The Dark Heart of Humanity

I am continually disturbed by the human world as it has evolved a kind of systematic concatenation of ever and ever more abusive and rapacious ideologies in which the Powerful can now easily and readily marshal and inject sophisticated (and not so sophisticated) strategies of persuasion into every part of our daily living: from industrial food and religious brotherhood to military invasion and Hollywood entertainments, not to mention testing in education (both for teachers and students) and mandatory payments to the industrial "wellness" industry. The list of course goes on and on.

One often balks at "conspiracy" as an idea--rationally, too many parts must coalesce to be the work of conspirators. But I've come to simply think of it as a systematic conspiracy created by very the framework of our ideas of what it means to be a human and how we come to BE and ACT within this. In short, everything seems tied together when you start thinking about changing even one way of "being" in the world.

That said, I was struck yesterday by a Rolling Stone piece about the "proposed" use of Psy-Op techniques by the military on delegations of congressional members visiting Afghanistan for "on the ground" briefings. So, basically, military generals attempting to use propaganda against our elected representatives to encourage continuing and expanding the pillaging and domination of occupied territory.

Now, it's claimed that this tactic WAS NOT deployed as those ordered to do so refused the order. This is illegal after all--but illegal never stopped anyone before! However, my "read" on this is, "of course they do these kinds of things all the time, and anyway, how would anyone know if/when psy-ops is used."

Remember when it was reported that Donald Rumsfeld would pepper all his reports to Bush with bible verses? That is psy-ops 101.

Also, you might recall that the torture regime has been aided and abetted by psychologists. Look it up yourself.

Okay, so, to the tapestry of "like" ideology.

Psy-Ops really is no different than any application of "organizational" psychology. Daily we are subjected to this kind of manipulation. It's a corporate and academic industry after all.

[You might recall that I suggested you do a little investigating the fact that there are so many Religious colleges that offer HR degrees--well, HR is of course nothing more than manipulating the "human resource" in the corporate machine.]

Now, here is little essay about Industrial and Organization Psychologists written by one of their own. Skim it, it's not worth spending too much time on. But, I would like to call your attention to the first few lines of the author's bio:

Dr. Charles Handler is the president and founder of Rocket-Hire.com. Throughout his career he has specialized in developing effective, legally defensible employee selection systems.

Comforting, yes? This is the dark heart of humanity. I hope you think long and hard about taking this route in life.

I'm tired of this. How do people justify this type of activity as it is applied to their fellow humans? But of course, what part of your life isn't infested by psy-op applications? What the hell is advertising anyway?

Well, remember an earlier post about the "organizational" strength of a certain religion?

See, this is all coming together...onward Christian soldiers marching as to war...on everyone else. But my favorite phrase is next: "with the Cross of Jesus marching on before." It's the IDEA that marches on before (the symbol of torture by the state) because Jesus, as a man and philosopher is too complicated (and well, against violent and worldly domination) to be a symbol of war.

And, finally, for this post, what do you think the "morality of greed" (not softened by the use of "profit" to replace "greed") is but a psy-op attack on your very idea of human society (your social relations). Your responsibility is now to an abstraction called MONEY, or PROSPERITY rather than your fellow beings.

All this manipulation is fostered by the distancing hand of our technologies. More machines, more tools, less human empathy, what we once might have called "fellow feeling"...it's that simple.

Please stop it.

Numerous Cabalistical Contrivances

I know my friends Meredith and Dimitri are missing the Melville fix!

From Chapter 118, The Quadrant, Ahab examining a piece of technology:

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:"Foolish toy! babies'plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores,and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; THESE shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

And Justice for All

Besides being a pretty good Al Pacino movie, the post title, as you know, comes from the "Pledge of Allegiance". Isn't it funny how you grow up with these things and have no real idea of their inculcating symbolic intention...a flag and allegiance to it. Odd, right, pledging loyalty to an abstraction.

That's not the point though: with the "democratic" challenges to ruling authority in Egypt and Tunisia some have trumpeted the call to liberty (and justice) for all. However, many are asking about the inequality of women in these societies and if that will be addressed in any meaningful way. Will there be justice?

No. To elaborate, equality is a chimera and justice is a legalism of the power structure of systems of government. Power decides what is just and just how equal things need to be in order to be called just. Melville addressed this, as shown in the previous post, with the idea of "fast-fish and loose-fish"; even if a fish is fast this tenet of "natural law" (I have caught it, and I am in possession of it) will be vitiated by the hierarchical law of "civilized" legal systems if Power wants the fish. And this vitiation, this unequal or unfair action will be called "just". And it will indeed be just in civil terms.

We have also heard calls condemning patriarchal systems...I really can't disagree here as I find the psychology of the human male to be the cause of all our ills. Yep, I'm laying at the feet of the biological male animal striving for alpha positions and all the lesser males trying to put one over on the alpha. These "stupid" biology tricks are useful in certain species and social orders do benefit from this kind of organization--but it seems to me that the wrong genes have been in the ascendancy for far too long. The female animal goes about her living in the cycle of care not in the cycle of domination.

Our human reality is dominated by masculine aggression on every level. We pray to the trinity of War, Technology and Money. All of these are masculine ideas. All of these come out of a desire to conquer our very biology--conquer each other--conquer our planet--even conquer our gods. These are our masculine abstractions.

Without a massive alteration in this particular "way" of being there is no hope.

Our only future is in the physical reality of the feminine, body, mind and soul.

Slaves to the Idea of the Tower

My friend Marc over at Disquiet reviewed Doug Rushkoff's recent book about technology, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, while proscribing its dictates into a "guide" for musicians in the technological age. That review is linked below.

Rushkoff's product page (link below) says this:

The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

I commented on Disquiet's FB post:

I always feel ambivalent about these kinds of self-help books for the Age of Technicity. On the one hand, the train of obeisance and acquiescence to our future with mediating machines has left the station (about the time real trains left the station!), but on the other I always want to fight against "acceptance manifestos"--there is no real way to "manage the machine" and in the end the only folks that can remotely pretend to are already those working that angle of the tech game (already a specialization in the world of our current view of the magic of technology). I feel it's closer to an addiction and this would be like saying to the smoker, just be sure to grow your own tobacco so you can be the one addicting yourself in just the right amount.

Further to the point--Rushkoff is a self-promoting "counter-revolutionary" (no clue what that means in this context) and "expert" in all things digital, but who, to my mind, is like an embedded "journalist" in the current terror campaigns--he's promoted the very war he sends back dispatches from and profited by this medium and speaks from within its parameters.

His goal has always been to make you comfortable with the medium that is remaking you.

Don't fight it, Brother, Sister...learn the best way to please IT and IT will smile upon you.

This is a real concern and has been one for aeons regarding our knowledge of the world. Philosophy has debated this knowing the world via "theory" or "practice". Of course, it's not a very real dichotomy as the two must go hand-in-hand (like lovers are supposed to; there's a thin line between love and hate).

But I think the worst thing has been happening; practice is all most of us "know". We know there is a machine and we know what we can see and use of the machine--my "knowledge" of the laptop I'm using is literally a surface knowledge...plastic keys, power cord, etc., I know nothing of its guts; I know even less of it's software (though I can name some programs).

One might believe that knowing programming will help you "direct" technology to your benefit (and it might create economic opportunities for you, I can't disagree)--but knowing coding is also a surface knowledge.

What do I know of anything? is finally a very important first question. Nothing is my best answer at this point (thank you, Michel).

I know that given the above you have to assume that I am skeptical of most of this kind of reaching after technical skill without understanding the history of our machine-driven species (emphasis on "driven"). I know nothing of how anything works--cars, computers, airplanes, refrigerators, animal bodies, atoms, bombs, seeds. Yes, I can find out the "guts" of most of these things. Yes, that is my responsibility (and I take it this is likely Rushkoff's message at bottom--I didn't read the book, only the review and the promotional page), but what am I learning?

How to better "use" technology? Perhaps this is all we can do. If so, then I propose the President add "philosophy of technology" to his list of educational priorities--I don't think it was in the SOTU. We are, as Hedges has detailed in a talk linked to in a previous post here, erasing the subjects of our liberal arts education like languages, art and music at all levels and re-tooling what's left of them to be subservient to all-mighty STEM. Just as one learns languages best at the earliest age of immersion, so too one can learn philosophy. Our children begin as philosophers but are quickly turned into technologists. "Why" is discouraged; "How to" encouraged.

I often wonder if real wisdom lies not in knowing the consequences of your "practice" but rather in knowing that a tower stretching to the heavens is irrelevant and makes us simply slaves of the idea of the tower.

Review of Program or Be Programmed by Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet.com

Rushkoff's Product website

Episteme and Techne--Stanford

Montaigne

Teaching Tech

Philosophy for Kids

No Mind

Believe it or not, while reading the piece discussed below on "Situationalism" and Virtue Ethics I thought of that abominable recent flick The Green Hornet (avoid at all costs). I'll explain why...in due course.

In the Summer 2009 (link below) issue of Daedalus (unearthed happenstantially out of a box recently-unpacked in search of a Spore computer game disc) is an essay by Kwame Appiah discussing, primarily, ethics and the psychology of morality. It was a piece culled from his book Experiments in Ethics which deals with much that is happening in the neurosciences and cognitive psychology and how this might affect moral philosophy (hell, just morality in general I guess). It's a pretty interesting and easy piece to read.

I went looking for reviews of the Appiah book and there's a pretty good one in the NYRB by Jeremy Waldron (10/8/09--link below).

These are important issues in moral philosophy. Primarily it seems our brain does a lot of "work" that often has no relevant narrative applicable to it and our terms such as those we label "Virtues" may not be "agent-centered" or even "action-centered". Our brain commands us and we act and then we tell the tale of the action.

There is a strong "situationist" movement regarding Virtue that seems very interesting but also too readily "reductionist" in our easy conception of it. We act "situationally" and "virtue" is flexible, or situationally definable, for lack of a better term. But the act itself may in no way be "virtuous"--it may simply be the brain responding to other "unreflected upon" stimuli. This is akin to what I take to be the thrust of the Bronk poem posted yesterday, The Limitations of the Mind Are Its Freedom.

You know there are always messages we find
--in bed, on the street or anywhere, and the mind
invents a translation almost plausible;

The two examples discussed in the Appiah piece of experiments in "moral psychology" may be well known to you if 1) you listen to Radio Lab and/or 2) you listen to Philosophy Bites.

1) The "trolley car" dilemma and variants.

From the Wikipedia: taking a neuroscientific approach to the trolley problem, Joshua Greene[10] under Jonathan Cohen decided to examine the nature of brain response to moral and ethical conundra through the use of fMRI. In their more well-known experiments,[11] Greene and Cohen analyzed subjects' responses to the morality of responses in both the trolley problem involving a switch, and a footbridge scenario analogous to the fat man variation of the trolley problem. Their hypothesis suggested that encountering such conflicts evokes both a strong emotional response as well as a reasoned cognitive response that tend to oppose one another. From the fMRI results, they have found that situations highly evoking a more prominent emotional response such as the fat man variant would result in significantly higher brain activity in brain regions associated with response conflict. Meanwhile, more conflict-neutral scenarios, such as the relatively disaffected switch variant, would produce more activity in brain regions associated with higher cognitive functions. The potential ethical ideas being broached, then, revolve around the human capacity for rational justification of moral decision making.

My take on this regarding what this variant of the "fat man" ("why is the man fat, dad," asks my 11 year old..."that doesn't seem necessary.") speaks to a technology-induced disaffection. Pulling a lever to affect an outcome is mechanical and distant and does not engage your "feelings"; pushing a man indeed brings you into the equation full force and jumps out at us as VERY wrong EVEN if the Utility calculation is equal. The more we engage in "moral" conflict (modern war as video game) at a distance the more we are able to "de-personalize" these choices and create a world enacted out of "calculation" and do away with morality as a choice based in our notions of the "good" or what is a right/wrong action based on ethical principles (a reason to be against Utilitarianism and, hell, Pragmatism as well--at least as it's commonly defined).

And 2) I don't really want to talk about...sorry. But there is a link below and a YouTube video about this. However the point here is about "intentionality"--a "moral" issue regarding "harming" or "helping" as a secondary or "accidental" result of a primary intention which leads to an action (which may or may not be intrinsically moral or immoral but is then "colored" by the consequences of the act/intention).

Finally, what you've been waiting for--how in the world does any of this relate to that excrescence that is the Green Hornet movie? Only in this way--Cato "acts" in the movie in slow motion. All of his movements are a product of the stillness of his mental activity. He sees all and acts in accordance to the mind's dictates...Cato (of Asian descent and so a man of Eastern philosophy) doesn't act, his mind directs his motions on the "first order" while the "Western" rube that is Seth Rogan's character can only "see" what's in front of his face and "think" about it in a "second order" reflection. He is hampered by his "thinking I".

Appiah in Daedalus

Waldron NYRB

Quandaries and Virtues
Against Reductivism in Ethics
Edmund L. Pincoffs

RadioLab-Morality

Philosophy Bites Joshua Knobe

YouTube Experimental Philosophy--"intentionality"

War Games

The Gun Inside of Us

**Update below

It's too easy to argue with so much intensity about this object and not really think much about it. Or rather be open to thinking about it without a knee-jerk "political" response or "defensive" response. I think I mean defensive there in both ways.

For some reason I've begun to think that really, everyone, EVERYONE, feels that a gun is an error of the human imagination. Many things are "mistakes" of imagination. This was the teaching of the myth of Pandora's box, and really, I think the core of the story of Adam & Eve in the garden--expulsion for knowledge "too soon". Human minds touch the ineffable--it's there within our neural networks--the ALL and the Abyss ("Nothing" is not quite the right word here as we don't really know how to think about it)--and in this way we can imagine everything. In this way we are susceptible to self-destruction in the manner of Icarus. In our very foundational mythologies we are given the whole truth. We have no capacity for wisdom on the whole. Wisdom is slow and comes with age probably only truly comes with death.

We imagine and we create without wisdom. Wisdom is knowing the ALL and the Abyss lives in everything we do and touch. Without the understanding that is wisdom, that is knowing finality, of death as the just and proper conclusion to this living, we bring out of ourselves only the Abyss. We carry it into our lives through fear of death.

A gun is abysmal.

**Update

I want to clarify a bit. The abysmal [correction! is NOT] "bad"--it IS. A gun, hell probably everything we do that attempts to define us against our surroundings, is a response to the void. And pulling the trigger confirms the fear of it and inability to confront it in ourselves with the wisdom of the ALL (which I might argue is simply acceptance of what is "given" in nature).