Things get serious in the middle of the year. Hope you can all be there. CS
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Max Weber – Social Philosopher
Convened by Cameron Shingleton
Max Weber’s social thought was both philosophically influenced and philosophically influential. Yet Weber is today often associated with a series of somewhat over-used conceptual motifs which contemporary philosophers have adopted a notably defensive attitude to – the modern “disenchantment of the world”, the protestant “spirit of capitalism”, the iron cage of modern social life and the associated notions of rationalisation, intellectualisation and the rise of modern bureaucracy – the latter of which many have taken Weber to be subtly commending rather than describing. With a view to getting beyond some of the received ideas, Max Weber, Social Philosopher aims to introduce Weber’s “interpretative sociology” from a philosophical angle via a discussion of five of his main themes – his notion of cultural or social science, his views of rationality and rationalisation, of capitalism, bureaucracy and the meanings of asceticism for religion and culture at large.
Each day of the course will focus on a series of key questions relating to each of these five central Weberian preoccupations: What does objectivity mean once we move beyond the natural sciences – what methods are appropriate to the study of human societies, what is a Weberian ideal-type? What does rationality look like once we put behind us the perennial philosophical temptation of a priori theory-building? What is the historical “elective affinity” Weber sees between the spirit of early capitalism and the ethos and conceptual universe of protestant puritanism? What is Weber’s genealogy of bureaucracy, how does he think bureaucracy works and what is its significance as part of the modern social dispensation? How does the notion of asceticism fit into Weber’s sociology of religion, what is the difference for Weber between other-worldly and inner-worldly asceticism and what part does asceticism play in Weber’s analysis of the domains of art and science, as well as erotic, economic and political life at large?
The course is intended for beginners and for those with some prior knowledge. Weber’s allegedly forbidding written style will be introduced via some of his raciest texts, including “Science as a Vocation”, his work on Buddhism and the under-read “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions”.
Day 1: Weber on the cultural/social sciences, ideal-types
Day 2: Rationality and rationalisation
Day 3: Capitalism and modernity
Day 4: Bureaucracy and politics
Day 5: Religion and the meanings of asceticism
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Still Unfunny
Exhausted as you clearly all are by my attempt to show that Catherine D's atheism is a classic Krausian symptom of a social problem it purports to be a cure for, I can't help having another go. It's Anzac Day and what else is there to do but keep thinking about fighting?
"A further problem for the Dawkins-Deveney approach to religion is that it tends to take myth and narrative - indeed seemingly all forms of communication that rely for their sense of depth on symbolism or indirect representation - as something patently ridiculous that can and should be mocked out of existence. Deveney is not really so daft as to think that the Bible stands or falls on whether it provides a literal account of the creation of the world or the history of human affairs, though she's forced to pretend on this score a lot of the time so she can make as much use as possible of the blowtorch of sarcasm against the dim-witted fundamentalism of our day and age. The trouble is that when she uses the same blowtorch against non-literalist takes on the Bible, the result is an even more volatile mixture of funny and unfunny doctrinaire nonsense. Parables degenerate into fairy stories, all religious institutions turn into cults (as Deveney lamely jested in God is Bullshit, there's only one letter's difference between cults and cu*ts) and there's nothing much more to cults than middle-aged charlatans extorting free sex from gullible followers or innocent children. . . OK, she was joking - it's was only for the sake of entertaining caricature that she attributed to herself the inverse Midas touch - turning everything religious to sh*t, or, more exactly, to magic (= literally the coercion of spirits by force of sheer charisma or arbitrary formulas). The question though is - how far does she want to take the joke? God is Bullshit, as I said in last week's post, is a transparent attempt to make a serious point in disguise - the serious point being - not just that you're a dope if you think Jesus of Nazareth was literally born of a virgin or the word made flesh, but that you're also a dope if you think these stories and ideas have any interest or meaning, except maybe as testimony to the incredibly stupid things human beings can be fooled into believing. Where the serious problem lies is in the denial that religious texts - or, for that matter, literary texts, poems, etc. - can convey truths, even if they aren't scientific truths, "demonstrative truths", truths that everyone must rationally accept, truths which exclude their contraries, etc. Here we have perhaps the biggest single contributor to the impression that the intellectual master of the atheist movement himself is as self-righteous and literal-minded a crusader as any 6-day young-earth creationist, i.e. Richard Dawkins' refusal to acknowledge truths whose truth depends (for example) on the story-like way they are elaborated and realised in a text as a whole human predicament [For more on this, try Harry Redner's aesthetics book, reviewed last year in these pages - Chapter 8 especially. CS]. While in his own defence Dawkins would probably say - and he'd be right to say - that there's a categoric difference between taking the Bible literally (or thinking that it contains all the truth) and taking the facts of nature literally (or thinking that they are the whole truth) - it's the entire aspect of the world that he can't see and doesn't have any feeling for or even want to think about - precisely what lies to one side of the literal scientific truth once the literal Biblical truth has fallen to the ground - that is his blindspot, as it is for a lot of the rather less self-assured atheist agitators who want to wheel Dawkins on as The Authoritative Smart Guy."
"A further problem for the Dawkins-Deveney approach to religion is that it tends to take myth and narrative - indeed seemingly all forms of communication that rely for their sense of depth on symbolism or indirect representation - as something patently ridiculous that can and should be mocked out of existence. Deveney is not really so daft as to think that the Bible stands or falls on whether it provides a literal account of the creation of the world or the history of human affairs, though she's forced to pretend on this score a lot of the time so she can make as much use as possible of the blowtorch of sarcasm against the dim-witted fundamentalism of our day and age. The trouble is that when she uses the same blowtorch against non-literalist takes on the Bible, the result is an even more volatile mixture of funny and unfunny doctrinaire nonsense. Parables degenerate into fairy stories, all religious institutions turn into cults (as Deveney lamely jested in God is Bullshit, there's only one letter's difference between cults and cu*ts) and there's nothing much more to cults than middle-aged charlatans extorting free sex from gullible followers or innocent children. . . OK, she was joking - it's was only for the sake of entertaining caricature that she attributed to herself the inverse Midas touch - turning everything religious to sh*t, or, more exactly, to magic (= literally the coercion of spirits by force of sheer charisma or arbitrary formulas). The question though is - how far does she want to take the joke? God is Bullshit, as I said in last week's post, is a transparent attempt to make a serious point in disguise - the serious point being - not just that you're a dope if you think Jesus of Nazareth was literally born of a virgin or the word made flesh, but that you're also a dope if you think these stories and ideas have any interest or meaning, except maybe as testimony to the incredibly stupid things human beings can be fooled into believing. Where the serious problem lies is in the denial that religious texts - or, for that matter, literary texts, poems, etc. - can convey truths, even if they aren't scientific truths, "demonstrative truths", truths that everyone must rationally accept, truths which exclude their contraries, etc. Here we have perhaps the biggest single contributor to the impression that the intellectual master of the atheist movement himself is as self-righteous and literal-minded a crusader as any 6-day young-earth creationist, i.e. Richard Dawkins' refusal to acknowledge truths whose truth depends (for example) on the story-like way they are elaborated and realised in a text as a whole human predicament [For more on this, try Harry Redner's aesthetics book, reviewed last year in these pages - Chapter 8 especially. CS]. While in his own defence Dawkins would probably say - and he'd be right to say - that there's a categoric difference between taking the Bible literally (or thinking that it contains all the truth) and taking the facts of nature literally (or thinking that they are the whole truth) - it's the entire aspect of the world that he can't see and doesn't have any feeling for or even want to think about - precisely what lies to one side of the literal scientific truth once the literal Biblical truth has fallen to the ground - that is his blindspot, as it is for a lot of the rather less self-assured atheist agitators who want to wheel Dawkins on as The Authoritative Smart Guy."
Friday, April 23, 2010
Gilded Cage
"Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the following propositions are encouraged to join Gilded Cage."
The corporate regimentation of arts, science and education in Australia has been proceeding apace for more than two decades. In higher education, the process was initiated in the 1980’s with the ALP’s Dawkins reforms, which saw mass amalgamations of universities and vocational colleges and the introduction of HECS. Under Howard’s Liberals universities, arts organisations and scientific agencies were increasingly compelled to seek funding from private sources as Federal patronage entered a prolonged period of decline – with predictable results for all areas of intellectual and aesthetic life unsuited to operating in a mass market or unable to gear operations to the development of new products and technologies. The story continues under the present Labor government. Its latest instalment is the underwhelming response by governments to calls on behalf of the VCA as it struggles to avoid annexation by a rapidly corporatising Melbourne University.
Gilded Cage is a loose association of university students and staff, writers, artists, scientists and activists who see corporate culture, bureaucratic regimentation and top-down managerial practices as threats to institutions of many kinds. The group aims to raise awareness of the noxious effects of current institutional practices on Australian cultural life and combat them.
Gilded Cage calls for:
1. university students, university staff and the wider arts and science community to support suspension of the application of the “Melbourne Model” to the VCA;
2. immediate revision of the Federal funding arrangements that led to the VCA-Melbourne University merger;
3. university music students and staff to oppose the merger of VCA Music and the Conservatorium;
4. university students and staff to resist corporate regimentation by:
(a) disposing thoughtfully of university advertising material or undertaking spontaneous creative improvements to it
(b) publicising cost-cutting and re-structuring measures being undertaken by university faculties that are likely to affect teaching, learning or research;
(c) circulating flagrant examples of managerial language deployed in pursuit of inappropriate business models for academic life;
(d) discussing the impact of cost-cutting, re-structuring and managerial foul language with sympathetic parties beyond the university system;
5. artists, art teachers, arts workers and the members of arts funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of consciousness-raising and resistance involving: (a) culture-jamming, (b) whistle-blowing, (c) circulation of examples of toxic managerial newspeak, (d) public discussion;
6. scientists (social and natural), science teachers, government researchers and members of scientific funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of (a) to (d); and
7. all interested parties to join Gilded Cage in a show of support – with the aim of bringing together and informing all those with direct experience of systemic problems in the arts, science and higher education.
Gilded Cage believes that:
1. looking to the arts, sciences and education system exclusively as the source of export revenue has seriously impaired Australian public culture;
2. the introduction of inappropriate models of market competition has led to wasteful expenditure on advertising and consultancy and an institutional culture whose relation to students and to the general public is blinkered and manipulative;
3. new forms of managerial control demoralise all who seek to sustain and benefit from arts, science and higher education
4. university life is increasingly anonymous and educational experiences increasingly impoverished; and
5. current modes of operating arts organisations and scientific agencies have led to similarly impoverished aesthetic experiences for artists and their audiences and to the socially questionable dissemination and use of science.
Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the above propositions are encouraged to join via:
the gilded cage facebook enclosure
The corporate regimentation of arts, science and education in Australia has been proceeding apace for more than two decades. In higher education, the process was initiated in the 1980’s with the ALP’s Dawkins reforms, which saw mass amalgamations of universities and vocational colleges and the introduction of HECS. Under Howard’s Liberals universities, arts organisations and scientific agencies were increasingly compelled to seek funding from private sources as Federal patronage entered a prolonged period of decline – with predictable results for all areas of intellectual and aesthetic life unsuited to operating in a mass market or unable to gear operations to the development of new products and technologies. The story continues under the present Labor government. Its latest instalment is the underwhelming response by governments to calls on behalf of the VCA as it struggles to avoid annexation by a rapidly corporatising Melbourne University.
Gilded Cage is a loose association of university students and staff, writers, artists, scientists and activists who see corporate culture, bureaucratic regimentation and top-down managerial practices as threats to institutions of many kinds. The group aims to raise awareness of the noxious effects of current institutional practices on Australian cultural life and combat them.
Gilded Cage calls for:
1. university students, university staff and the wider arts and science community to support suspension of the application of the “Melbourne Model” to the VCA;
2. immediate revision of the Federal funding arrangements that led to the VCA-Melbourne University merger;
3. university music students and staff to oppose the merger of VCA Music and the Conservatorium;
4. university students and staff to resist corporate regimentation by:
(a) disposing thoughtfully of university advertising material or undertaking spontaneous creative improvements to it
(b) publicising cost-cutting and re-structuring measures being undertaken by university faculties that are likely to affect teaching, learning or research;
(c) circulating flagrant examples of managerial language deployed in pursuit of inappropriate business models for academic life;
(d) discussing the impact of cost-cutting, re-structuring and managerial foul language with sympathetic parties beyond the university system;
5. artists, art teachers, arts workers and the members of arts funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of consciousness-raising and resistance involving: (a) culture-jamming, (b) whistle-blowing, (c) circulation of examples of toxic managerial newspeak, (d) public discussion;
6. scientists (social and natural), science teachers, government researchers and members of scientific funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of (a) to (d); and
7. all interested parties to join Gilded Cage in a show of support – with the aim of bringing together and informing all those with direct experience of systemic problems in the arts, science and higher education.
Gilded Cage believes that:
1. looking to the arts, sciences and education system exclusively as the source of export revenue has seriously impaired Australian public culture;
2. the introduction of inappropriate models of market competition has led to wasteful expenditure on advertising and consultancy and an institutional culture whose relation to students and to the general public is blinkered and manipulative;
3. new forms of managerial control demoralise all who seek to sustain and benefit from arts, science and higher education
4. university life is increasingly anonymous and educational experiences increasingly impoverished; and
5. current modes of operating arts organisations and scientific agencies have led to similarly impoverished aesthetic experiences for artists and their audiences and to the socially questionable dissemination and use of science.
Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the above propositions are encouraged to join via:
the gilded cage facebook enclosure
Saturday, April 17, 2010
How unfunny is Catherine D?
Review: Catherine Deveney "God is Bullshit: That's the Good News"
Though it shouldn't dissuade you from becoming an atheist (or persuade you), the fact is that there have always been a fair number of them for whom the attraction is obviously the opportunity to have some rough fun at the expense of what other people take very seriously. These people are not so much born rebels as serial pests, Bart Simpsons in battle dress. If you wanted a technical name for them, it would have to be social scatologists - people whose atheism comes down basically to sticking their fingers up their bums, whipping them out and waving them round chanting gleefully that God, that pathetic non-existent fkn loser, hasn't struck them down for their sins yet. On the other hand, especially since the days religion started having to justify itself in the face of scientific enquiry, journalistic scrutiny and scatological provocation, there have always been quite a few testy metropolitans who have argued rather fatuously for their beliefs on the grounds of sheer historical necessity: religion has been taken seriously for the longest time and should therefore be taken seriously today. In a broadly secular society such as our own, the sort of ill-natured to-ing and fro-ing that goes on between the two groups seems like just another sideshow - an exercise in mutual irritation that the mainstream media is happy to bring to the boil, especially at the time of the two main Christian festivals, when the rest of the world is just taking a breather. Such is the eternal nil-all draw that seems bound to be replayed over and over again on the margins of the social realm.
Exactly why it's bound to be a nil-all draw is complex, but if I had to say in 30 words or less - what might, very roughly, be called the scientific view of the world has run into problems of its own, both intrinsic and extrinsic, but religion, including the Christian religion, has established itself as a bit of a refuge against some of the forces in the world that are advancing and have been for a long time and have caused a lot of people severe anxiety in the process. - Much as you might get people to agree in questionnaires to the proposition that they "believe what science says" (whatever that actually means), our society just doesn't seem capable of acquainting large enough numbers of people with the complex bodies of bio-geo-physical fact that fly in the face at least of more literalist interpretations of the Bible. On the other hand, there's probably a general perception that most Christians and religious folk take the notion of charity and social cohesion a little more seriously than most and much more seriously than they are, and indeed can be, taken by the dominant institution of the contemporary world - the market economy. Religion, in broad terms, probably isn't going backwards because there's a bit of a sense that it functions, partly, as a counterweight to the at times pitiless spirit of commercialism that permeates almost every aspect of the systems by which we supply our ever-multiplying material needs. If religion is not going backwards, I'd say, that has little to do with the fact that large numbers of people put themselves down as nominal Christians or say they believe in some sort of transcendent or supra-worldly plane - such beliefs are normally so totally content-less and so devoid of practical consequences that they should hardly be called religion at all and certainly not Christianity; but it does have to do with the not unjustifiable perception that religion is a viable path of self-restraint in a world dominated by grossly excessive consumption. The fewer needs you have the happier you are, as the saying goes; well, in the crack-brained rooting-tooting-cussing-gorging times we live in, when maxing out your credit card is something to group text your friends about (LOL) and when your patriotic duty in an economic crisis is to go out there and FKN-WLL SHOP, religion is seen as a powerful motivation to slough off superfluous needs and ignore various palpably insane social imperatives.
This brings me to Catherine Deveney, whose show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival I stopped by to see last night. Deveney, as I'm sure you already know, is one of the scatological atheist brigade, but before I get to that - a disclosure: I have been an un-fan of Deveney's for many years now - not so much because of what she writes - which is such a stew of smart-arsery and brow-beating that I rarely read it - but because of what she represents: the celebrity columnist, viz. at a once-serious newspaper now determined to turn itself into a super-size Who Weekly, whose fairly unremarkable life and equally unremarkable mind leaves her with nothing much to do in her thrice-weekly columns but talk about herself and aimlessly hang sh*t on people. Her stand-up comedy aside, Deveney's career has essentially been a variation on a theme whose monotonous key notes are filling up column inches and giving readers a sense of social superiority. The idea of the people who commission this stuff seems to be to give The Age's readers the chance to get themselves close enough over breakfast to the source of self-important snark (Deveney), quirky navel-gazing (Marieke Hardy), cosy principled "musings" (Kate Holden) or 2-minute-noodle-style literary knowingness (Shane Maloney), so that they can head out into the world - if not feeling an inner glow, at least feeling forearmed with someone else's ironies. - It's important to bear in mind, by the way, what all this guff - guff that undoubtedly knows it's guff - has come to edge out of the newpaper almost completely - that is, book reviews, film reviews and social criticism that fulfil the minimal criteria of grown-up commentary - talking about the topic for more than three sentences back-to-back and not using the elbow-room that new-style subjectively coloured journalism gives you as a pretext for talking about what bit of obnoxious or poignant behaviour you were witness to last time you were at the supermarket. - That The Age continues to employ Deveney as a tv writer is a sign of the deep downwards spiral it entered into long ago; the abrasive scatter-brained smugness might sometimes be amusing in a column devoted to Catherine's larger-than-life personality, but applied to a medium, tv, that would be well served being written about from a thoughtful informed perspective, it's inexcusable.
***
We interrupt transmission to present you posthumously with no less than six epigraphs. Just in case you'd been tempted not to read on by so many preliminaries. . . CS
It is quite possible nowadays to rebel against rebellion by being conventional. Of course this doesn’t mean that all conventionality has just the right mystical rebellious qualities. . . But then how to stand out from the crowd if this is the trick you’re trying to play? That requires imagination. . . - Lion
Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even afraid of them. - Lichtenberg
I flew too close to the sun – on wings of pastrami. - George Costanza
All theology represents an intellectual rationalisation of the possession of sacred values. No science is absolutely free from presuppositions, and no science can prove its fundamental value to the man who rejects these presuppositions. Every theology, however, adds a few specific presuppositions for its work and thus for the justification of its existence. Their meaning and scope vary. Every theology. . . presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable. - Max Weber
Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualisation which we have been undergoing for thousands of years . . . Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalisation, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically. . . Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may “count” on the behaviour of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy here in the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money – sometimes more and sometimes less? The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. . . It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather than one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualisation means. – Max Weber
The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked though to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a "meaning" of inner-worldly occurrences. Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power. The extent of consciousness or of consistency in the experience of this contrast, however, varies widely. Athansius won out with his formula [I believe because it is absurd] in his struggle against the majority of the Hellenic philsophers of the time; it does not seem inconceivable, as has been said, that among other reasons he really wanted to compel them expressly to make the intellectual sacrifice and to fix a limit to rational discussion. Soon afterwards, however, the Trinity itself was rationally argued and discussed. - Weber
***
All of that said though - there's no denying that the larger-than-life personality does work for Deveney as a stand-up. In her promo material for the Comedy Festival she describes herself as "atheist eye-candy" - which is pretty much the sort of self-admiring tripe that her columns are full of. But when she stalks round on stage in high-heels and a low cut dress and hoots, Tallulah Bankhead style, about being atheist eye-candy she actually makes herself into what she says she is; instead of just writing egomaniacal comic IOU's, she gives herself the chance to play on or against the expectations that come with that sort of sexualised self-presentation. Likewise when she tells us the story of her pre-teen attempts at joining the ranks of Catholic altar boys at the start of God is Bullshit. What did they make her as punishment for even asking? A . . . liturgical dancer: down she goes on bended knee and swirls her arms bizarrely above her head, part matador, part calisthenics teacher - at last she's showing us the stupid side of religion. Or take this development of the show's mainline title:
"George Pell is doing a show at the Comedy Festival did you know? It's called. . . Catherine Deveney is bullshit."
Exactly why it's bound to be a nil-all draw is complex, but if I had to say in 30 words or less - what might, very roughly, be called the scientific view of the world has run into problems of its own, both intrinsic and extrinsic, but religion, including the Christian religion, has established itself as a bit of a refuge against some of the forces in the world that are advancing and have been for a long time and have caused a lot of people severe anxiety in the process. - Much as you might get people to agree in questionnaires to the proposition that they "believe what science says" (whatever that actually means), our society just doesn't seem capable of acquainting large enough numbers of people with the complex bodies of bio-geo-physical fact that fly in the face at least of more literalist interpretations of the Bible. On the other hand, there's probably a general perception that most Christians and religious folk take the notion of charity and social cohesion a little more seriously than most and much more seriously than they are, and indeed can be, taken by the dominant institution of the contemporary world - the market economy. Religion, in broad terms, probably isn't going backwards because there's a bit of a sense that it functions, partly, as a counterweight to the at times pitiless spirit of commercialism that permeates almost every aspect of the systems by which we supply our ever-multiplying material needs. If religion is not going backwards, I'd say, that has little to do with the fact that large numbers of people put themselves down as nominal Christians or say they believe in some sort of transcendent or supra-worldly plane - such beliefs are normally so totally content-less and so devoid of practical consequences that they should hardly be called religion at all and certainly not Christianity; but it does have to do with the not unjustifiable perception that religion is a viable path of self-restraint in a world dominated by grossly excessive consumption. The fewer needs you have the happier you are, as the saying goes; well, in the crack-brained rooting-tooting-cussing-gorging times we live in, when maxing out your credit card is something to group text your friends about (LOL) and when your patriotic duty in an economic crisis is to go out there and FKN-WLL SHOP, religion is seen as a powerful motivation to slough off superfluous needs and ignore various palpably insane social imperatives.
This brings me to Catherine Deveney, whose show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival I stopped by to see last night. Deveney, as I'm sure you already know, is one of the scatological atheist brigade, but before I get to that - a disclosure: I have been an un-fan of Deveney's for many years now - not so much because of what she writes - which is such a stew of smart-arsery and brow-beating that I rarely read it - but because of what she represents: the celebrity columnist, viz. at a once-serious newspaper now determined to turn itself into a super-size Who Weekly, whose fairly unremarkable life and equally unremarkable mind leaves her with nothing much to do in her thrice-weekly columns but talk about herself and aimlessly hang sh*t on people. Her stand-up comedy aside, Deveney's career has essentially been a variation on a theme whose monotonous key notes are filling up column inches and giving readers a sense of social superiority. The idea of the people who commission this stuff seems to be to give The Age's readers the chance to get themselves close enough over breakfast to the source of self-important snark (Deveney), quirky navel-gazing (Marieke Hardy), cosy principled "musings" (Kate Holden) or 2-minute-noodle-style literary knowingness (Shane Maloney), so that they can head out into the world - if not feeling an inner glow, at least feeling forearmed with someone else's ironies. - It's important to bear in mind, by the way, what all this guff - guff that undoubtedly knows it's guff - has come to edge out of the newpaper almost completely - that is, book reviews, film reviews and social criticism that fulfil the minimal criteria of grown-up commentary - talking about the topic for more than three sentences back-to-back and not using the elbow-room that new-style subjectively coloured journalism gives you as a pretext for talking about what bit of obnoxious or poignant behaviour you were witness to last time you were at the supermarket. - That The Age continues to employ Deveney as a tv writer is a sign of the deep downwards spiral it entered into long ago; the abrasive scatter-brained smugness might sometimes be amusing in a column devoted to Catherine's larger-than-life personality, but applied to a medium, tv, that would be well served being written about from a thoughtful informed perspective, it's inexcusable.
***
We interrupt transmission to present you posthumously with no less than six epigraphs. Just in case you'd been tempted not to read on by so many preliminaries. . . CS
It is quite possible nowadays to rebel against rebellion by being conventional. Of course this doesn’t mean that all conventionality has just the right mystical rebellious qualities. . . But then how to stand out from the crowd if this is the trick you’re trying to play? That requires imagination. . . - Lion
Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even afraid of them. - Lichtenberg
I flew too close to the sun – on wings of pastrami. - George Costanza
All theology represents an intellectual rationalisation of the possession of sacred values. No science is absolutely free from presuppositions, and no science can prove its fundamental value to the man who rejects these presuppositions. Every theology, however, adds a few specific presuppositions for its work and thus for the justification of its existence. Their meaning and scope vary. Every theology. . . presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable. - Max Weber
Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualisation which we have been undergoing for thousands of years . . . Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalisation, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically. . . Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may “count” on the behaviour of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy here in the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money – sometimes more and sometimes less? The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. . . It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather than one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualisation means. – Max Weber
The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked though to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a "meaning" of inner-worldly occurrences. Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power. The extent of consciousness or of consistency in the experience of this contrast, however, varies widely. Athansius won out with his formula [I believe because it is absurd] in his struggle against the majority of the Hellenic philsophers of the time; it does not seem inconceivable, as has been said, that among other reasons he really wanted to compel them expressly to make the intellectual sacrifice and to fix a limit to rational discussion. Soon afterwards, however, the Trinity itself was rationally argued and discussed. - Weber
***
All of that said though - there's no denying that the larger-than-life personality does work for Deveney as a stand-up. In her promo material for the Comedy Festival she describes herself as "atheist eye-candy" - which is pretty much the sort of self-admiring tripe that her columns are full of. But when she stalks round on stage in high-heels and a low cut dress and hoots, Tallulah Bankhead style, about being atheist eye-candy she actually makes herself into what she says she is; instead of just writing egomaniacal comic IOU's, she gives herself the chance to play on or against the expectations that come with that sort of sexualised self-presentation. Likewise when she tells us the story of her pre-teen attempts at joining the ranks of Catholic altar boys at the start of God is Bullshit. What did they make her as punishment for even asking? A . . . liturgical dancer: down she goes on bended knee and swirls her arms bizarrely above her head, part matador, part calisthenics teacher - at last she's showing us the stupid side of religion. Or take this development of the show's mainline title:
"George Pell is doing a show at the Comedy Festival did you know? It's called. . . Catherine Deveney is bullshit."
Saturday, April 10, 2010
In grim times like these. . .
As we toddle (slouch?fiddle?burn?) towards the end of the forgettable first term of the Rudd Labor government - time for a moment's reflection. In honour of John Clarke - who's been funnier on the subject of the miseries of Australian political life than possibly any Australian: a vaguely Clarke-Dawe style interview conducted by Marc Hiatt with one of the nation's lesser-known pundits - a man of some humour and great testiness - at about the same point in the life-cycle of the last Howard government that is now being approached by Rudd Labor mark 1.
Since Rudd's intellectual make-up people at The Monthly are about the only ones on this side of politics who could possibly toast him three years in - after the mockery of the Garnaut Review, the recent re-emergence of base populism on the question of asylum seekers and his and Julia Gillard's unstinting entirely Howardesque churning out of rhetorical sausage-meat for the equally surreal purposes of political attack and defense - three cheers instead to John Clarke and Bryan Dawe. And to a certain philosophical notion that's in the background of Marc's 2007 interview and has been richly exemplified in political reality ever since - the theory of the identity of indistinguishables. . .
In grim times like these. . .
Marc Hiatt: Eric Timewell, obviously the topic of this interview is politics - something you claim to be an expert on.
Eric Timewell: Thank you very much.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, you're renowned for your cynicism on the topic of Australian politics. . .
TIMEWELL: It’s not cynicism, Marc, it’s “acidic scepticism”.
HIATT: Sorry, your acidic scepticism. So we’ve invited you in to cheer us all up tonight, and maybe enlighten us, given the miserable state we socially concerned people are in 11 years into the reign of the Coalition government.
TIMEWELL: I’ll see what I can do there.
HIATT: Can you start maybe by giving me an indication where you stand on John Howard.
TIMEWELL: Beg your pardon.
HIATT: Thinking about national politics - where do you stand on John Howard.
TIMEWELL: Who?
HIATT: John Howard!
TIMEWELL: Sorry, I’m drawing a blank there.
HIATT: You don’t know who John Howard is?
TIMEWELL: For the time being, no, I don’t want to buy Qantas either, Marc, no.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, please think for a minute. The current prime minister of Australia – who is it?
TIMEWELL: It’s not Alfred Deakin. . .
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: Noel Coward?
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: John Hunt?
HIATT: I think you know who I’m talking about, Dr Timewell.
TIMEWELL: I know, John Wayne.
HIATT: No, it’s not John Wayne.
TIMEWELL: Can I phone a friend?
HIATT: Absolutely not.
TIMEWELL: You know, the Los Angeles Times used to think it was John Hunt.
HIATT: They’re from California.
TIMEWELL: Some of them think Australia should be towed into Southern Ocean and used as a nuclear waste dump.
HIATT: But Doctor!
TIMEWELL: Where were we? Oh, that’s right - John Howard.
HIATT: Are we on the same page?
TIMEWELL: (pause) Maybe.
HIATT: Do you think Australia is rising, Dr Timewell?
TIMEWELL: No, I don’t think there’s going to be an uprising in Australia.
HIATT: No, I mean. . .
TIMEWELL: Marc, Australians like watching telly much too much for there ever to be any sort of uprising.
HIATT: I said do you think Australia is – rising.
TIMEWELL: What’s that meant to mean?
HIATT: Mr Howard said in his speech to the Queensland Press Club the other day that Australia was rising.
TIMEWELL: What?!
HIATT: That’s right, he said we’re rising.
TIMEWELL: Like a cake in the oven?
HIATT: He said we need to foster – I’m quoting him now – foster a rising Australia that can prosper in a fast-changing world. Let me try and get the intonation right - a ri-sing Australia that can prosper in a fast-changing world.
TIMEWELL: A rising Australia? Australia isn’t some sort of hovercraft, Marc. What does he mean by that?
HIATT: That’s what I’m asking you.
TIMEWELL: What’s the context. It probably makes more sense in context.
HIATT: (slowly, as if labouring under heavy delusions) “Our abiding national challenge is a rising economic tide that lifts all boats. . . That is a calling for our time and for all time.”
TIMEWELL: (pause) The meaning of that is not immediately perspicuous to me, Marc.
HIATT: No idea? Rising tide? Lift all boats?
TIMEWELL: There does seem to be some sort of underlying theme of . . . tides and, maybe . . . hovercraft.
HIATT: How about this one: “The best kept secret of the Australian achievement is our national sense of balance. The national sense of balance is the handmaiden of national growth and renewal.”
TIMEWELL: The hand-what of national growth?
HIATT: The handmaiden.
TIMEWELL: (irritably) What’s that supposed to mean?
HIATT: That’s what I’m asking you.
TIMEWELL: Handmaiden or handtowel did he say?
HIATT: Handmaiden.
TIMEWELL: I’m not sure about any of that.
HIATT: No idea?
TIMEWELL: What is a handmaiden exactly, anyway? Do you know?
HIATT: Not exactly, do you?
TIMEWELL: I could take a guess. Is it some sort of serving girl who hands you a handtowel?
HIATT: Could be.
TIMEWELL: I didn’t think we had those any more. What else has he got?
HIATT: There’s a lot about balance. “What helps us keep our balance?”
TIMEWELL: It’s something to do with the inner ear, isn’t it?
HIATT: No, this is from Howard. “What helps us keep our balance?”
TIMEWELL: “What helps us keep our balance?” - question mark.
HIATT: Yes. “What helps us keep our balance?”
TIMEWELL: “What helps us keep our balance?” - he asks rhetorically.
HIATT: What helps us keep our balance, he asks rhetorically, yes. This is what he says. (slowly) “To me, it’s no secret. It’s economic growth leavened always by Australian common sense.”
TIMEWELL: “leavened”?!
HIATT: Yes, “leavened”.
TIMEWELL: (pause, in contemplative wonder) There is a touch of the carrot cake about his vision for Australia, isn’t there. Ha-ha.
HIATT: So what does it mean?
TIMEWELL: This isn’t a trick question, is it?
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: I mean, these aren’t all trick questions are they?
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: Questions of meaning have a horrible way of turning out to be trick questions – know what I mean?
HIATT: Hm.
TIMEWELL: Read it again.
HIATT: “What helps us keep our balance? To me, it’s no secret. It’s economic growth, leavened always by Australian common sense.”
TIMEWELL: (pause) Does he maybe mean something more like “leveraged”. As in “economic growth, leveraged by Australian common sense”. You see, the particular metaphor the political animal usually grasps for in these situations – after he’s done with his metaphors of growth and fecundity – is a metaphor of the economy as a piece of machinery, a lovely glistening metallic set-up which is very good at doing things.
HIATT: There’s nothing about a glistening metallic set-up in here.
TIMEWELL: Look, Marc, my guess is it’s basically hot air.
HIATT: Is that the best you can do?
TIMEWELL: It appears to be the best John Howard can do, Marc.
HIATT: Deeper interpretations?
TIMEWELL: He doesn’t say the economy is fungible does he?
HIATT: Fungible?
TIMEWELL: Yes.
HIATT: No, he doesn’t say anything about fungible.
TIMEWELL: I’ve never known what fungible meant. Sounds like something the economy might be. Also sounds like a foot disease.
HIATT: Shall we move on?
TIMEWELL: Let's.
HIATT: Ok then, what do you make of the performance of the Leader of the Opposition?
TIMEWELL: Who? (pulls face of tortured incomprehension)
HIATT: The Leader of the Opposition.
TIMEWELL: Marc, we’ve been talking about John Howard for the past 10 minutes.Think of something else for us to talk about - go on.
HIATT: That’s what I’m saying, let’s talk about Mr Rudd.
TIMEWELL: Marc there are serious people in the audience. I’m not going to sit here and indulge one of your fantasies about an android from Queensland who’s colonised the body of a man as boring as John Howard so he can promote the ideological agenda of the actual John Howard.
HIATT: You have no idea who Kevin Rudd is. . .
TIMEWELL: Marc, you’re just being hysterical. John Howard this, John Howard that.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, how long are you going to keep this up? KEVIN RUDD.
TIMEWELL: John Who? Marc, don’t scream. You may be petrified of barely human beings impersonating John Howard, but let me just point out - you have not been visited by aliens, you have not been sexually abused by a rogue Christian from the right wing of the ALP, and you are not about to experience the Australian version of the Rapture.
HIATT: Mr Rudd’s been talking about it as if it was going to happen in Canberra just after the election.
TIMEWELL: What?
HIATT: The Australian version of the Rapture.
TIMEWELL: Look, if any sort of full eschatological-style Rapture is going to happen anywhere, it’s not going to happen in Canberra.
HIATT: You must have heard at least some of Mr Rudd’s religious references . . .
TIMEWELL: I deny that.
HIATT: What about the thing about the light on the hill. How do you read Mr Rudd on that?
TIMEWELL: I think it’s a reference to something a certain beardy reforming type once said.
HIATT: Chifley?
TIMEWELL: No, I think a slightly earlier figure in the Labour Movement, Marc.
HIATT: Henry Lawson?
TIMEWELL: No.
HIATT: Karl Marx?
TIMEWELL: Jesus Christ Almighty, supposedly.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, tell us what you think the light on the hill means in terms of the modern Australian Labour movement - even if you won’t admit to knowing it’s one of Mr Rudd’s favourite metaphors.
TIMEWELL: Sounds like hot air again to me.
HIATT: In the Cultural Studies department they say it could be part of some sort of coded environmental discourse, for instance.
TIMEWELL: Almost certainly not, Marc.
HIATT: For instance, could it have something to do with the electricity Mr Rudd wants to save by switching the lights off after we’ve left the room.
TIMEWELL: It’s not lights off on the hill.
HIATT: Have you got a better interpretation?
TIMEWELL: Of John Howard’s “light on the hill”?
HIATT: Of Kevin Rudd’s light on the hill.
TIMEWELL: One that doesn’t involve an acutely felt political need to borrow a bit of the Jesus man’s credibility on social issues?
HIATT:That's right.
TIMEWELL: If you really want a Cultural Studies angle, maybe think of it as a stray signifier that needs to be taken to the pound, Marc. . .
Since Rudd's intellectual make-up people at The Monthly are about the only ones on this side of politics who could possibly toast him three years in - after the mockery of the Garnaut Review, the recent re-emergence of base populism on the question of asylum seekers and his and Julia Gillard's unstinting entirely Howardesque churning out of rhetorical sausage-meat for the equally surreal purposes of political attack and defense - three cheers instead to John Clarke and Bryan Dawe. And to a certain philosophical notion that's in the background of Marc's 2007 interview and has been richly exemplified in political reality ever since - the theory of the identity of indistinguishables. . .
In grim times like these. . .
Marc Hiatt: Eric Timewell, obviously the topic of this interview is politics - something you claim to be an expert on.
Eric Timewell: Thank you very much.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, you're renowned for your cynicism on the topic of Australian politics. . .
TIMEWELL: It’s not cynicism, Marc, it’s “acidic scepticism”.
HIATT: Sorry, your acidic scepticism. So we’ve invited you in to cheer us all up tonight, and maybe enlighten us, given the miserable state we socially concerned people are in 11 years into the reign of the Coalition government.
TIMEWELL: I’ll see what I can do there.
HIATT: Can you start maybe by giving me an indication where you stand on John Howard.
TIMEWELL: Beg your pardon.
HIATT: Thinking about national politics - where do you stand on John Howard.
TIMEWELL: Who?
HIATT: John Howard!
TIMEWELL: Sorry, I’m drawing a blank there.
HIATT: You don’t know who John Howard is?
TIMEWELL: For the time being, no, I don’t want to buy Qantas either, Marc, no.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, please think for a minute. The current prime minister of Australia – who is it?
TIMEWELL: It’s not Alfred Deakin. . .
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: Noel Coward?
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: John Hunt?
HIATT: I think you know who I’m talking about, Dr Timewell.
TIMEWELL: I know, John Wayne.
HIATT: No, it’s not John Wayne.
TIMEWELL: Can I phone a friend?
HIATT: Absolutely not.
TIMEWELL: You know, the Los Angeles Times used to think it was John Hunt.
HIATT: They’re from California.
TIMEWELL: Some of them think Australia should be towed into Southern Ocean and used as a nuclear waste dump.
HIATT: But Doctor!
TIMEWELL: Where were we? Oh, that’s right - John Howard.
HIATT: Are we on the same page?
TIMEWELL: (pause) Maybe.
HIATT: Do you think Australia is rising, Dr Timewell?
TIMEWELL: No, I don’t think there’s going to be an uprising in Australia.
HIATT: No, I mean. . .
TIMEWELL: Marc, Australians like watching telly much too much for there ever to be any sort of uprising.
HIATT: I said do you think Australia is – rising.
TIMEWELL: What’s that meant to mean?
HIATT: Mr Howard said in his speech to the Queensland Press Club the other day that Australia was rising.
TIMEWELL: What?!
HIATT: That’s right, he said we’re rising.
TIMEWELL: Like a cake in the oven?
HIATT: He said we need to foster – I’m quoting him now – foster a rising Australia that can prosper in a fast-changing world. Let me try and get the intonation right - a ri-sing Australia that can prosper in a fast-changing world.
TIMEWELL: A rising Australia? Australia isn’t some sort of hovercraft, Marc. What does he mean by that?
HIATT: That’s what I’m asking you.
TIMEWELL: What’s the context. It probably makes more sense in context.
HIATT: (slowly, as if labouring under heavy delusions) “Our abiding national challenge is a rising economic tide that lifts all boats. . . That is a calling for our time and for all time.”
TIMEWELL: (pause) The meaning of that is not immediately perspicuous to me, Marc.
HIATT: No idea? Rising tide? Lift all boats?
TIMEWELL: There does seem to be some sort of underlying theme of . . . tides and, maybe . . . hovercraft.
HIATT: How about this one: “The best kept secret of the Australian achievement is our national sense of balance. The national sense of balance is the handmaiden of national growth and renewal.”
TIMEWELL: The hand-what of national growth?
HIATT: The handmaiden.
TIMEWELL: (irritably) What’s that supposed to mean?
HIATT: That’s what I’m asking you.
TIMEWELL: Handmaiden or handtowel did he say?
HIATT: Handmaiden.
TIMEWELL: I’m not sure about any of that.
HIATT: No idea?
TIMEWELL: What is a handmaiden exactly, anyway? Do you know?
HIATT: Not exactly, do you?
TIMEWELL: I could take a guess. Is it some sort of serving girl who hands you a handtowel?
HIATT: Could be.
TIMEWELL: I didn’t think we had those any more. What else has he got?
HIATT: There’s a lot about balance. “What helps us keep our balance?”
TIMEWELL: It’s something to do with the inner ear, isn’t it?
HIATT: No, this is from Howard. “What helps us keep our balance?”
TIMEWELL: “What helps us keep our balance?” - question mark.
HIATT: Yes. “What helps us keep our balance?”
TIMEWELL: “What helps us keep our balance?” - he asks rhetorically.
HIATT: What helps us keep our balance, he asks rhetorically, yes. This is what he says. (slowly) “To me, it’s no secret. It’s economic growth leavened always by Australian common sense.”
TIMEWELL: “leavened”?!
HIATT: Yes, “leavened”.
TIMEWELL: (pause, in contemplative wonder) There is a touch of the carrot cake about his vision for Australia, isn’t there. Ha-ha.
HIATT: So what does it mean?
TIMEWELL: This isn’t a trick question, is it?
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: I mean, these aren’t all trick questions are they?
HIATT: No.
TIMEWELL: Questions of meaning have a horrible way of turning out to be trick questions – know what I mean?
HIATT: Hm.
TIMEWELL: Read it again.
HIATT: “What helps us keep our balance? To me, it’s no secret. It’s economic growth, leavened always by Australian common sense.”
TIMEWELL: (pause) Does he maybe mean something more like “leveraged”. As in “economic growth, leveraged by Australian common sense”. You see, the particular metaphor the political animal usually grasps for in these situations – after he’s done with his metaphors of growth and fecundity – is a metaphor of the economy as a piece of machinery, a lovely glistening metallic set-up which is very good at doing things.
HIATT: There’s nothing about a glistening metallic set-up in here.
TIMEWELL: Look, Marc, my guess is it’s basically hot air.
HIATT: Is that the best you can do?
TIMEWELL: It appears to be the best John Howard can do, Marc.
HIATT: Deeper interpretations?
TIMEWELL: He doesn’t say the economy is fungible does he?
HIATT: Fungible?
TIMEWELL: Yes.
HIATT: No, he doesn’t say anything about fungible.
TIMEWELL: I’ve never known what fungible meant. Sounds like something the economy might be. Also sounds like a foot disease.
HIATT: Shall we move on?
TIMEWELL: Let's.
HIATT: Ok then, what do you make of the performance of the Leader of the Opposition?
TIMEWELL: Who? (pulls face of tortured incomprehension)
HIATT: The Leader of the Opposition.
TIMEWELL: Marc, we’ve been talking about John Howard for the past 10 minutes.Think of something else for us to talk about - go on.
HIATT: That’s what I’m saying, let’s talk about Mr Rudd.
TIMEWELL: Marc there are serious people in the audience. I’m not going to sit here and indulge one of your fantasies about an android from Queensland who’s colonised the body of a man as boring as John Howard so he can promote the ideological agenda of the actual John Howard.
HIATT: You have no idea who Kevin Rudd is. . .
TIMEWELL: Marc, you’re just being hysterical. John Howard this, John Howard that.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, how long are you going to keep this up? KEVIN RUDD.
TIMEWELL: John Who? Marc, don’t scream. You may be petrified of barely human beings impersonating John Howard, but let me just point out - you have not been visited by aliens, you have not been sexually abused by a rogue Christian from the right wing of the ALP, and you are not about to experience the Australian version of the Rapture.
HIATT: Mr Rudd’s been talking about it as if it was going to happen in Canberra just after the election.
TIMEWELL: What?
HIATT: The Australian version of the Rapture.
TIMEWELL: Look, if any sort of full eschatological-style Rapture is going to happen anywhere, it’s not going to happen in Canberra.
HIATT: You must have heard at least some of Mr Rudd’s religious references . . .
TIMEWELL: I deny that.
HIATT: What about the thing about the light on the hill. How do you read Mr Rudd on that?
TIMEWELL: I think it’s a reference to something a certain beardy reforming type once said.
HIATT: Chifley?
TIMEWELL: No, I think a slightly earlier figure in the Labour Movement, Marc.
HIATT: Henry Lawson?
TIMEWELL: No.
HIATT: Karl Marx?
TIMEWELL: Jesus Christ Almighty, supposedly.
HIATT: Dr Timewell, tell us what you think the light on the hill means in terms of the modern Australian Labour movement - even if you won’t admit to knowing it’s one of Mr Rudd’s favourite metaphors.
TIMEWELL: Sounds like hot air again to me.
HIATT: In the Cultural Studies department they say it could be part of some sort of coded environmental discourse, for instance.
TIMEWELL: Almost certainly not, Marc.
HIATT: For instance, could it have something to do with the electricity Mr Rudd wants to save by switching the lights off after we’ve left the room.
TIMEWELL: It’s not lights off on the hill.
HIATT: Have you got a better interpretation?
TIMEWELL: Of John Howard’s “light on the hill”?
HIATT: Of Kevin Rudd’s light on the hill.
TIMEWELL: One that doesn’t involve an acutely felt political need to borrow a bit of the Jesus man’s credibility on social issues?
HIATT:That's right.
TIMEWELL: If you really want a Cultural Studies angle, maybe think of it as a stray signifier that needs to be taken to the pound, Marc. . .
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Crikey Review of: Clive Hamilton - Requiem for a Species
Could our goose already be cooked when it comes to climate change? If you think the question itself is beyond the pale I can only recommend you have a read of Clive Hamilton’s latest effort. Does the question itself smack of an alarmism you want nothing to do with? Well, unless you think that life in this world is incapable of tossing up situations that are alarming then that isn’t quite a good enough response, according to Hamilton, whose central premise in his ominously titled Requiem for a Species is indeed that there is next to no chance we can avoid passing the tipping points climate scientists have been telling us we’ve been approaching for several years. And, like it or not, he supports what he’s got to say with layer upon layer of well-reasoned argument.
Just as importantly, he’s got the tone downpat. A lot of Requiem for a Species – I won’t say all – is written with a restraint that belies the passion the author clearly feels about our environmental predicament. – Getting the right written tone, if you ask me, is one of the things that separates the climate change sheep from the climate change goats, given that both of the rough parties to the debate about the topic regularly claim to be arguing in defence of rational intellectual and scientific standards. In spite of his pessimism, Hamilton remains a credible partisan of a rational cause because he adheres to general manners and methods that derive ultimately from scholarly research and investigative journalism. In argument, he wins hands down over, say, his opposite number in the debate, Andrew Bolt, whose defence of “scepticism” or “reason” comes with sledge-hammer sarcasm and those under-explanatory 8 – 10 word sentences that might as well end with a spray of exclamation marks, even if they don’t actually come with them. Hamilton, you could say, passes one basic test of rational credibility by not resorting to scorn, clowning and the dubious negative pathos of quasi-prophetic denunciation.
So what’s Hamilton’s reasoning? The science – notwithstanding the swifties pulled by some of the East Anglian climate science division – is looking horribly horribly bad for us. Although you wouldn’t guess it from mainstream media coverage of Tony’s struggle with Malcolm’s struggle with Kevin brought on by that. . . CPRS. . . thing, worst-case scenarios on climate change have been turning into middle-of-the-range scenarios for several years in the scientific literature on the subject. As Hamilton details in Chapter 6 of Requiem for a Species, large groups of credentialed climate scientists gather nowadays to hold conferences called things like “4 degrees and beyond: Implications of a global change of 4+ degrees for people, ecosystems and the earth system.” (Anyone who wants a first-hand impression of the dry analytic minds who head the climate science fraternity should have a listen to John Schellnhuber’s contribution to the gathering.) Whatever dents have been put in the public credibility of the thesis of anthropogenic global warming by the diffuse air of scandal surrounding “climategate” and the not-so-diffuse air of failure surrounding Copenhagen, all the main evidential threads pointing to the forbidding seriousness of the problem remain intact.
Problem number two for Hamilton is that the world is actually carbonising economic production at exactly the time it needs to be de-carbonising, and fast. The figures for the decade just closed are in: global emissions of CO2, in large part driven by fossil fuel combustion, rose at 3% a year during the decade – a rate of increase that, if reproduced over coming decades, will easily push atmospheric CO2 content into the 600 – 1000ppm band by later in the century. Developed countries like Australia, which probably need to move first, seem to want to underwrite the coal industry decades into the future, by compensating it for most of the pain of a cap-and-trade system and by upholding the technological fiction that Carbon Capture and Storage can allow us to dispose thoughtfully of emissions – though nobody at all is prepared to make this claim for CCS over the vital decade we’ve just moved into.
Economic growth, for Hamilton, is as fetishised as ever, before and after the Great Recession – a sort of structural reason for pessimism. The imperative to grow the economy the easy way, using relatively plentiful supplies of fossil fuel, irrespective of environmental constraints or whether it makes people happy to be involved in turbo-charged economic life, is a large part of what got us into the pickle in the first place and there is no sign any of that is about to change. Unfortunately the fifteen years that preceded the Great Recession have created an up-and-coming generation that is likely to include some of the biggest hyper-consumers of all time – as Hamilton puts it, people who go in for the self-defeating business of defining their very selves in terms of purchases and purchasing power. And then there’s the Chinese who, in spite of their relatively rational assessments of the science of global warming, are in the middle of creating an economy based more and more on coal-fired domestic consumption.
Hamilton points to a shared assumption of political progressives and conservatives on the question of growth:
The association in both progressive and conservative thinking between economic growth and progress is so deeply entrenched and vigorously defended that it cannot rest solely on any empirical association between higher material consumption and greater. . . happiness.
The key indicator that economic growth has a quasi-supernatural meaning in today’s world is that human beings who buy into it, and especially their elected representatives, are capable of acting against what worldly wisdom ought to be telling them – that above a certain level, material consumption is just as likely to make people miserable as it is to make them happy. So when it is demonstrated that cutting greenhouse gas emissions would in all likelihood have a minor effect on economic growth and none on the amount of sunshine in the world, we have an unambiguous demonstration of growth’s symbolic or utopian power: the feeling is almost that even if material contentment were to remain as high as ever in the transition to a low-carbon economy, something horrendous would have happened all the same – our unavowed belief in the sanctity of growth itself would’ve been called into question.
In the central chapter of the book, where Hamilton presents his freshest material, things get really grim. Here he turns his attention to “the many forms of denial”, left-wing denial, right-wing denial; everyday denial dawdling into your inbox from a friend and organised denial flowing from the centres of power; principled denial which shades into contrarianism and scientific devil’s advocacy and, trickiest of all, what you might call practical denial – the sort that congratulates itself for having recognised the problem, avows its concern and . . . flies off to Paris for a quick holiday all the same . . . Hamilton gives us the basic pre-history of the denialist tide that is swelling at the moment. There can be no doubt, on this view, that a small number of corporations and radical conservatives made a strategic decision following the close of the Cold War to paint environmentalism and, if need be, parts of the scientific community, as the new threat to Our Lives and Values. This was politicking of a particularly hard-nosed variety, though it is completely mistaken to attribute machiavellian duplicity to everyone who thinks they sense the threat. (Whether it will be enough to hollow out the bases of conservatism – Waleed Aly’s thesis in his latest Quarterly Essay – only time will tell; the intellectually defensible conservative notion that no knowable theory can truly encompass society and culture has been inverted in the case of the radical anti-environmental conservatives into a knowably false theory with an inbuilt paranoid inclination - all that stuff about nefarious IPCC-engineered world-government.)
The decision to demonise environmentalism in any case seems to be bearing fruit, particularly at the moment. The anti-environmental cause is starting to mobilise free-floating resentment of science (an elite of experts), government (an elite of decision-makers) and considered intellectual perspectives of all kinds – first and foremost in the U.S. For Hamilton, it’s cause for more pessimism: climate change denial seems to be channelling general low-level wishful thinking as well as a more specific sort of ugly right-wing populism at exactly the time when an almighty push needs to be taking place to bring emissions down by 40% on 1990 levels within ten years – just to give us an even-money chance of keeping temperature increases later in the century to under four degrees. That’s four degrees.
Just as importantly, he’s got the tone downpat. A lot of Requiem for a Species – I won’t say all – is written with a restraint that belies the passion the author clearly feels about our environmental predicament. – Getting the right written tone, if you ask me, is one of the things that separates the climate change sheep from the climate change goats, given that both of the rough parties to the debate about the topic regularly claim to be arguing in defence of rational intellectual and scientific standards. In spite of his pessimism, Hamilton remains a credible partisan of a rational cause because he adheres to general manners and methods that derive ultimately from scholarly research and investigative journalism. In argument, he wins hands down over, say, his opposite number in the debate, Andrew Bolt, whose defence of “scepticism” or “reason” comes with sledge-hammer sarcasm and those under-explanatory 8 – 10 word sentences that might as well end with a spray of exclamation marks, even if they don’t actually come with them. Hamilton, you could say, passes one basic test of rational credibility by not resorting to scorn, clowning and the dubious negative pathos of quasi-prophetic denunciation.
So what’s Hamilton’s reasoning? The science – notwithstanding the swifties pulled by some of the East Anglian climate science division – is looking horribly horribly bad for us. Although you wouldn’t guess it from mainstream media coverage of Tony’s struggle with Malcolm’s struggle with Kevin brought on by that. . . CPRS. . . thing, worst-case scenarios on climate change have been turning into middle-of-the-range scenarios for several years in the scientific literature on the subject. As Hamilton details in Chapter 6 of Requiem for a Species, large groups of credentialed climate scientists gather nowadays to hold conferences called things like “4 degrees and beyond: Implications of a global change of 4+ degrees for people, ecosystems and the earth system.” (Anyone who wants a first-hand impression of the dry analytic minds who head the climate science fraternity should have a listen to John Schellnhuber’s contribution to the gathering.) Whatever dents have been put in the public credibility of the thesis of anthropogenic global warming by the diffuse air of scandal surrounding “climategate” and the not-so-diffuse air of failure surrounding Copenhagen, all the main evidential threads pointing to the forbidding seriousness of the problem remain intact.
Problem number two for Hamilton is that the world is actually carbonising economic production at exactly the time it needs to be de-carbonising, and fast. The figures for the decade just closed are in: global emissions of CO2, in large part driven by fossil fuel combustion, rose at 3% a year during the decade – a rate of increase that, if reproduced over coming decades, will easily push atmospheric CO2 content into the 600 – 1000ppm band by later in the century. Developed countries like Australia, which probably need to move first, seem to want to underwrite the coal industry decades into the future, by compensating it for most of the pain of a cap-and-trade system and by upholding the technological fiction that Carbon Capture and Storage can allow us to dispose thoughtfully of emissions – though nobody at all is prepared to make this claim for CCS over the vital decade we’ve just moved into.
Economic growth, for Hamilton, is as fetishised as ever, before and after the Great Recession – a sort of structural reason for pessimism. The imperative to grow the economy the easy way, using relatively plentiful supplies of fossil fuel, irrespective of environmental constraints or whether it makes people happy to be involved in turbo-charged economic life, is a large part of what got us into the pickle in the first place and there is no sign any of that is about to change. Unfortunately the fifteen years that preceded the Great Recession have created an up-and-coming generation that is likely to include some of the biggest hyper-consumers of all time – as Hamilton puts it, people who go in for the self-defeating business of defining their very selves in terms of purchases and purchasing power. And then there’s the Chinese who, in spite of their relatively rational assessments of the science of global warming, are in the middle of creating an economy based more and more on coal-fired domestic consumption.
Hamilton points to a shared assumption of political progressives and conservatives on the question of growth:
The association in both progressive and conservative thinking between economic growth and progress is so deeply entrenched and vigorously defended that it cannot rest solely on any empirical association between higher material consumption and greater. . . happiness.
The key indicator that economic growth has a quasi-supernatural meaning in today’s world is that human beings who buy into it, and especially their elected representatives, are capable of acting against what worldly wisdom ought to be telling them – that above a certain level, material consumption is just as likely to make people miserable as it is to make them happy. So when it is demonstrated that cutting greenhouse gas emissions would in all likelihood have a minor effect on economic growth and none on the amount of sunshine in the world, we have an unambiguous demonstration of growth’s symbolic or utopian power: the feeling is almost that even if material contentment were to remain as high as ever in the transition to a low-carbon economy, something horrendous would have happened all the same – our unavowed belief in the sanctity of growth itself would’ve been called into question.
In the central chapter of the book, where Hamilton presents his freshest material, things get really grim. Here he turns his attention to “the many forms of denial”, left-wing denial, right-wing denial; everyday denial dawdling into your inbox from a friend and organised denial flowing from the centres of power; principled denial which shades into contrarianism and scientific devil’s advocacy and, trickiest of all, what you might call practical denial – the sort that congratulates itself for having recognised the problem, avows its concern and . . . flies off to Paris for a quick holiday all the same . . . Hamilton gives us the basic pre-history of the denialist tide that is swelling at the moment. There can be no doubt, on this view, that a small number of corporations and radical conservatives made a strategic decision following the close of the Cold War to paint environmentalism and, if need be, parts of the scientific community, as the new threat to Our Lives and Values. This was politicking of a particularly hard-nosed variety, though it is completely mistaken to attribute machiavellian duplicity to everyone who thinks they sense the threat. (Whether it will be enough to hollow out the bases of conservatism – Waleed Aly’s thesis in his latest Quarterly Essay – only time will tell; the intellectually defensible conservative notion that no knowable theory can truly encompass society and culture has been inverted in the case of the radical anti-environmental conservatives into a knowably false theory with an inbuilt paranoid inclination - all that stuff about nefarious IPCC-engineered world-government.)
The decision to demonise environmentalism in any case seems to be bearing fruit, particularly at the moment. The anti-environmental cause is starting to mobilise free-floating resentment of science (an elite of experts), government (an elite of decision-makers) and considered intellectual perspectives of all kinds – first and foremost in the U.S. For Hamilton, it’s cause for more pessimism: climate change denial seems to be channelling general low-level wishful thinking as well as a more specific sort of ugly right-wing populism at exactly the time when an almighty push needs to be taking place to bring emissions down by 40% on 1990 levels within ten years – just to give us an even-money chance of keeping temperature increases later in the century to under four degrees. That’s four degrees.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Aphoristic Mixed Dips 2 (2001)
For everyone who's been encouraging me for years to go public with the aphoristic bits and pieces I used to write lots of - today a little more of a selection. I'm putting them up with hesitation, after fiddling round with them for too long - I think maybe because, looking back with the benefit of many years' hindsight, they seem imitative and a touch antiquated - harking back, as they do, to the days when I wrote on the assumption that it was possible to make WEIGHTY PRONOUNCEMENTS about LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING without charging your pen with any of the masterful concept-laden opinions that ten years' labour have made known to me under the names of Adorno, Weber, Redner, Boehme.
The model I can hear and see most in the background in retrospect is G.C. Lichtenberg - the problem with CS the 25-year-old aphorist is not just that he is antiquated but that he was a bit of an antiquarian to start with. There's the hunchback professor, unmistakably second-hand, everywhere - in the tone of the pieces and in the way they compiled themselves: by chance, in scrapbooks, quarantined from diary-writing, university labour and from any impulse to form them into a philosophical system or a comprehensive account of himself. - Neither of those are flaws in themselves maybe, though what is a flaw is that in writing "philosophy by half-measures" like Lichtenberg I borrowed a touch too easily from his self-conception - that of an amusing, bemused character who made an art, or an arty hobby at least, of doubting his experiences : "Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong" - says Lichtenberg, thinking clearly of himself - "if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!" - which is surely the problem of theodicy inverted and reduced to the pea-sized. Or take one of his earlier fantasies:
"Zezu Island. This island had remained undescribed for so long because the foolish customs of its inhabitants gave publishers everywhere the idea that an account of it was a satire on their own country. . ."
- which always reminded me of Australia, and was penned a mere three years before European settlement. . .
In any case - ten years after they were whipped up, a second serve of mixed dips - hopefully not stale, inedible or completely off. Time maybe to shut the bottom desk-drawer where they've been mouldering for so many years and get the best of GCL down from the top shelf again? CS
Philosophy by Half-Measures
The idea of God shares with good fiction and bad philosophy the attribute of being infinitely interpretable - which might be a reason for thinking it a half-way house between the two.
The mindset of many of many intellectuals has really centred on the question whether lack of intellect is a sin.
The realm of the spiritual is fundamentally an answer to sickness-unto-death and paralysing heartache. People's sense for the spiritual will diminish the more we socially conceal from ourselves the experiential possibility of sickness-unto-death, but it can never be properly concealed and paralysing heartache can hardly be either, so spirituality will always remain, increasingly as an incompletely concealed tantalising possibility on the margins of experience.
The only evidence I can think of for the X'n world-view is the existence in paint catalogues of colours whose names are arbitrarily concocted by their manufacturers to appeal to the vapid sensibilities of the hordes of interior decorators.
Marx could only be considered a philosopher in a world that had descended into its own ninth circle via political theory.
If you asked my to come up with a picture of truth then I would suggest one whose paradoxicality took on a sort of logical form. "This was once a paradox, but now the times prove it true," says Hamlet. And subsequently the times proved it a tautology.
Unless we actually build up a strong-minded picture of our weaknesses we are incapable of liberality towards ourselves or being cheerful about ourselves in a sense which differes from simply going easy on ourselves. Going easy on yourself in this sense is the stream in which all our weaknesses flow faster and to more dramatic effect.
At the root of much of the religious sentiment of today is a nostalgia for the certainty and coherence which the days of the primacy of religion are thought to have had. But it is another question altogether whether the era of religion was actually marked by anything we could recognise as certainty and coherence. Coherence and certainty, in short, are probably far rarer things than the existence of vigorous religious movements is likely to suggest. What exists of them in the world - except to the extent that the world is seen in the warm regretful light of religious nostalgia - is constitutionally more sickly and subtle than we would like to acknowledge. The very availability of the notions of certainty and coherence gets us into this mess in the first place. The existence of the concepts makes them seem attainable, because in essence we are wishful beings.
Philosophy, it seems to me, is the great unnatural cure for melancholy. - Question from one my readers: What does that make the great natural cure for melancholy? The answer of course is sex, combined with a heightened sense of the natural.
Everything is capable of being treated as a fact, or at least according to its value as fact, however everything and nothing is capable of being treated as heavenly intervention in the affairs of the world.
Those who constantly have at their disposal a few substantial little ideas live best. Life in the company of one big idea is enough to make any human being obtuse, having many big ideas makes for gloominess and ruined nerves, many little ideas are hard to keep in sight let alone catch hold of all the time. Life in the company of ideas of no substance is by definition null and void, willed idea-less is humbug, although it has to be said that thinking in clichés is usual and lack of presence of mind can be irresistible.
Goethe simply ought to have said - morality is no more and no less than staring down one's demons.
The real meaning of the remark that irony is the modern mode is that irony is the best modern weapon of knowledge.
If you are going to be a moralist - no doubt the fate of many - then the least you can do is be inscrutable.
If aphorisms are like definitions then there is no tradition of the aphorism in English because in England it was always assumed that the definitions of words and thoughts must state something basic and common to everything coming under the definition, whereas a definition can also set out the rarest things and those that leave us a prey to fears. We think of definitions as a well-considered jump into the light, but they could just as well be a fitful jump in the dark.
The opposite of philosophy is not thoughtlessness but pure contemplation of images.
Self-knowledge is the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the silver fetter preventing knowledge from disbanding by means of its own centrifugal force.
Too much contemplation of the sources of inspiration tends to turn inspiration aside. Unceasing reverence for the same thing becomes by its nature lugubrious and dull.
La Rochefoucauld says that to be known well things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. But the argument in the opposite direction works just as well. To be known well things must be known in all their interconnections with other things. Although getting to known them well may in part have to do with acquiring the necessary details, it is mainly a matter of comparing them with a wide range of similar and differnt things, as well as a constant process of obtaining a perfectly apt picture of them from fewer and fewer details.
The clearest sign that a man or woman is incurably in love is that they can only bear seeing the loved one on their own very strict terms. Lovesickness is the co-existence of a state of inspiration and shattered nerves.
The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.
No so-called moral problem can be solved satisfactorily without reference to moral authority, and the fountainhead of moral authority is always metaphysics, of varying degrees of phoneyness. So really the closest you can get to a "solution" that avoids all phoneyness is a question-mark, that is to say - a clear-minded statement of the problem itself. But that is just as clearly not a solution - and honest moral philosophy, which doesn't deliquesce into art or something else, bites its own tail ad infinitum.
Historical
The nineteenth and twentieth century's partiality for literary and philosophical fragments is among other things a continuation of the neo-classical veneration of ruins.
Historians 500 years from now will be at one in thinking that the French Revolution did not inaugurate an age of revolutionary transformation so much as an age of the cult of revolutionary transformation. The volume and multiplicity of interpretation of the French Revolution will count as one of its principle effects.
The total process of life is in a fundamental sense a process of aestheticisation. In rationalising man the eighteenth century gave him a nice little touch-up. Nowadays our psychological categories turn up as aesthetic ones, but once we have left off idolising well-fuelled narcissism, amusing neurotics and exciting psychopaths, once the brilliant sheen of these flashy conceptual instruments has worn off, the world may again appear in a benign light.
The model I can hear and see most in the background in retrospect is G.C. Lichtenberg - the problem with CS the 25-year-old aphorist is not just that he is antiquated but that he was a bit of an antiquarian to start with. There's the hunchback professor, unmistakably second-hand, everywhere - in the tone of the pieces and in the way they compiled themselves: by chance, in scrapbooks, quarantined from diary-writing, university labour and from any impulse to form them into a philosophical system or a comprehensive account of himself. - Neither of those are flaws in themselves maybe, though what is a flaw is that in writing "philosophy by half-measures" like Lichtenberg I borrowed a touch too easily from his self-conception - that of an amusing, bemused character who made an art, or an arty hobby at least, of doubting his experiences : "Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong" - says Lichtenberg, thinking clearly of himself - "if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!" - which is surely the problem of theodicy inverted and reduced to the pea-sized. Or take one of his earlier fantasies:
"Zezu Island. This island had remained undescribed for so long because the foolish customs of its inhabitants gave publishers everywhere the idea that an account of it was a satire on their own country. . ."
- which always reminded me of Australia, and was penned a mere three years before European settlement. . .
In any case - ten years after they were whipped up, a second serve of mixed dips - hopefully not stale, inedible or completely off. Time maybe to shut the bottom desk-drawer where they've been mouldering for so many years and get the best of GCL down from the top shelf again? CS
Philosophy by Half-Measures
The idea of God shares with good fiction and bad philosophy the attribute of being infinitely interpretable - which might be a reason for thinking it a half-way house between the two.
The mindset of many of many intellectuals has really centred on the question whether lack of intellect is a sin.
The realm of the spiritual is fundamentally an answer to sickness-unto-death and paralysing heartache. People's sense for the spiritual will diminish the more we socially conceal from ourselves the experiential possibility of sickness-unto-death, but it can never be properly concealed and paralysing heartache can hardly be either, so spirituality will always remain, increasingly as an incompletely concealed tantalising possibility on the margins of experience.
The only evidence I can think of for the X'n world-view is the existence in paint catalogues of colours whose names are arbitrarily concocted by their manufacturers to appeal to the vapid sensibilities of the hordes of interior decorators.
Marx could only be considered a philosopher in a world that had descended into its own ninth circle via political theory.
If you asked my to come up with a picture of truth then I would suggest one whose paradoxicality took on a sort of logical form. "This was once a paradox, but now the times prove it true," says Hamlet. And subsequently the times proved it a tautology.
Unless we actually build up a strong-minded picture of our weaknesses we are incapable of liberality towards ourselves or being cheerful about ourselves in a sense which differes from simply going easy on ourselves. Going easy on yourself in this sense is the stream in which all our weaknesses flow faster and to more dramatic effect.
At the root of much of the religious sentiment of today is a nostalgia for the certainty and coherence which the days of the primacy of religion are thought to have had. But it is another question altogether whether the era of religion was actually marked by anything we could recognise as certainty and coherence. Coherence and certainty, in short, are probably far rarer things than the existence of vigorous religious movements is likely to suggest. What exists of them in the world - except to the extent that the world is seen in the warm regretful light of religious nostalgia - is constitutionally more sickly and subtle than we would like to acknowledge. The very availability of the notions of certainty and coherence gets us into this mess in the first place. The existence of the concepts makes them seem attainable, because in essence we are wishful beings.
Philosophy, it seems to me, is the great unnatural cure for melancholy. - Question from one my readers: What does that make the great natural cure for melancholy? The answer of course is sex, combined with a heightened sense of the natural.
Everything is capable of being treated as a fact, or at least according to its value as fact, however everything and nothing is capable of being treated as heavenly intervention in the affairs of the world.
Those who constantly have at their disposal a few substantial little ideas live best. Life in the company of one big idea is enough to make any human being obtuse, having many big ideas makes for gloominess and ruined nerves, many little ideas are hard to keep in sight let alone catch hold of all the time. Life in the company of ideas of no substance is by definition null and void, willed idea-less is humbug, although it has to be said that thinking in clichés is usual and lack of presence of mind can be irresistible.
Goethe simply ought to have said - morality is no more and no less than staring down one's demons.
The real meaning of the remark that irony is the modern mode is that irony is the best modern weapon of knowledge.
If you are going to be a moralist - no doubt the fate of many - then the least you can do is be inscrutable.
If aphorisms are like definitions then there is no tradition of the aphorism in English because in England it was always assumed that the definitions of words and thoughts must state something basic and common to everything coming under the definition, whereas a definition can also set out the rarest things and those that leave us a prey to fears. We think of definitions as a well-considered jump into the light, but they could just as well be a fitful jump in the dark.
The opposite of philosophy is not thoughtlessness but pure contemplation of images.
Self-knowledge is the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the silver fetter preventing knowledge from disbanding by means of its own centrifugal force.
Too much contemplation of the sources of inspiration tends to turn inspiration aside. Unceasing reverence for the same thing becomes by its nature lugubrious and dull.
La Rochefoucauld says that to be known well things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. But the argument in the opposite direction works just as well. To be known well things must be known in all their interconnections with other things. Although getting to known them well may in part have to do with acquiring the necessary details, it is mainly a matter of comparing them with a wide range of similar and differnt things, as well as a constant process of obtaining a perfectly apt picture of them from fewer and fewer details.
The clearest sign that a man or woman is incurably in love is that they can only bear seeing the loved one on their own very strict terms. Lovesickness is the co-existence of a state of inspiration and shattered nerves.
The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.
No so-called moral problem can be solved satisfactorily without reference to moral authority, and the fountainhead of moral authority is always metaphysics, of varying degrees of phoneyness. So really the closest you can get to a "solution" that avoids all phoneyness is a question-mark, that is to say - a clear-minded statement of the problem itself. But that is just as clearly not a solution - and honest moral philosophy, which doesn't deliquesce into art or something else, bites its own tail ad infinitum.
Historical
The nineteenth and twentieth century's partiality for literary and philosophical fragments is among other things a continuation of the neo-classical veneration of ruins.
Historians 500 years from now will be at one in thinking that the French Revolution did not inaugurate an age of revolutionary transformation so much as an age of the cult of revolutionary transformation. The volume and multiplicity of interpretation of the French Revolution will count as one of its principle effects.
The total process of life is in a fundamental sense a process of aestheticisation. In rationalising man the eighteenth century gave him a nice little touch-up. Nowadays our psychological categories turn up as aesthetic ones, but once we have left off idolising well-fuelled narcissism, amusing neurotics and exciting psychopaths, once the brilliant sheen of these flashy conceptual instruments has worn off, the world may again appear in a benign light.
Friday, April 2, 2010
By way of introduction: Gernot Böhme, Philosopher
Gernot Böhme (born 1937, Dessau, Germany) - German philosopher
Böhme was Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University and has risen to prominence through his work in aesthetics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of embodiment, the philosophy of technology and his conception of practical philosophy as a capacity for dealing with the exigencies of life. He has become known beyond specialist cricles too, with interviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as numerous publications on Plato, Kant and Goethe. Böhme's essential concerns are to preserve both human values and the natural world under the conditions of a technological civilisation.
Classical Philosophy, Ethics
Philosophical practice for Böhme means the necessity of formulating questions about life and the elaboration of an art of living. It is connected at the same time with the work of the self on the self. Modern academic philosophy refuses this philosophical tradition which derives from the classical world. Philosophy however is not just a form of methodical knowledge related to science, as it is practised within universities. It is simultaneously the wisdom of the world and a form of life. In speaking of philosophy as a form of life, our concern is as it were with cultivating ourselves as human beings, following in the footsteps of Socrates and the world of antiquity. Philosophy considered as the wisdom of the world draws on Kant, who defined it as the type of philosophy that deals with what is of interest to each and every human being. Today the concern is particularly with questions of social significance. Socrates, as a type, represents an anthropological condition distinguished above all through conscious thought. Böheme's conception implies sensitivity towards what is part of one's own existence that is not part of the self (c.f. the Socratic daimonion). Care of the self does not entail that The Other is denied a sense of self. According to Böhme, in dealings with the irrational components of the self, the task of ethics is to develop forms that allow those components to appear necessary, useful and amenable to control. Böhme has become prominent in Kant scholarship through Das Andere der Vernunft (The Other of Reason), a book published with his brother, Hartmut Böhme. The work presents a critical view of modernity, influenced by psychoanalysis. For Böhme, Kant's epistemology turns out to be a theory of alienated knowledge - it articulates an ideal of the autonomous rational individual, who represents a sort of hard-won strategy of self-mastery. Böhme, by contrast, speaks up for "the other of reason", thus especially for the world of nature, the body, imagination, desire and the emotions. In this connection he has put forward a new interpretation of The Critique of Judgment - the beautiful as atmosphere - and a reconstruction of the metaphysical first principles of natural science. Böhme is critical of the Kantian concept of becoming human through education.
Aesthetics as Aisthetics
Böhme is concerned to thematically extend philosophical aesthetics. He conceives aesthetics as aisthetics, that is as a general theory of perception. The concepts of design, nature and art form the centrepoint of his reflections. The task of aesthetics is not to be a mere medium for the transmission of modern art. An exlusively intellectualistic interpretation of works of art is rejected. Aesthetics also has to take up the theme of human beings' new relationship to a natural world increasingly shaped by their action. Moods and affects play a particular role in aesthetics. What Böhme calls "atmosphere" is the primary reality aesthetics has to deal with. It relates to moods and their spatial carriers - which are essentially what the beholder of a work of art and what he or she perceives have in common. By perception, Boehme understands a mode of bodily presence - with an emphasis on emotional components. Perception for him is primarily the sensation of a presence or, alternatively, a certain atmosophere. Atmosphere belongs neither in the sphere of the object nor in that of the subject; rather it is a co-presence that exists within the terms of the subject/object division. Atmophere is only differentiated retrospectively into a polar relation between "me" and the thing I perceive, thus taking on the fixed duality of subject and object:
"In perceiving an atmosphere I sense what sort of environment I find myself in. The perception thus has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the environment which radiates a certain quality of mood, on the other hand - me, participating in this mood through my very situatedness and thereby becoming aware where I now am . . . To put it the other way round, atmospheres are the very forms in which things and environments present themselves."
An atmosphere flows out into a space in a far from definite way. We can only follow up its traces to the extent that we have direct experience of it. We have to open ourselves up to it, be affectively influenced by it, affected in both senses of the word. Thus for example a certain cheerful or oppressive mood can prevail in a space. But this is not something subjective. The atmosphere is something we have an immediate experience of as quasi-objectively exterior to us. What is designated as atmospheric here is a condition common to the perceiving individual and his/her environment. We have an immediate experience of "atmospheric phenomena" as free-floating qualities, like energy in the bodily or emotional sense or the partly personified forces of nature. Böhme differentiates between the different characteristics of atmospheres. He counts wealth, power and elegance among social characteristics. Warmth, coldness and brightness are among the so-called synaesthetic characteristics. Tension or tranquility are examples of communicative atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric impressions created through movement can be, among other things, oppressive, uplifting, agitating. There are also moods in the narrower sense, such for example as the sense of scene created by an english garden. In perception, the individual doesn't just sense the presence of something external, he or she has a bodily sense of it - in the process sensing him/herself too. Material things arise out of this sensitivity to the atmospheric through processes of defense, differentiation and restriction. Perceiving them is a dynamic process, because they themselves produce atmospheres and hence our sense of situatedness. What distinguishes things is their spatially fixed place, their corporeality, their identity, the way they function as potential condensation points for qualities perceived atmospherically. It is the perception of things that first constitutes the subject-object relationship. We experience them as factually existing in an objective world beyond the subject as defined by this relationship.
Böhme was Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University and has risen to prominence through his work in aesthetics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of embodiment, the philosophy of technology and his conception of practical philosophy as a capacity for dealing with the exigencies of life. He has become known beyond specialist cricles too, with interviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as numerous publications on Plato, Kant and Goethe. Böhme's essential concerns are to preserve both human values and the natural world under the conditions of a technological civilisation.
Classical Philosophy, Ethics
Philosophical practice for Böhme means the necessity of formulating questions about life and the elaboration of an art of living. It is connected at the same time with the work of the self on the self. Modern academic philosophy refuses this philosophical tradition which derives from the classical world. Philosophy however is not just a form of methodical knowledge related to science, as it is practised within universities. It is simultaneously the wisdom of the world and a form of life. In speaking of philosophy as a form of life, our concern is as it were with cultivating ourselves as human beings, following in the footsteps of Socrates and the world of antiquity. Philosophy considered as the wisdom of the world draws on Kant, who defined it as the type of philosophy that deals with what is of interest to each and every human being. Today the concern is particularly with questions of social significance. Socrates, as a type, represents an anthropological condition distinguished above all through conscious thought. Böheme's conception implies sensitivity towards what is part of one's own existence that is not part of the self (c.f. the Socratic daimonion). Care of the self does not entail that The Other is denied a sense of self. According to Böhme, in dealings with the irrational components of the self, the task of ethics is to develop forms that allow those components to appear necessary, useful and amenable to control. Böhme has become prominent in Kant scholarship through Das Andere der Vernunft (The Other of Reason), a book published with his brother, Hartmut Böhme. The work presents a critical view of modernity, influenced by psychoanalysis. For Böhme, Kant's epistemology turns out to be a theory of alienated knowledge - it articulates an ideal of the autonomous rational individual, who represents a sort of hard-won strategy of self-mastery. Böhme, by contrast, speaks up for "the other of reason", thus especially for the world of nature, the body, imagination, desire and the emotions. In this connection he has put forward a new interpretation of The Critique of Judgment - the beautiful as atmosphere - and a reconstruction of the metaphysical first principles of natural science. Böhme is critical of the Kantian concept of becoming human through education.
Aesthetics as Aisthetics
Böhme is concerned to thematically extend philosophical aesthetics. He conceives aesthetics as aisthetics, that is as a general theory of perception. The concepts of design, nature and art form the centrepoint of his reflections. The task of aesthetics is not to be a mere medium for the transmission of modern art. An exlusively intellectualistic interpretation of works of art is rejected. Aesthetics also has to take up the theme of human beings' new relationship to a natural world increasingly shaped by their action. Moods and affects play a particular role in aesthetics. What Böhme calls "atmosphere" is the primary reality aesthetics has to deal with. It relates to moods and their spatial carriers - which are essentially what the beholder of a work of art and what he or she perceives have in common. By perception, Boehme understands a mode of bodily presence - with an emphasis on emotional components. Perception for him is primarily the sensation of a presence or, alternatively, a certain atmosophere. Atmosphere belongs neither in the sphere of the object nor in that of the subject; rather it is a co-presence that exists within the terms of the subject/object division. Atmophere is only differentiated retrospectively into a polar relation between "me" and the thing I perceive, thus taking on the fixed duality of subject and object:
"In perceiving an atmosphere I sense what sort of environment I find myself in. The perception thus has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the environment which radiates a certain quality of mood, on the other hand - me, participating in this mood through my very situatedness and thereby becoming aware where I now am . . . To put it the other way round, atmospheres are the very forms in which things and environments present themselves."
An atmosphere flows out into a space in a far from definite way. We can only follow up its traces to the extent that we have direct experience of it. We have to open ourselves up to it, be affectively influenced by it, affected in both senses of the word. Thus for example a certain cheerful or oppressive mood can prevail in a space. But this is not something subjective. The atmosphere is something we have an immediate experience of as quasi-objectively exterior to us. What is designated as atmospheric here is a condition common to the perceiving individual and his/her environment. We have an immediate experience of "atmospheric phenomena" as free-floating qualities, like energy in the bodily or emotional sense or the partly personified forces of nature. Böhme differentiates between the different characteristics of atmospheres. He counts wealth, power and elegance among social characteristics. Warmth, coldness and brightness are among the so-called synaesthetic characteristics. Tension or tranquility are examples of communicative atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric impressions created through movement can be, among other things, oppressive, uplifting, agitating. There are also moods in the narrower sense, such for example as the sense of scene created by an english garden. In perception, the individual doesn't just sense the presence of something external, he or she has a bodily sense of it - in the process sensing him/herself too. Material things arise out of this sensitivity to the atmospheric through processes of defense, differentiation and restriction. Perceiving them is a dynamic process, because they themselves produce atmospheres and hence our sense of situatedness. What distinguishes things is their spatially fixed place, their corporeality, their identity, the way they function as potential condensation points for qualities perceived atmospherically. It is the perception of things that first constitutes the subject-object relationship. We experience them as factually existing in an objective world beyond the subject as defined by this relationship.
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