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continuing my major theme since 2006....
Jun. 5th, 2013 10:23 amWiden the area of consciousness (what, again?)
Most human beings, and myself more than most, are enormous messes; they/we are, however, self-congratulatory messes, and almost completely unable to perceive, much less articulate, how and why they/we are a product of their/our personal psychology as shaped by their/our social environment. This is in part due to our incapacity to focus on a sufficiently large number of perceptions and concepts simultaneously, and to find valid or genuinely probable links among them that do not depend on the simple human capacity to invent meaningful patterns where there are none—not a good idea, even though that is a capacity on which civilization depends, since we live by the fictions that keep us from being just a bundle of wordless automatic reactions. We are still far more shaped by that bundle of unconscious responses than we like to think, no matter how much that bundle is shaped in turn by culture, and culture is shaped in turn by us.
Traditions exist that have attempted to expand the capacity for concurrent perceptions without playing into our predilection for paranoia (even if they frequently fail to suppress our affection for alliteration). At their outer margins, they assert that what we think of as the highest form of humanity is in reality the minimum achievement required to be worthy of the title “human being” in the first place. (This is the meaning of the maxim “Human birth is hard to obtain”—not that there are far more bacteria than human beings populating the planet.)
I keep writing essays that try to explain why it ought to be not just possible but necessary to contemplate the prospects for practical action about the needs of the planet and the societies that cling to its fragile surface, and at the same time to consider the structures that underlie such societies and the planet on which they exist and the physical universe that supports it,
and finally to reflect on the fact that there are or at least appear to be anomalous aspects of human existence that have been explained by many contradictory sets of beliefs—all of which are probably largely wrong, though some of them explain the data more adequately, if still misleadingly.
After seven years of trying, I keep getting responses that indicate that most if not all of my readers don’t have the slightest idea what I am talking about; even the response that I am crazy as a loon would show that they had absorbed something. So then I try to explain it another way. As Samuel Beckett put it, “Fail again. Fail better.”
Of course, the essays appear on a blog and in friends lists with dozens of other posts, and nobody actually has time to read the stuff, even when it is the same length as the essays my readership absorbs and comments on in magazines and online publications. Readers from outside the LiveJournal world may not even understand how to click on LJ-cuts to read the rest of the essay, as with the asterisk or text that should appear right here: ( * )
Most human beings, and myself more than most, are enormous messes; they/we are, however, self-congratulatory messes, and almost completely unable to perceive, much less articulate, how and why they/we are a product of their/our personal psychology as shaped by their/our social environment. This is in part due to our incapacity to focus on a sufficiently large number of perceptions and concepts simultaneously, and to find valid or genuinely probable links among them that do not depend on the simple human capacity to invent meaningful patterns where there are none—not a good idea, even though that is a capacity on which civilization depends, since we live by the fictions that keep us from being just a bundle of wordless automatic reactions. We are still far more shaped by that bundle of unconscious responses than we like to think, no matter how much that bundle is shaped in turn by culture, and culture is shaped in turn by us.
Traditions exist that have attempted to expand the capacity for concurrent perceptions without playing into our predilection for paranoia (even if they frequently fail to suppress our affection for alliteration). At their outer margins, they assert that what we think of as the highest form of humanity is in reality the minimum achievement required to be worthy of the title “human being” in the first place. (This is the meaning of the maxim “Human birth is hard to obtain”—not that there are far more bacteria than human beings populating the planet.)
I keep writing essays that try to explain why it ought to be not just possible but necessary to contemplate the prospects for practical action about the needs of the planet and the societies that cling to its fragile surface, and at the same time to consider the structures that underlie such societies and the planet on which they exist and the physical universe that supports it,
and finally to reflect on the fact that there are or at least appear to be anomalous aspects of human existence that have been explained by many contradictory sets of beliefs—all of which are probably largely wrong, though some of them explain the data more adequately, if still misleadingly.
After seven years of trying, I keep getting responses that indicate that most if not all of my readers don’t have the slightest idea what I am talking about; even the response that I am crazy as a loon would show that they had absorbed something. So then I try to explain it another way. As Samuel Beckett put it, “Fail again. Fail better.”
Of course, the essays appear on a blog and in friends lists with dozens of other posts, and nobody actually has time to read the stuff, even when it is the same length as the essays my readership absorbs and comments on in magazines and online publications. Readers from outside the LiveJournal world may not even understand how to click on LJ-cuts to read the rest of the essay, as with the asterisk or text that should appear right here: ( * )
