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Feb. 20th, 2009 10:03 amI must beg forgiveness for an unprecedented outburst (in a post no longer publicly available) of utterly sincere but excessive irony. I was amused and appalled to realize that the only way I could join any coherently organized group (you will recall Will Rogers’ comment regarding the political party to which I belong) would be to adopt the positions held in past centuries by those who became its opponents—positions which I also do not share.
I remain bewildered by the partisans of certainty in any academic discipline other than, perhaps, pure mathematics. Even though it is the worst of literary clichés and has been for centuries, we are the most extraordinary of extraordinary species, the most dysfunctional and the most functional, and even the makers of scientific or religious just-so stories are insufficiently astounded at our paradoxes.
It is one thing to be fixated on displaced sexuality as laid down in early childhood; something else, by degrees of displacement, to be fixated on the possible movements of chess pieces, the possible relationships of pure numbers, or (some would say) the physical and mathematical relationships of musical intervals.
But of course the capacities in one direction are often made up for by incapacities in other areas of normally functioning life, as is too commonly known to be worth mentioning. And there are enough personality types in which all the functions are correlated to allow the moralists among us to accuse malproportioned souls of being as inclined to excuses as they in fact usually are. There are as many ways of messing up as there are types and conditions of human beings, and actually a good many more ways than that.
So many human predilections work against their reproductive success that it is a marvel that the various extremities of behavior have survived at all, much less turned into some of the marvels of human accomplishment. We can see why investment bankers would come into being frequently (I am thinking of a NY Times story of the women describing the benefits of sticking with a hard-charging, Type A personality even after their material benefits were suddenly snatched away from them); makers of atonal music and mathematical puzzles are harder to explain satisfactorily, much less men and women inclined to work against their own best interests for the sake of some prospective reward that only they can perceive, and doing so stubbornly against the wishes of the priestcraft of their particular epoch.
It is irresistibly tempting to resort to “either-or” to talk about such topics (even though it will allow certain LJ friends to remark again on the English-language pun suggested by the Co-Principality of Andorra): Either we are the sickest species ever evolved on the face of the planet (Nietzsche’s description of us as das kranke Tier) or we are in fact some outcome of special creation, whether by divinities or space aliens.
But of course the proper answer is once again both-and: we are indisputably immensely dysfunctional in our innermost depths, and at our heights we bump up against outer limits that suggest that either our sickness allows us to do things that no other species has ever been able to accomplish, or that we have fiddled from the beginning or been fiddled with by forces that we cannot comprehend and perhaps are structurally, intrinsically incapable of comprehending, or, of course, both.
In fact, we are both deeply dysfunctional and given to pursuits and capacities that we are at present incapable of explaining satisfactorily. All we can do is gather evidence, and be productively puzzled if we have gathered evidence for which we have no definitive explanation, or any explanations at all except ones that we feel have something wrong with them.
The cartoonist and art professor Jim Crane once produced a fantasia based on Abbott’s Flatland that could be expanded from his original simpler version: The cartoon shows Abbott’s more or less elliptical two-dimensional beings (which for my purposes I imagine as simply very flat rather the way Abbott does, making their lines of sight visible but very thin). In my version of Crane's less contorted original, one would say, “What makes you think we might be the products of a cartoonist?” “Well, sometimes things just show up that I can’t explain. …Like now! I feel like I’ve got an ‘X’ that wasn’t there before.” (An X has appeared in the middle of our two-dimensional creature’s otherwise blank ellipse.) “And look! There’s another X out there next to us!” “Huh? Two little dots?” “No, it's at right angles to us, and and if we could squeeze in between those two dots and look at them differently, you’d see they’re connected. But we don't know how to do that and you won’t help me figure out what if anything could get in there and bring back information.” “Why should we look for ways to figure out something that obviously isn’t what you think it is? We know dots. We know lines. What is a right angle?”
The creature, now with curlicues drawn around its internal X, ends up muttering, “It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just a hallucination.”
And indeed it is, which is why I discount individual experience, my own included. All I can do is triangulate occurrences and parallel experiences, and that way madness lies. The worst crackpots of all time are the ones who are convinced they have assembled evidence of vast conspiracies or immense invisible metaphysical systems.
The problem is that sometimes there really are vast conspiracies, and more people have suffered from being supposed to be members of them than from actually being part of them. Hence Descartes’ anxiety at having to demonstrate his non-membership in a conspiracy that was most likely already only the fiction of a few intellectuals.
It is better to imagine subgroups of society at the mercy of a few game-playing equivalents of chess fanatics entertaining themselves than the alternative hypotheses.
I remain bewildered by the partisans of certainty in any academic discipline other than, perhaps, pure mathematics. Even though it is the worst of literary clichés and has been for centuries, we are the most extraordinary of extraordinary species, the most dysfunctional and the most functional, and even the makers of scientific or religious just-so stories are insufficiently astounded at our paradoxes.
It is one thing to be fixated on displaced sexuality as laid down in early childhood; something else, by degrees of displacement, to be fixated on the possible movements of chess pieces, the possible relationships of pure numbers, or (some would say) the physical and mathematical relationships of musical intervals.
But of course the capacities in one direction are often made up for by incapacities in other areas of normally functioning life, as is too commonly known to be worth mentioning. And there are enough personality types in which all the functions are correlated to allow the moralists among us to accuse malproportioned souls of being as inclined to excuses as they in fact usually are. There are as many ways of messing up as there are types and conditions of human beings, and actually a good many more ways than that.
So many human predilections work against their reproductive success that it is a marvel that the various extremities of behavior have survived at all, much less turned into some of the marvels of human accomplishment. We can see why investment bankers would come into being frequently (I am thinking of a NY Times story of the women describing the benefits of sticking with a hard-charging, Type A personality even after their material benefits were suddenly snatched away from them); makers of atonal music and mathematical puzzles are harder to explain satisfactorily, much less men and women inclined to work against their own best interests for the sake of some prospective reward that only they can perceive, and doing so stubbornly against the wishes of the priestcraft of their particular epoch.
It is irresistibly tempting to resort to “either-or” to talk about such topics (even though it will allow certain LJ friends to remark again on the English-language pun suggested by the Co-Principality of Andorra): Either we are the sickest species ever evolved on the face of the planet (Nietzsche’s description of us as das kranke Tier) or we are in fact some outcome of special creation, whether by divinities or space aliens.
But of course the proper answer is once again both-and: we are indisputably immensely dysfunctional in our innermost depths, and at our heights we bump up against outer limits that suggest that either our sickness allows us to do things that no other species has ever been able to accomplish, or that we have fiddled from the beginning or been fiddled with by forces that we cannot comprehend and perhaps are structurally, intrinsically incapable of comprehending, or, of course, both.
In fact, we are both deeply dysfunctional and given to pursuits and capacities that we are at present incapable of explaining satisfactorily. All we can do is gather evidence, and be productively puzzled if we have gathered evidence for which we have no definitive explanation, or any explanations at all except ones that we feel have something wrong with them.
The cartoonist and art professor Jim Crane once produced a fantasia based on Abbott’s Flatland that could be expanded from his original simpler version: The cartoon shows Abbott’s more or less elliptical two-dimensional beings (which for my purposes I imagine as simply very flat rather the way Abbott does, making their lines of sight visible but very thin). In my version of Crane's less contorted original, one would say, “What makes you think we might be the products of a cartoonist?” “Well, sometimes things just show up that I can’t explain. …Like now! I feel like I’ve got an ‘X’ that wasn’t there before.” (An X has appeared in the middle of our two-dimensional creature’s otherwise blank ellipse.) “And look! There’s another X out there next to us!” “Huh? Two little dots?” “No, it's at right angles to us, and and if we could squeeze in between those two dots and look at them differently, you’d see they’re connected. But we don't know how to do that and you won’t help me figure out what if anything could get in there and bring back information.” “Why should we look for ways to figure out something that obviously isn’t what you think it is? We know dots. We know lines. What is a right angle?”
The creature, now with curlicues drawn around its internal X, ends up muttering, “It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just a hallucination.”
And indeed it is, which is why I discount individual experience, my own included. All I can do is triangulate occurrences and parallel experiences, and that way madness lies. The worst crackpots of all time are the ones who are convinced they have assembled evidence of vast conspiracies or immense invisible metaphysical systems.
The problem is that sometimes there really are vast conspiracies, and more people have suffered from being supposed to be members of them than from actually being part of them. Hence Descartes’ anxiety at having to demonstrate his non-membership in a conspiracy that was most likely already only the fiction of a few intellectuals.
It is better to imagine subgroups of society at the mercy of a few game-playing equivalents of chess fanatics entertaining themselves than the alternative hypotheses.
