the gods of the copybook headings, part one

And if you think I am recommending Rudyard Kipling's poetic prescription unreservedly by using that subject line, then you probably need to read these three posts.

Those who were born in certain years of the twentieth century had the misfortune of encountering early in life a good many schemes for the improvement of the species. These schemes, whether propounded by individual crackpots or respected philosophers or powerful heads of state, had one thing in common: they simply did not work.

Therefore, some of those who found problematic the unsatisfactory condition of themselves, compounded by the differently unsatisfactory condition of everybody else, wondered if there were any systems that did work.

For two years now, I have tried to point to some of those who seemed to have hit upon similar insights regarding how our generally miserable and maleficent selves might be made at least a little bit less miserable and mischief-making.

Some of those folks asserted that a great deal more than that was possible. A few of them gave the impression that they themselves might have gotten there.

Still more announced that they were arrant frauds, but they seemed to have keys to altering behavior that nobody else had, or at least didn't have in ways that spoke to the contemporary condition. I haven't discussed them, one in particular, because, well, they were obvious fakes. They told us so. And to begin with them is to stir passionate debate about all the wrong subjects, looked at in the wrong way.

Instead, along with handing out info about cool, completely unrelated stuff I've encountered along the way that other people might find cool, too, I have sought to replicate and translate the insights that are shared by medieval mystics, nineteenth-century atheists, Central Asian poets and gurus, twentieth-century philosophers, and twenty-first century neurological researchers. Most of whom are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, even in intellectually disreputable circles.

The neurological researchers help explain, in language we can find palatable, why the other people might have done more than just replicate crashingly obvious folk wisdom. Unfortunately, when they are mentioned at all by most writers, they are misunderstood or summarized so misleadingly as to be worse than useless, but.

At various times, I have tried both to explain analytically how some of the shared insights might help oneself to break out of being the blinkered self that one ordinarily is, and to become aware of one's own deeply ingrained personal scripts, ones that make us act more like pieces of machinery than like self-aware human beings.

(Terms such as "self-aware" omits such illusions as whether or not we have "free will," which is the worst way of misdefining the problem.)

Actually, the machine metaphor is also a bad one, because it led folks like Descartes off in all sorts of mistaken directions. Descartes thought of animals as simple machines without an inner life. By contrast, machines may have alternate internal scripts that are contending with one another, as they are to some degree even in the least complex of animals. (Isaac Asimov's novels about the Laws of Robotics were about behavioral psychology as much as they were about robots, and his mid-1950s fiction breaks down when it has to imagine proto-emotions in machines that don't have biochemical stimuli to give their computational apparatus an emotional jag.)

Anyway, I have had a go at creating scenarios that would allow people to see their own behavior and thereby not amend it, but become aware of it. Actually doing anything about it is quite another matter, and what is to be done is quite another matter.

And after two years of setting forth the issues in a dozen different ways, I am beginning to figure out at least some of the reasons why these disparate historical figures may have had more of a shared agenda than they ever would have known how to admit. Actually, it isn't even an agenda (bad word choice), but what Wittgenstein would have called intellectual family resemblances: Not an invisible brotherhood or sisterhood, but persons over the centuries who have an unnoticed shared sense of what is wrong and how to begin figuring out what to do about it.

And because the linkages are familial, there are many different forms of life that share some of the same prevailing issues, and have come up with similar solutions to the difficulties in question. ("Forms of life" as in Wittgenstein's replacement term for Weltanschauung, since I observe that contemporary German uses Lebensform in the same biological-species sense that "form of life" conveys...think "ways of living in and looking at the world" instead.)

But to even begin to discuss that, we have to get out of our respective ingrained interests and ways of putting the problem. And it appears that as soon as anybody comes across the one topic that interests THEM, they immediately read the whole thing in terms of what they already know, and assume that these trivial remarks must be the essence of the thing, about which the writer obviously knows nothing.

The writer actually does know almost nothing about it, but that wasn't the point under discussion. The point under discussion was why none of the contemporaries of this or that thinker could understand what in hell he (in male-dominated subgroups, it was usually he) was talking about.

But if we have not gotten to the point of having a shared language within which to discuss these subjects, then of course no one will know what in hell I am talking about, either. And apparently, nobody does, though not because I participate in any of the insights of my betters. (Except the ones I have quoted or stolen outright.)

And because it is so difficult to explore topics that are usually dominated by obsessives, crackpots, and highly opinionated ignoramuses, it is no wonder that hardly anybody has any idea of how to proceed. Especially since the further one goes in such things, the more aware one becomes of one's own obsessiveness, crackpot tendencies, and opinionated ignorance.

the gods of the copybook headings, part two: an interlude of farce

So instead (see end of part one) I will recommend Ingrid Rowland's delectable essay on Renaissance salaciousness in her 2005 compilation of essays From Heaven to Arcadia. It contains a passage from Giordano Bruno, in her own translation, that is a curmudgeonly assault on the elaborately learned softcore porn of his era, in favor of Bruno's typically more paradoxical blend of blunt lechery and analytical yearnings towards transcendence.

The pictures are pretty good, too, if you catch my meaning, if you get my drift. (Who was Firesign Theatre parodying when they quoted those phrases, by the way?)

Actually, Rowland's book is to be recommended for a whole host of essays, an amazing reminder of the variousness of Renaissance and Baroque times, every bit as much as any other time to which one cares to pay serious enough attention.

And apparently her translation of Bruno's On the Heroic Frenzies is not yet published or even announced for publication anywhere (though her Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic comes out in the U.S. on August 19), whereas the new translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Ian White that she cites approvingly as more accurate than Godwin's can be had only in CD-ROM format.

Simply trying to confirm such matters in a web search quickly mires one in familiar thickets (miry thickets, with mud at the bottom). L. E. Semler's article on Robert Dallington's 1592 translation of the Hypnerotomachia reveals how postmodern Dallington was, and in the Elizabethan Renaissance, too. I cite all that is available to me through Project MUSE's locked gate:

"Robert Dallington’s Hypnerotomachia and the Protestant Antiquity of Elizabethan England by L. E. Semler
ROBERT Dallington’s Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dreame (1592) is one of the more extraordinary printed artifacts to emerge in a decade of English literary brilliance bookended by The Faerie Queene (books 1–3) and Hamlet. It is often referred to as a ‘‘part-translation’’ of its primary source, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), a bizarre dream narrative that hybridizes Neoplatonic romance and architectural treatise. A quick comparison reveals that Dallington omits chunks of narrative and edits the remainder, scrambles the meanings of numerous passages, abandons the story well before the end of book 1, and reduces the eighty-seven illustrations in the section he covers to twenty-two. Nonetheless, it is the intention of this essay to do away with the pejorative idea of ‘‘part-translation’’ which has customarily been joined with the observation of the English text’s printing defects, inadequate aesthetic vocabulary, and retarded visual stylistics, to create a many-knobbed stick with which to beat the Tudor translator. The obvious flaws in Dallington’s Hypnerotomachia have tended to obscure the fact that it possesses its own purposeful identity deserving of exploration. Dallington self-consciously modifies Colonna’s book so that it speaks more easily to his English contemporaries. He melds an1 On the nature and..."

the gods of the copybook headings, part three: getting to the point, or getting the point, or not

Novelists are usually the only ones who actually comprehend how remarkable it is that our screwed-up species accomplishes the many and unimaginably varied number of things that it accomplishes in terms of practical inventions and theoretical discoveries that increase our comprehension of the world within which we live and move and have our being. (As distinct from the world in which we do only one of those things.)

I remain astonished at the degree to which a wish to avoid stereotyping prevents us from comprehending why people choose the professions they do, or the pastimes, or all the other predilections that do in fact come in statistically predictable proportions with just enough surprises to keep things interesting. (Ex-football star Rosie Grier’s passion for knitting used to be the standard citation in this department.)

This sort of comes out of a followup post I didn’t get round to writing, regarding why the types of folks I wrote about in an earlier post tend to write about a bewilderingly broad number of topics…some of which they have actually mastered, but most of which interest them from their own outside(r) perspective.

From that outsider perspective, the following extract from a news story (“Genes Get Out the Vote,” by HealthDay reporter Steven Reinberg) scares the dickens out of me on several levels at once:

“Fowler and Dawes also looked for specific genes involved in the decision to vote. They found that two genes that influence the brain's serotonin system, called MAOA and 5HTT, were also associated with a person's inclination to cast a ballot. The serotonin system helps regulates trust and social interaction, the experts noted.

“In fact, they found that people with more efficient versions of those genes were about 10 percent more likely to vote.

“‘It's not just the gene that makes you vote, but it has an impact on how susceptible you are to different kinds of environments,’ Fowler said. ‘Depending upon what kind of environment you are in, it is going to activate those tendencies you might have to cause you to participate in politics or not.’

“To thoroughly understand politics, one has to include genetics, Fowler now believes.

“‘To study politics without genes is to miss half the story,’ he said. ‘To really get an understanding of what people are doing and why they are doing it, we need to integrate both nature and nurture into the study of politics,’ he said.

“According to John T. Jost, a professor of psychology at New York University in New York City, this article is another in a growing list of studies suggesting that political orientation is partly heritable.
“‘In some ways, this conclusion is not so surprising, given that we have known for over 50 years that there are basic cognitive, motivational, and behavioral differences between leftists and rightists,’ Jost said.

“‘Unless one believes that basic psychological characteristics have no genetic antecedents whatsoever, one would have anticipated these results on the basis of the psychological literature,’ Jost said. ‘Still, it's quite important that these researchers appear to have identified specific gene combinations that are linked to political orientation,’ he said.”

I believe it was Kenneth Rexroth who, probably citing somebody else, suggested that depression in the poor tended to be the result of having a great deal to be depressed about. The correlation is obvious.

But this observation should be modified to include the notion that stress triggers biochemical reactions in certain individuals that leads to long-term clinical depression.

In other individuals, it doesn’t, and those individuals may be the ones who lead the political revolution, or reinvent the structure of the corporation that employs them, or establish their own consulting agencies in which they make a very large amount of money.

We still hear universalizing statements about the human condition and about politics, far too often. And we have not really begun to take seriously the prospect that whereas people with two legs sometimes go from near-paralysis to victory in long-distance races, persons with one leg and no prosthesis scarcely ever do.