Skywritings

No one has written an ethics/etiquette book on:

(1) How 15 million people, dispersed as a stateless and oppressed minority all over the planet for 2000 years, are supposed to react to having a third of their number systematically exterminated on the grounds of their race by various European states within one half-decade

(2) How 1.5 million other people, having nothing at all to do with that extermination, are supposed to react when the land they have been living in for 2000 years is expropriated and given as a state to the remainder of the exterminated people by the same European states that allowed (or helped) them to be exterminated

(3) How those of the exterminated people who emigrate to the expropriated state are supposed to react to the expropriated people, who form a fifth column within and around their expropriated state

(4) How either side is supposed to react after almost 60 years of ensuing bloody tit-for-tat vendettas

My guess is that the ethics/etiquette book for such a case has not been written because the case is unique, tragic, and no one knows what right or wrong is, or what to do about it. Onlookers simply fixate selectively on the injustices and atrocities (on either side) that affect or disturb them most. And, as usual, they offer criticism and solutions without having the responsibility of testing whether they will really work, or of suffering the consequences if they do not.

On Leon Wieseltier on Dan Dennett on Voodoo:

Whoops, creed crunched! But anyone reading this review has enough face-valid evidence, plus excerpted text, to see that LW’s words contradict themselves and in fact offer no alternative at all, other than grumbling and no small dose of hysteria and spleen! I have not read Dan’s book, but the obvious rebuttals to all of LW’s points (except two to which I will return) pop up immediately, as soon as one reads LW’s wiesel-words! There’s space between the two “bearded” extremes? Spare me! That’s like space between True and False (does LW think there’s some probabilistic wiggle-room in there? the existence of the immaterial/immortal soul [T/F?]; the existence of god(s) [T/F?]; any of the other supernatural smorgasbords served up by human wit across the ages [T/F?]).

But, to consider only LW’s two substantive points: (1) DD’s selective quote from Darwin left out Darwin’s personal creed? I can’t mind-read, let alone mind-read a deceased brain, but my own guess is that either that was Darwin exercising some Galilean diplomacy, or CD himself did not quite grasp where his bright lights were shining! (Either way, who cares? This is about truth, not about authority, or personal credos: otherwise we’d be committing the intentional fallacy — that propositions don’t mean what they mean, but only what their drafters meant them to mean…) Ditto for Hume.

LW’s other point, that voodoo is not to be taken literally but metaphorically: What the Dickens is that supposed to mean? Apart from the irrelevant cultural point that religion can inspire or even be art (Psalms, Bach, Blake, Boticelli) (so what? art is not about truth value but aesthetic value), what literal point is being made in pointing out this truism? Far more often voodoo is or inspires atrocities and abominations — today’s latest happening to be tit-for-tat shrine bombings!

As to the tautological status of saying that human mentation is biologically based even in its degrees of freedom: what alternative does LW have in mind? Original sin? Divine inspiration? Free Will? To say that all human doings originate from and are constrained by biology is to say no more nor less than that all human doings and sayings are constrained by cause/effect and the law of the excluded middle! Unless, of course, some of the Holy Writ to the contrary is (literally) true after all. In which case I suppose not just Biology, but Science and Logic are all up for grabs…

On LW on Philosophy — the less said, the better!

Why elevate a malign clown from the ignominy he deserves to the infamy he desires?

As Science is mere structured common sense,
her means but trial-and-error made intense,
the only virtue setting her apart,
and raising her above (some think) mere Art,
    Is her convergence ever on consensus:
    collective, self-corrective her defenses.
A flagellant, she boldly does defy
Reality her schemes to falsify.

And yet this noble jousting were in vain,
and all this pain would yield no grain of gain
    if Science were content, a shrinking violet,
    her works from all the world e‘er to keep private.
    Instead, performance public and artistic,
    restraining all propensities autistic,
perhaps less out of error-making dread,
than banal need to earn her daily bread.

For showbiz being what it is today,
work’s not enough, you’ve got to make it pay.
    What ratings, sweeps and polls count for our actors,
    no less than our elected benefactors,
    for Science the commensurate equation
    is not just publication but citation.
The more your work is accessed, read and used,
the higher then is reckoned its just dues.
    Sounds crass, but there may be some consolation,
    where there’s still some residual motivation
to make a difference, not just make a fee:
the World Wide Web at last can make Science free.

Stevan Harnad

September 11 2001

Gershwin’s gay garish Gotham
today has joined the ranks
of Gaia’s tragicopoles,
London, Dresden, Gdansk

for evermore.

An unhallowed razor,
thrust,
so savagely,

into the apple`s core.

But please,

spare us the braying
of the semioticians of symmetry.

Let them stay huddled,
paretically,
in Zeno’s corner,
ruminating,
endlessly,
on the etymology and etiology
the means/ends mission statements
of “horror,” and “counterhorror,”
lateral, collateral, and full frontal,
the feudal bloodline
of our selfish genes,
even unto the Big Bang,

while we chew instead
on whether high-tech sociopathy
and low-tech superstition
were indeed always slated
to win the day,
eventually,
in life’s no-sin, no-sum
game
of Gaussian roulette.

Coda: Homage to William of Ockham
(Or, The Hazards of Passive Exposure To Involuntary Co-Martyrdom)
(Or, Trumping Pascal’s Wager)

our forebears had it right
the fewer gods the better
monody just undershot
the optimum by
one

Could anyone, whether Bishop of Oxford or next of kin, be so self-righteous as to condone condemning someone hopelessly ill to having to struggle to end her misery with pills and a plastic bag and then, failing that, to having to drag her weary bones to Zurich to free herself at last from a wretched fate that’s no one’s to endure or not to endure but her own? Does Reverend Harries truly hold life “precious”? Who can wish for “one of the people I love most in the world” anything but the release she seeks from the pain she can no longer bear?

Anon: “being religious is probably an ineradicable fact about the human species (one of our apparently characteristic behaviors like music, language, genocide and so on) — not all of us have the tendency but most do, apparently.”

Scott Atran, would agree, but the question is, what is the trait? “Religiosity”? Isn’t that just one symptom of an adaptive tendency toward other-mind-reading, overstretched to animism? plus everybody’s mind/body problem? plus the fact that everyone had omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent god-parents once? and that no one experiences either mortality or eternity? and the rest is just rampant rumor and hearsay (which serves us well where it matters, and otherwise is just a bit of nonfunctional overflow)?

“It is not just a cultural artifact, in other words. I keep pushing this idea but so far get mostly blank stares from people. Glad to see a heavy hitter like Dennett (who looks simply marvelous in the photograph, btw) thinks so too.”

But the devil’s in the details. Earthly totemisms and cults and creeds themselves are not in the genes, just the animism and reliance on (satisfieciently [sic] reliable) hearsay is. You can build both veridicality and voodoo on that self-same foundation: there’s at least as much nonreligious hokum too, flowing from the same fountain.

“But reading the interview and looking at the questions focused another, possibly deeper trait: people for whom it makes perfectly good sense to say that pleasantness (hopefulness) is a better reason than truth to believe in something, and those who think that the only reason to believe something is whether it is true.”

It’s the difference between knowledge and wishful thinking. Not restricted to religion. Smokers, for example, have the syndrome in full bloom; so did Dr. Hwang and his faithful crew; and people who are going postal have it in spades…

“There are a lot of people who not only believe stuff because it is comforting or hopeful, etc. (which of course all of us do until we look critically at ourselves), but who know they do, and see no problem with it. What do you think?”

I think most people think extremely uncritically and unrigorously: “Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself.” The reason it doesn’t matter that much is because most of our believings and thinkings and doings are simply inconsequential. Nothing hangs on them one way or the other. We just need to be rational enough to meet our daily bread needs, and not be led into conflagration (more than once)…

Stevan Harnad

Nous n’avons pas de catégorie expérientielle désservant le décès de quelqu’un. On a l’absence, la distance, mais pas la mort. On se résigne consciemment au fait qu’on ne verra plus jamais la personne [le « jamais » c’est déjà flou ], et qu’elle n’existe plus, mais on n’a aucun ressenti inné pour cette catégorie, juste le regret, ce qui se dérive plutôt de l’absence que de la non-existence — qu’on ne comprend que chez les objets, pas chez les êtres animés. Reste seulement l’oubli. Mais jamais l’appréciation de la mort, l’inexistence. C’est encore une fois notre célèbre animisme : Une conscience, comment peut-elle ne plus être ? Elle n’est pas physique, matérielle. C’est pour ça qu’il y a le culte des ancêtres. Et c’est ça la provenance de l’idée biscornue de l’âme immortelle et de tous les plaisirs (croisades, inquisitions, djihads) qui en sont l’issue.

In the land of the old
everyone’s a foreigner
fancied native-born
by but the haply young.

Time thus ensures
rude awakenings all round.

Journalists
like moths and drunks
seem attracted
irresistibly
where the light
shines, not
where the key lies