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It is now the day after the day after the Day of the Dead, which I ought to have called the Dia de Todos los Difuntos, I believe, not Muertos, but I haven't time to look it up.
Posting this on Thursday morning, I would note that I started a few hours ago to write a piece about how recent scholarship suggests possible reasons for the rise of mystical-rationalist policy wonks in the eighteenth century, but even my eyes glaze over at the thought. I now see that the morning’s offerings from Arts & Letters Daily offer a reinforcement of the conventional view of what was going on in eighteenth century thought, so far be it from me to unsettle the settled clichés of discourse.
This, however, is what I wrote yesterday and didn’t post:
I was surprised, on Tuesday afternoon, to notice that David Eagleman has expressed two subjective opinions about the nature of reality that are logically incompatible; one can’t semi-believe one of them and so much as consider the other one.
I suppose this shouldn’t have been a surprise in a man who can write forty alternate imaginary versions of the afterlife off the top of his head, and who coined a name for his conceptual program that is so tin-earedly disharmonious as to make me unwilling to write it here.
But generally, the people who interest me are ones who find that the two alternatives being set forth (in any given universe of discourse) are both unsatisfactory (even if one is more obviously unsatisfactory than the other), or simply unbelievable (although almost everyone believes one or the other, often passionately). When both sides of a binary opposition are subject not just to suspicion (as is everything) but to outright disproof, it ought to suggest that the answer is not a synthesis of the two but an unknown third term that is a better reflection of reality.
Granted, most of the people who interest me are also running self-conscious clown shows (check out Eagleman’s websites, for example) designed to suggest that they ought not to be taken seriously. This is a strategy intended not just to deflect the pointless criticisms of those with considerable emotional and financial investment in the existing oppositions, but to cover up the tricksters’ own stupidities until such time as they can recognize and repair them.
It is also more important to propound obvious absurdities with the goal of making readers think in different categories than to present timidly expressed truths that will do no more than reinforce the existing states of unconscious delusion.
That said, I am baffled as to why nobody figured out in 2008 how to approach the problem of explaining the nature of the global economic crisis. We knew in 2006 that apocalypse was coming; it was spelled out by any number of economic theorists. We knew in 2008 that the apocalypse would take about five years to shake out, the American collapse to be followed circa 2010 by a companion European collapse; once again, it was spelled out op-ed column by op-ed column. I remember vividly the column that said “Feeling like things have gotten as bad as they can get? Sorry, look at the sovereign debt crisis looming in a year or two in Europe. And by the way, given the disinclination of governments to take drastic steps, look what will happen when the loan agreements come to term that were negotiated by….”
I remember before the 2008 election how the people I knew were saying they almost weren’t sure who they wanted to win because whoever was in office would be blamed for failing to end something that was foredoomed to be a five-year crisis that could be addressed but not totally reversed.
I had sort of assumed that the Great Recession would be addressed after the manner of the Great Depression, with a dramatic freeze on foreclosures to stanch the downward pressures on home prices until the situation was sufficiently sorted out, reform of the regulatory system in everything from banking to health care, temporary loans to threatened corporations with a clearly defined repayment program, a public works program to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, a fresh focus on developing an energy and new-technology policy for the 21st century, and a set of rhetorical measures intended to reframe the national debate, in terms of getting a long-term but surmountable global crisis behind us in ways that would leave the world at large in a more viable economic and social condition.
Actually, we got a great deal of that in half-baked increments, minus the timing and the rhetoric that would have made it all work, and here we are. The pendulum has swung, the other side of the binary has asserted itself, and it possibly isn’t going to work any better this time than it did the time before and the time before that.
Curiously, in such moments of dialectical wrongheadedness it is the unintended consequences that provide the long-term benefits (at least culturally). Historical citations to come, maybe.
Or maybe not. I have a lot of other things to do besides re-evaluate past decades. Shows to curate, reviews to write, and practical personal matters to neglect, deny or repress as expeditiously as possible, in order to accomplish the first two items on the agenda.
Posting this on Thursday morning, I would note that I started a few hours ago to write a piece about how recent scholarship suggests possible reasons for the rise of mystical-rationalist policy wonks in the eighteenth century, but even my eyes glaze over at the thought. I now see that the morning’s offerings from Arts & Letters Daily offer a reinforcement of the conventional view of what was going on in eighteenth century thought, so far be it from me to unsettle the settled clichés of discourse.
This, however, is what I wrote yesterday and didn’t post:
I was surprised, on Tuesday afternoon, to notice that David Eagleman has expressed two subjective opinions about the nature of reality that are logically incompatible; one can’t semi-believe one of them and so much as consider the other one.
I suppose this shouldn’t have been a surprise in a man who can write forty alternate imaginary versions of the afterlife off the top of his head, and who coined a name for his conceptual program that is so tin-earedly disharmonious as to make me unwilling to write it here.
But generally, the people who interest me are ones who find that the two alternatives being set forth (in any given universe of discourse) are both unsatisfactory (even if one is more obviously unsatisfactory than the other), or simply unbelievable (although almost everyone believes one or the other, often passionately). When both sides of a binary opposition are subject not just to suspicion (as is everything) but to outright disproof, it ought to suggest that the answer is not a synthesis of the two but an unknown third term that is a better reflection of reality.
Granted, most of the people who interest me are also running self-conscious clown shows (check out Eagleman’s websites, for example) designed to suggest that they ought not to be taken seriously. This is a strategy intended not just to deflect the pointless criticisms of those with considerable emotional and financial investment in the existing oppositions, but to cover up the tricksters’ own stupidities until such time as they can recognize and repair them.
It is also more important to propound obvious absurdities with the goal of making readers think in different categories than to present timidly expressed truths that will do no more than reinforce the existing states of unconscious delusion.
That said, I am baffled as to why nobody figured out in 2008 how to approach the problem of explaining the nature of the global economic crisis. We knew in 2006 that apocalypse was coming; it was spelled out by any number of economic theorists. We knew in 2008 that the apocalypse would take about five years to shake out, the American collapse to be followed circa 2010 by a companion European collapse; once again, it was spelled out op-ed column by op-ed column. I remember vividly the column that said “Feeling like things have gotten as bad as they can get? Sorry, look at the sovereign debt crisis looming in a year or two in Europe. And by the way, given the disinclination of governments to take drastic steps, look what will happen when the loan agreements come to term that were negotiated by….”
I remember before the 2008 election how the people I knew were saying they almost weren’t sure who they wanted to win because whoever was in office would be blamed for failing to end something that was foredoomed to be a five-year crisis that could be addressed but not totally reversed.
I had sort of assumed that the Great Recession would be addressed after the manner of the Great Depression, with a dramatic freeze on foreclosures to stanch the downward pressures on home prices until the situation was sufficiently sorted out, reform of the regulatory system in everything from banking to health care, temporary loans to threatened corporations with a clearly defined repayment program, a public works program to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, a fresh focus on developing an energy and new-technology policy for the 21st century, and a set of rhetorical measures intended to reframe the national debate, in terms of getting a long-term but surmountable global crisis behind us in ways that would leave the world at large in a more viable economic and social condition.
Actually, we got a great deal of that in half-baked increments, minus the timing and the rhetoric that would have made it all work, and here we are. The pendulum has swung, the other side of the binary has asserted itself, and it possibly isn’t going to work any better this time than it did the time before and the time before that.
Curiously, in such moments of dialectical wrongheadedness it is the unintended consequences that provide the long-term benefits (at least culturally). Historical citations to come, maybe.
Or maybe not. I have a lot of other things to do besides re-evaluate past decades. Shows to curate, reviews to write, and practical personal matters to neglect, deny or repress as expeditiously as possible, in order to accomplish the first two items on the agenda.
