain that ever existed; with all the knowledge that is possible to know. Albert Einstein's estimation of how much we actually know/gnosis and also his (apocryphal?) story of the existence of good and evil is also quite instructive in terms of what we are talking about. I can attempt to find this if anybody is interested. The argument is eminently cogent but it may be an urban myth to attribute it to Albert Einstein, somewhat like the phony story that circulates about Charles Darwin's deathbed conversion. On the other hand, how do we call these myths phony, wrong, or deceptive. The current method of argument completely negates the law of contradiction, without which we cannot have any usable logic; or even any arguments at all. There are a number of authors who have famously said something like, "It was true.... for me..... even if it did not "happen." This is the ultimate Hollywood Dream to be able to sell fantasy for the same price as reality.


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If I may go back to the original headline as well as to Calvin and Hobbes' trenchant observations I will attempt to do a Walker Percy/shouts and murmurs end-of-the-year/new year questionnaire:

1. I have had an extremely strong negative reaction to people of abusing women, animals, and people of other races or persuasions as long as I can remember. I am not sure a lot of males share these emotions however that could be simply the practical application of the cone of silence. Is this reaction the result of conditioning, biological structural and physiological interactions between various parts of my body; assuming that the word "mind" is merely a convenient fiction?
2. Is racism/gender discrimination/wrong in any generally agreeable sense or merely a physical error in judgment which, practically speaking is only wrong if you get caught, again, being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Are our negative reactions result of hypertrophy of the limbic system at the cost of cerebral cortex? These questions are meaningful to me especially as a scientist who happens to be a physician; but in general it would seem this would be an issue for almost anyone who is not content to go through life as a series of conditioned reflexes. Assuming this is physically possible.
3. Without reference to my various mental meanderings, how does this headline strike you as an individual? How much of your reaction/understanding of this is, in your estimation, biological, cultural, or spiritual in some way?
4. If there was such a thing as Absolute Truth, what tools would we have to detect such a thing? There are things that we obviously cannot grasp, don't care to grasp, and don't even want to hear about. If we are unable to discern any type of Absolute, would it then follow that Absolutes do not exist? There is such a thing as Absolute Zero and we can even attach a number to it -- but this is not scientifically demonstrable. If there are multiple parallel universes and so forth does this actually solve any of the problems we are considering or does it simply compound them? If we decide to assume that there are no Absolutes whether physical ethical or scriptural -- would anything change as far as we can tell?
5. Would you trust the average ethicist with your wife? Do you want to have a doctor who is ethical? If so, what kind of ethics do you want her/him to have? Arthur Koestler, a notorious womanizer, who wrote the Ghost in the Machine, gives one answer which may not be what we might think. Or want to hear.
6. The concept of morality appears to be bound to the notion of culture. What then is ethics? Is there anything super cultural about this? Is there a Tao as suggested by St.Lewis and many others? Is any of this objectively verifiable on any level? What do you make of this quote by Wittgenstein, who was a colleague of Bertrand Russell and T.S. Eliot was also a friend of Russell's: "there is no such thing as a book of ethics. If there were, it would explode all the other books in the world."? (I would love it if someone could find the actual quote I heard it a long time ago but am pretty sure that Wittgenstein said it in a much more striking fashion and context
7. These are only the questions that happened to occur to me on the fly. I am sure I could do better if I had more time, kind of like all those monkeys typing Shakespeare. I apologize for the length of this meditation. However this wasn't even really what I was intending to write, I would've much preferred to write something else in something lighter or in a poetic style etc. However consider that this represents not only about a week's worth of throwing things away and not posting much at all; so take what you need and leave the rest for someone else. I will be back at tracking other things and trying other experiments-- so, as I said at the very beginning: friends, Romans, and countrymen: give me your patience. and eye contact as my wife is wont to add; Here snipe, skype, skypey................ And next time we will try doing speed drill endings for the verb " Amar" So study hard For Dr. Chips eh?