"Sold!" (Updated)

Do we feel like we can now label this a "Gladwellian" era?  One in which "science" is made fabulous in order to feed the hungry belief that is the dream of human progress?  The She-Wolf of human self-regard.

In this era we have I think finally brought out the open secret that "science" IS our story--our fiction, our religion, our poetry--we create out of its "discoveries."  Gladwell seems our most conspicuous example of this, but he is by no means alone and by no means unique.  It is the praxis of the times.

We cannot see this; or rather, we "relativize" truth and laud "uncertainty" with certainty.

I suppose I'll expose myself here as one who doesn't believe these stories.  Rather, I happily believe in experiments that can be replicated, but I begin to doubt (yes, I said it) when we begin to narrate the MEANING of said experiments.  That is, the experiment is valid in all its own parameters, but that is ALL.  There is no meaning outside of this.  Experiments must be a "closed" system, a universe unto themselves.  Yes, let us guess what comes next based on the results.  But that too creates another separate universe of predicated factors.  The world is not a "laboratory" experiment.  There will always be other factors we cannot "allow for" to make "best" guesses that have real ("dose-dependant") meaning.  I realize I am likely exposing myself here as someone who "doesn't get" the scientific method.  So it goes.  Eviscerate away.

It cannot be doubted this is the era of TED, revelatory as Gladwellian enterprise.  But this is only a progression: snake oil is as baseball and apple pie to us, just as the savage, black or red, is the devil.

It is not unusual that the country which prizes novelty and showmanship (chooses Edison over Tesla; Columbus over de las Casas), that which seems to characterize our understanding of "economy," over the staid yet miraculous daily and seasonal changes of the non-human, the trees, the rivers, the wild, that which characterizes our ecology, should love TED, love Gladwell, love the "reveal" which is not in the least a revelation but instead an exposure: there are suckers who will discount the reveal and there are suckers who will honestly love being taken.  What we are responding to is the show, and any show will do as long a the performance is "real."  (Huck Finn is probably our greatest exposé as regards this circus-belief; Brave New World only expands upon it, scientifically.)

I might contend that this very tendency is what the human ought to be trying to work itself through and out of...and verily into another way of minding the world.  Perhaps the exposure of "enlightened" skepticism ought to have taught us to return to the beginning using a truer sight and wiser eyeballs.

But really, my only point, I think, is that these experiments in "machined-sight" (our brilliance requires a capability beyond rubies after all) are in a way simply abstractions, like mathematic equations.  They prove only themselves and carry no other content.  Until we use them to narrate an idea.

That is, until we put them to work.

***

Update

I've been reading For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers by Sherman Paul (author of what I think is probably the best Thoreau biography-study) and I find this section in the essay on Aldo Leopold (Sand County Almanac) illustrative of my own thinking (but perhaps I've simply borrowed it and called it my own):

Science, [Leopold] finds, has encouraged rather than halted this [environmental] destruction (of land bureaus, agricultural colleges, and extension services, he notes that "no ethical obligation toward land is taught in these institutions"), and his own scientific education, making him aware of what is invisible to others, has penalized him by isolating him, forcing him to live alone in "a world of wounds."  "An ecologist," he says, "must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well, and does not want to be told otherwise."

I suppose the TED Circus reveals to me the self-aggrandizing nature of the human who, in the delusion of "mastery," simply continues world-wounding in the service of promoting a next brilliant technological fix: a fix one imagines will bear the moniker of the performer though the genealogy is out of Houdini and Barnum.

Reading America

But it’s generally true that abroad they have more interesting taste in American poetry than in the U.S. French anthologies of American poetry are better than the American ones. When I talk to Brazilian or Danish poets, they ask me about Michael Palmer or Rosmarie Waldrop or Robert Creeley. They’ve never heard of Stephen Dunn or Mary Oliver or Alan Dugan or some prizewinner. In countries where poets are intellectuals, they simply can’t relate to all those poems about changing the storm windows or the jonquils coming up through the snow.

Eliot Weinberger in conversation with Kent Johnson, Jacket 16 — March 2002

American Liberty

"Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology." HDT

"And in this country one sees that there is always margin enough in the statute for a liberal judge to read one way and a servile judge another." RWE

[I'll admit to a slight grin as I typed "servile judge".]

It was not until 1828 that Dissenters gained legal equality in matters of religion and education in England. Hazlitt, in 1818, wrote the following eloquent praise of his coreligionists, the sectaries--the men and women who embodied what Edmund Burke had called "the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." The nonconformists, Hazlitt wrote, "are the steadiest supporters of [England's] liberties and laws, they are the checks and barriers against the insidious or avowed encroachments of arbitrary power: and they are depositaries of the love of truth." Dissent or religious individualism was always more a state of mind than a doctrine, and it was opposed to the Establishment...[emphasis added]
--Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company

"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Handle With Care", Esquire Magazine (March 1936).

I would like to think one might be able to conceptualize "individualism" in two distinct ways, both of which seem readily applicable to what we think of as "mine".

1) Property
2) Liberty

You can see how these two "ideas" are difficult to hold in the mind at the same time. And perhaps we are coming to what seems like a clear rift in our national consciousness in consequence of these ideas "coming apart" in our minds.

Let's define the terms:

1) ownership; right of possession, enjoyment, or disposal of anything, especially of something tangible

2) freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.

We are a nation beholden to propertied interests--and that includes our own if we are owners or debtors--houses, cars, land, etc., yet we are a nation whose mythology is one where Liberty is a central tenet.

It turns out, though, that Liberty is only an abstraction (a powerful one to be sure, but most useful for the human drive to creativity); and that Property is regnant in the world at large.

1) Conservative: Possessive: Tradition: Establishment: Servile
2) Liberal: Creative: Subversive: Dissident: Equality

Which do you prefer?

I saw the Sacs & Foxes at the Statehouse on Monday--about 30 in number. Edward Everett addressed them & they replied. One chief said "They had no land to put their words upon, but they were nevertheless true." RWE

Hero Crime

I spent a few minutes (or more) with this little bit from Gertrude Stein and I think it's apropos to our robber baron culture. We lionize the Greed of Wall Street cuz goddam if I had the opportunity I'd keep those billions too...and you'd shittin' hate me for it but holy jesus want to be in my place.

Anyway, not too far from my writing desk, geographically speaking, is a museum dedicated to John Dillinger. We all seem to want to stick it to the man, but, guess what...the "man" ain't in charge no more and you and me, we're the ones getting stuck.

Do you see what I mean when I say anybody in America can be a public one, and anybody in America being able to be a public one it has something to do with the hero crime and so many people are always doing this thing doing the hero crime it gets into anybody who can have his picture where it is to be seen by everybody. Of course there are so many who feel themselves to be a crime hero that practically nobody wonders that there are any, their names are like the names of Pullman cars, they make them up as easily and it is no good. (From "American Crimes and How They Matter")

Yes, that was in Crase's AMERIFIL.TXT. You really should go steal a copy from someone, because likely you can apply any one of its entries to any news/blog item you come across dealing with politics and money.

The Squalid Cash Interpretation

When the ordinary American hears of cases of injustice he begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency. "It's understandable from the point of view of the parties interested"--but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That--with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success--is our national disease.

Wm James, "Letter to H.G. Wells, 1906" (quoted in AMERIFIL.TXT by Douglas Crase)

Shouting About the Things They Are Not

Apparently I have been channeling D. H. Lawrence (could be worse, I guess).

...Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. they revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth safely swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, and deposited among he reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe...

Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.

He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.

Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free ? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.

******

Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Studies in Classic American Literature

Politics Becoming Religious

I'm sure this is no surprise to you. I'm fairly convinced that though nearly 400 years have passed since the real founding of America (not the United States thereof) we have really not come very far from our "origins".

In any event, a kind of placeholder thought from Soren K. in his Journals:

Even now, in 1848, it certainly looks as though politics were everything; but it will be seen that the catastrophe (the Revolution) corresponds to us and is the obverse of the Reformation: then everything pointed to a religious movement and proved to be political, now everything points to a political movement, but will become religious.