Aphorisms, Filtered and Organized #2

I have gathered my best aphorisms I have written over the years along with a few from others.  Fitting them into themes has revealed some patterns in my thought that I wouldn't have seen if they weren't put together.  Realize that nearly all of these sayings were written at different times.

These week's selection flow from progress to tradition to a wider look at American politics.  After that, there are a few odd ideas that will serve as an intermission when this these quotes are a section of my book.  The picture these quotes paint is pretty dark.  Look for some rays of hope the next two weeks.

==
The Cult of Progress and The Techno-Future
==

The trans-humanist plan: to transcend the meat-space.  What's their back-up plan?  To do it better.

If you met my 83 year-old Grandma you wouldn't be saying 100 is the new 80. Rather, the new selection bias is the old selection bias.

(Note/update: none of my grandparents lived past 85).

You probably need AI to enforce rules against AI.

I am disgusted with the 21st century. It puts the worst of humanity in your face at all times. I try to spend as little time as possible in it.

Detroit is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet.

When our country puts kids in cages, it invokes images of the holocaust, a horrible past.  When we use killer robots in the sky to kill kids, it is part of the future, a disruptive future.  No wonder progressives can accept the latter.

Conjecture: if drone technology hits the point that the state and property are incontestable then the incentive for bullshit jobs will go away.  As dangerous as it is for the 99%, that might need to be the order it needs to happen.

Space travel isn't going to be colonization.  It is going to be white flight.

"Unable to achieve what it desires, 'progress' christens what it achieves desire."  -- Don Colacho.  This is great an explanation for neo-mania.

You are overhead for the technosphere.  Prepare to be more human or prepare to be liquidated. Actually, prepare for both.

AI will have a much easier time mastering clickbait headlines and tweets than long-form essays, to any level of human intelligence.  Perhaps it already has, and we're just not going to be told.

(Related). There won't ever be a need for AI to master the long-form essay.  The blood of the immature can always be stirred short-form (ergo keep it all short form AND keep them all immature!).  Furthermore, the retirement-center bots will be able to make do with small-talk.

"The only true and effective 'operator's manual for spaceship earth' is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures."  Wendell Berry.

My current understanding is that solar power is good tactically, but poor strategically.

Isn't that what Padmé said?:
"So this is how liberty dies . . . with robots everywhere."  *Glares at a droid.*

The real curse of living in interesting times is watching people try to win iteration after iteration of a negative sum game.

==
American "Tradition"
==

"Even our age may seem great when the worst of us are forgotten" Will Durant

I would consider defending the American Way of Life after World War II, but there isn't one.

Why has virtually all conservatism become a project in personal vanity?  It's the logic of profit that surrounds our culture.  It's impossible for nearly anyone to imagine investing in something that might cost them more than they receive.  And the conservatives feel their best return on investment is to set back and proclaim.

Only artificial things can get as clean as most conservatives want.

. .  Corollary: this is especially true of histories.

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."  Gustav Mahler

You know what?  Let's forget about the abstraction of "America."  Let's make the conversation at family meals great again.

When the American project is over, those with a conservative temperament (low openness, high disgust at disorder) will simply find another story for why the then-dominate groups deserve more.

"It's so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one." Ursula LeGuin

"Fear is seldom wise and never kind." Ibid.

Most of the developed world has worked to make the lives of families better.  In the U.S. we marketed "family values" and then called it a day.

Traditionalism in America has nothing to do with tradition.

==
American Politics
==

My fellow Americans love a good story, love a good image, but will neglect the supporting realities . . . till the end.

You are not asked daily to participate in democracy. You choose to freak out about things you can't control. This is not the same thing, and you need to learn the difference.  However, you do make daily decisions about consumption and production.  We should think about those more.

The argument that it was better to build a school than a prison might have been true once.  But now, in order to pay for the care of the richest generation in human history, we will soon have money for neither.

"The apparency: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. The actuality: If you even think there's a solution, you're part of the problem." Steve Solomon

While a Matrix metaphor might work for the masses, it is better to think of the elites in the U.S. as lotus eaters.  They are too doped up on greed to make any moves.  Alas, they've also locked the doors to the cockpit and are the only ones who can steer.

These Americans trading liberty for convenience don't realize that if they keep it up they'll soon have neither.  (Thanks to Benny Franklin for this).

The real cruelty of America to its young is not that it is denying them the American Dream.  It is denying them the Human Dream of starting a family that they can keep healthy and free from deprivation.  This is unsustainable.  If it is the first unsustainable thing to pop, then that will be for the good.  If it is toward the last, there will be no American society.

Is it really that difficult to understand that a tax cut when the budget isn't balanced is simply free money for rich people?

Liberals prefer to be liberal with other people's money, and conservatives prefer to be conservative with other people's morals. . .  Oh, I'm now an old man, fighting last generation's war. Now right-wingers also prefer to be right-wing with other people's money and leftists prefer to signal leftism about other people's morals.

When neither side engages in good faith, any instance of being correct is purely coincidental.

When the political class has shown a complete, stark, sociopathic disregard for 80 percent of the population -- what is another 19 (or 19.9) percent?

"Liberty is not the fruit of order alone; it is the fruit of mutual concessions between order and disorder." Don Colacho.  I despair of this ever being widely (enough) understood.

Sorry, friends, the Left is a Granfallon.  My real Karass is those who get to the root of things (radical, I know).  Prep and survive, but not like a Prepper or Survivalist.

It's sad to see how many Americans think they have nothing to lose.  What is more sad is how wrong they are. 

Rank and file Republican voters think everything is a conspiracy, and then vote in such a way as to conspiracies happen.  As of recently, Democrats do it too, but with different conspiracies.

I have not lost the ability to dream; I have lost the ability to pretend that other people will follow any of my dreams.

" . . . the real difficulty of democracy is not that voters are unworthy, but that their vote is generally the least worthy thing about them."  C.K. Chesterton

==
Miscellaneous Ideas -- an Intermission
==

Self driving cars could be called auto-automobiles.  I'd also accept them being called "autobots."

I propose that we have 73 Five-Day Weeks (73*5 = 365).  We could call the leap year day "Leap Day" and then all of our days of the week would line up every year.

Probably the best idea, as measured by possible utility to the human race, I've had in months.  But, alas, oh alack! -- such it is the nature of ideas that they need fertile ground to grow.  I will never get this idea out the general public to adopt:  Get rid of the free throws in basketball; instead, every second foul place the player in a penalty box for 1 minute of game play.

You fail to get warmth from 100% of fires you don’t start.

Aphorisms, Filtered and Organized #1

I have gathered my best aphorisms I have written over the years-- and some by others.  Fitting them into themes has revealed some patterns in my thought that I wouldn't have seen if they weren't put together.  

 The three themes for this week are "On Interest," "On the Internet" and "Humility/ Model Recalibration."  I was not aware just how much I had thought about the internet, but see the first two sections as statements of the problem and the third section as working toward solutions.

==
On Interest
==

Interesting is easier to hack than beautiful.  Hence, prioritize the beautiful over the interesting . . . especially in interesting times.

More important than being interested is working on good projects.  With a project in focus interesting things come to you and find a more harmonious, joyful place in your life.

"Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?" David Foster Wallace.

Interesting: you have to watch for the danger of anti-social media most when it is truly interesting.

==
On the Internet
==

The old internet was the greatest tool for life's conventional warfare.  Internet 2.0 -- or whatever marketing label you want to give it -- is guerrilla warfare against the human psyche.

How sad it must be to live on such a poor information diet, and with so little self control, that you think it is the job of other people to prevent you from seeing spoilers.

Life is so much more interesting when you are learning new things.  Contrast this with Silicon Valley's internet, where you are told that what you are going to like is exactly like something you have enjoyed before.  

(Note.  I am to understand the titans of the Valley don't fall for this trap, and don't let their children use their products, but that is deeply instructive. . . in more ways than one).

I'm bringing "web surfing" back.  Most people don't surf anymore; they are herded.

I know modernity's whole shtick is efficiency.  But always ask "efficient at what?."  Anti-social media does not efficiently give you information; rather, it efficiently kills time.

Why less anti-social media? Simple: more living, less arguing.

It is odd how the incentives of anti-social media have turned the pragmatists into absolutists about their pragmatism. If really pragmatists, then time to start building a coalition. If instead you are just signaling for likes, then by all means, continue. . .

We just accept at the level of truism that the internet contains "the sum total of all information," but if this is true why do most of the best blogs consistently import knowledge from books into the internet?

Anti-social media platforms which allow only upvotes are the ultimate fool's paradise.

"We used to have to talk to other humans if we wanted to join a cult." comment on a Reddit thread by user named 77096.

Complaining on the internet for an hour is easier than spending that same hour working on a problem. The benefits of the complaining are immediate and almost guaranteed. This reinforces complaining over doing. Now, repeat that across our species over billions, if not trillions, of total hours . . .

Anyone who thinks their best thinking happens on Twitter, misunderstands both the medium of Twitter, as well as thought.

In the age of the printing press,  anonymity was a way to avoid the hectoring of the outside world and achieve authenticity.  In the internet age, anonymity is a way to join in the hectoring and with it the pan-societal effort to make sure no can be authentic anywhere.

Netflix: because you watched a documentary based on research and facts, you'd probably love to watch ten documentaries of nothing but conspiracy theory.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Twitter.

What I really mean:
I have seen the worst souls of my generation destroyed by Twitter.  . . Well, damaged further.

==
Humility/ Model Recalibration
==

I'm only interested in listening to people who listen to other people.

We live in a society that thinks it has no time for politeness markers, but then wonders why everyone is angry at each other.

I'm not sure of much, but someone as sure as you is probably wrong.

They say they have no Faith, but then talk like True Believers about every opinion they state.  I know what they really worship.

As productive as it can be to ask "why are things bad," it is often more worthwhile to ponder "why aren't things much, much worse already?"

Be very suspicious of any take-down that assumes each and every thing someone else states is always wrong.  You are not witnessing truth-finding, but rather branding.

Contempt brain is stupid brain.

Of all the lessons to teach a Harvard or Oxford grad, the hardest seems to be a non sequitur.  Particularly about where one went to college.

To be on record saying there is nothing worthwhile in world literature is to admit to being too ignorant or too stupid to pattern-match whole classes of human knowledge.

I can be convinced that gambling for amusement is immoral, but the ability to make a bet needs to be on the table as a tool to deal with blowhards.

The only thing we have to fear is confidence itself.

Back up of my father's obiturary

 I'm surprised I haven't made a copy of it before.  Maybe it just hurt too much before now. 

===

Max Alan Huddleston was born July 11, 1957 to Virginia and Max Leroy Huddleston in Norman, Oklahoma. To avoid confusion with his father, he went by Alan or "Al."

Alan was dedicated to his family and his neighborhood, with a special gift for making children laugh. He worked a wide variety of jobs, including running several small businesses, managing restaurants, working in apartments, and working briefly as a professional magician. Though often shy in crowds, he was always a character at work who found ways to make jokes and brighten people's day.

He is survived by his wife Alison, his mother, his brother Ray and wife Connie, as well as his son Keith and wife Beth. He was preceded in death last year by his father.

Memorial services are scheduled for 2:00 p.m., Friday, August 28, 2015, at the Primrose Funeral Home Chapel, with Chaplain Harry Smith officiating.

If desired, memorial donations may be made to the Cancer Research Institute.

Round Up #32

Aphorisms/Shorts
===

If you can see through G.K. Chesterton's work to know where he is engaging in sophistry, and where he is being brilliant, then you are well on your way to fruitful explorations of the world.

"To know solves only subordinate problems, but learning protects against tedium." Don Colacho.  Now that's a manifesto, right there.

 "Hemmed in by language and horizons of time and space, reading is always a stylising of past reality."  John Keane

Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter:  "I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues . . . Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me . . . Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat.”

If glass were invented today, it would be hailed as this amazing technology that could be 3D printed using . . . sand itself!  What a disruptive technology!  Let's get some start ups going, and bid up their price to earnings somewhere between 800 and infinity (which would be the case if they had no earnings -- because who needs earnings when you are dIsRupTIve !?!) 

Links/research
===

I've been getting into mechanical toys again.  This has lead me to the marvelous Paul Spooner -- one, and two videos.  How is this for an artistic statement? 

As well as all the cars, clocks and other machines that make our lives efficient and comfortable, there are quite a lot of machines that have no practical use at all. Machines that are the antithesis of practicality, made by artists who have no interest in efficiency or comfort. They often make machines that express their anger about the dehumanising mechanisation of war, policing, bureaucracy or about the increasing distance between people who seem always to be on the phone but seldom talking to those next to them.

My machines are even more useless than those because I’m not even angry, having led an easy life in a beautiful country doing pretty much as I please all day. I make machines about things I find funny or absurd, hoping that others will feel the same. Even if I am a little annoyed when I start making something, the feeling has usually worn off by the time I’ve finished.

Video compiling David Lynch arguing that habits and routines free him to be creative. 

From the book Range by David Epstein

The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area (33)

I found the Intelligence Squared YouTube channel.  Seems good to give content to listen to while I do chores.

I don't know if this is a rabbit hole I want to go down, but there are claims to co-ops handled the last global financial crisis better than traditional for-profit companies.

. . . Lead to list of worker cooperatives, which lead to this line, which I found amusing "Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse is a radical infoshop . . ."  (It's worth saying that when it comes to anarchist stuff I am such a MOP.  It's not my thing, but I find it interesting to look at).

Discussion on Discussion on Dualism

 An astute reader emailed in response to Discussion on Non-Dualism and wrote 

My general impression is that "non-dualism" can tend to make a fetish of dualism, rather than leaving it behind. 

This was my reply: 

==

Dualism certainly should be left behind rather than rebelled against.  It's not even a great term for what it is describing.  I just use it sometimes because it is the best index to other thinkers who have written on the subject.  (So, as much as I knock labels, I have to admit they are useful -- necessary -- for finding more of what you are looking for). 

Instead of dualism and its Two, I like to think of the spots where separations of all types break down (seep into one another?).  My favorite piece where I show the dance of not being separated is Van Gogh Flow, although I don't mind my little diddy about my cat either.   If the formulation didn't get bogged down in political overtones that I don't want, I would adopt the label "non-separatism."  But that's really not going to work.  

Keep in mind it was "filthy jeeper" who was the monist.  If I am a monist, I am certainly not the fun type with woo-woo rays -- just materiality all the way down, with emergent properties playing the role of making it appear something else is going on.  

But to me, every time I look at what works in the art of living, it seems clear that you have to live in the emergent and let the substrate be what it is.  Maybe poke at the substrate every now and then for amusement, but it is not really Truer (other than holding in more cases globally speaking), and it is certainly not more useful.

A Theology of Compassion

This started its life here on Reddit.  Lightly edited.  The beginning of the thread is backed-up here.

===

I'm monist, in a sense - it's the cosmic background radiation of my practice, but while I'm here in this flesh bundle, there's really no reason to think much about it. I can thoroughly explore that kind of oneness after I'm dead.

Oh, I really like that. I think that a defense of compassion follows from that as a premise.

I) From the Mountaintop

==

Up at the tip-top of the great tall mountain of spirit it is cold, icy. There is an austere beauty of pure pattern, harmony, purest flow. As you said, we can contemplate that forever when we are dead, if that death means a transport to that place. Hinduism and Buddhism posits there are many more impediments to breaking the cycle of rebirth, while mainline Christianity and Islam are more committed to selves that stay separate forever and get their final, total judgement from Sky God.

To switch conceptualizations. Alan Watts expressed the pantheist concept in The Book by talking about two types of games: 1) hide-and-go-seek and 2) cards. As to hide-and-go-seek, basically, the One consciousness shattered itself into pieces to make for games. And once you fully realize (I mean fully realize) you the One. . . you win!  But card games are another matter. If you think about it, virtually every card game is about putting the cards back in order. To make it a game worth playing, however, the cards have to be first disordered. And for the sake of variety, they have to re-disordered each round of play. Ergo, no disorder, no game.

In a sense that would make our lives unreal, and from the very top of the mountain nothing would matter -- even nuclear blasts, the Holocaust, eco-cide).  It was all just a game.

But while you are in the middle of a game, why wouldn't you play?

II) A Western Detour

==

I rather like Watt's explanation, but the West approaches it all completely differently. Imperfection, rather than the heart of a game, is either the source of sin or a sin in itself. This is seen in the Platonic ideal of forms and the garbling of them that is our world. The implication is that our plane is filth. Further down the line, Gnosticism holds that evil forces created this plane.

I hereby present another heterodox idea (I'm not claiming I'm the first person to come up with it, just that I don't know of having ever heard it before): perhaps the forces of creation and consciousness aren't even the same. It's only when sufficiently complex enough brains come along processing sufficiently complex patterns that consciousness comes to possess the being.

But the mainline Western faith is that this life is a test for a prize. And as we moved through modernity, the more the test questions narrowed to in-group signaling and virtually nothing else. Absent that very last turn, the Western detour is not a bad way to defend compassion -- the Authoritarian God said have compassion, and that's that.

Failing that, the argument could be that we are so low compared to the divine that we are equal -- only Grace can give us any relief from our unworthiness.

This equality under God concept is highly underrated, and without it Liberalism has a very difficult time defending itself.

III) to the Daodejing, book 1

==

While the daodejing famously starts by starts by showing how labels don't work (thus Good is perceived pre-verbally, if not pre-cognitively ), I think the next passage profound enough to change a life:

Truly, "rid of desire, one can perceive the Wondrous." With desire, one can perceive only outcomes.

I don't find the Daodejing prescriptive as much as descriptive. But what it is describing here is of the utmost importance. The human body/brain apparatus is very prone to cogitate on social standing. When this happens, it crowds out all other virtues. Only by silencing that monkey brain, even if for a bit, do you get to wonder.

Why the hell is wonder important? Well, for one thing it is the source of every creation that is not hyper-specialized and derivative. That's not to say you can't make some really good weapons that way, but even if all you care about is weapons, the better ones will eventually be made as a by-product of someone's wonder. Wonder is the golden goose.

Wonder has another attribute -- it is inexhaustible, self-generating. There is always enough to go around. Every artist and creator, both through the text of their work and through their life gives extra texture to reality that can be explored while doing virtually no harm to rest of the world. To a greater extent, each segment of land is itself layered through with beauty on level after level. (And even the ugly spots are worth a gander -- they teach us to perceive time). Fractal. Reflective. Patterns ever widening, deepening. . .  Whoa.

In "outcome world" this very inexhaustibly is a weakness -- if you have unlimited supply, you can't be paid by any level of demand, you see -- but once you let a crack of wonder in to the eye of the beholder, the argument in its favor is apparent. Which makes it sad that there are people who intuit this weakness in hierarchy and thus do whatever they can to thwart the forces of dao.

I recently saw an old post where Ran Prieur quoted Cynthia Ozick:

Heaven is for those who have already been there.

I cannot teach the pre-cognitive bliss of the dao. I can only connect to experiences of people who have experienced it, and explain why it is worth defending. I would also go here to this understanding to try to make the case for all lives having worth.

Hilariously, I am told that Ayn Rand made an argument like this: one of her super-men wanted to kill someone because, you know, a lesser being was in the way, but then he noticed this lesser being had a clean shirt. This showed that the lesser being at least had ability to value something. So no, no right to kill. (Probably Atlas Shrugged -- but I'm not tracking it down).

This is a Kantian, weak sauce version of the argument; rather, the compassionate mode of being does tend to stick better when it comes from a spiritual experience.

IV) to the Gita

==

The Gita is really easy to mis-read. I think it is second to Nietzsche in terms of the most dangerously mis-read work of all time  [Update: I have no idea how the Bible didn't come to mind when I wrote that sentence.  I leave the sentence as an exercise in humility].  In The Gita, a warrior has realized the truth of hide-and-go-seek and that none . . . of this . . . matters. An avatar of God (actually, I think it's an avatar of an avatar -- but even this gets interpreted in a lot of ways) comes to our warrior with the gist of "Oh, so you think that by doing nothing, you're going to be blameless?" And proceeds to build arguments against non-action and to argue that action which, if performed without attachment and desire, is just as holy. Wikipedia says of this theology

right work done well is a form of prayer

This forms basically all of my understanding of dharma. (It should be pointed out that I am more of a breadth than depth person, so I could be missing a lot).

It is because we are still in the middle of a game that values appear to us. I do believe there is some connection here to your "right relationship" concept. Pulling a quote for the OP blog post

Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships.

Enemies/scapegoats are for the "results only" crowd. When things are going well, they will worship the winners under the current paradigm. When things are going badly, their instinct is to find a comfort ritual grounded in that very hierarchy they love. I find it to be an ugly way to play the existence game and one that does little to maximize the high score for everyone.  But, then, I'm not an asshole.

V) I guess that's an essay.

==

I would also be very interested to read your thoughts in essay form, for what it's worth!

Oh, I think this is it. I spent all morning on this and will count it as a one of my long pieces for the week. With your permission, I would like to reprint your side of the discussion on my blog as well, and eventually in the custom-print book I one day plan on paying to have made so I can give out as presents. I have a few friends that will enjoy it. To family I see giving the gift going like this: "Oh, you wanted something store bought. . . Too bad! I made it myself!" as it then sits on their shelf, unread forever.

Discussion on Non-Dualism

This started on Reddit, as a response to a piece of mine on non-dualism.  There is a bit of back and forth.

===
filthyjeeper:

Non dualism is taught in a lot of the mystery schools of the ancient Mediterranean, while dualism traditionally provided the face of mass, public religion. I've been reading some philosophy of the pre-columbian Mexica, which is openly monist - similar to dao, you have teotl, which is the only thing actually in existence - and there's a lot of this there. There is no metaphysical impetus for compassion in that school of thought though, just wisdom, and poise enough to keep upright while walking "on the slippery earth". To Mexica (ie Aztec) philosophers, the only eternal things were movement and transformation, so even compassion was a contextual moving target.

===

Me:

Hmm. In fact, that is a really deep hmm. That's going to take a lot to digest, so please understand anything I write here is very tentative, a real thinking aloud. What may seem like an argument against it is me trying to interact with the idea. I am profoundly interested and frankly moved by it. (I may one day request a bibliography.)

My first thought is that this reminds me of a thrust of the Gita, which is to criticize an addiction to stillness. I think being embedded in a reality gives us dharmas, and the more important thing is to quiet our desires in the practice (not concern ourselves with the fruit of action, but make the action itself as meditation). And for us in times of peace, it seems to me our dharma is compassion.

Or at least it was for my profession of teacher. But that seems backwards. I choose to teach because I wanted to nurture, and like most veteran nurturers I noticed that empathy burns you out, but compassion is sustainable. With that said, I have good reason (in the form this article) to believe that works fine as a professional nurturer, but may very well be a disaster to try as a parent. Different contexts. Different dharamas. I will try to write a long form essay to be more clear what I mean one day.

It's also possible I'm just stuck in Judeo-Christian baggage. I recently read the Illiad because for the first time I had a good enough reason -- I wanted to see that version of the divine to compare it to same claims I had read about how some roots of Christian universalism are in Judaism. . . . I think that's about right. Judaism presents a god who will keep his end of bargains. The Illiad does not. Somehow our Western sense of logos flows from one tradition (probably nothing in the Illiad itself, but I'm giving credit) and equality under the law flows from the other.

Coming back full circle. There are other paths to compassion than this universalism. And I think anyone who clears away enough desire does so little harm that they might as well have compassion. (I may have rambled myself into my main theses regarding what you presented about the Aztecs) But I think I've simply dug in to the point you're making

the only eternal things were movement and transformation, so even compassion was a contextual moving target.

Dharma is a contextual moving target. I'm just glorifying it -- which I don't regret. This also seems to be why daoism is the philosophy of the valley, not of the mountain top. To paraphrase Prisig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The top of the mountain is the highest bit, but virtually nothing lives there. Yes, the top defines the sides, but life is on the sides.

===
filthyjeeper:

First off, this is a mighty interesting dialogue, and I am humbled by your public fiddling with it. Secondly, my knowledge of eastern thought is limited - I know broad strokes, but the most of my meager familiarity is through Zen. So I may have a different (or underdeveloped) understanding of concepts like dharma. But I'm going to try to keep up.

Contemporary polytheisms (not necessarily paganism, as it's a much broader theological umbrella) have a term that might mirror this idea: right relationship. Whether you're practicing a revival of the ancient Kemetic religion, reconstructing Anglo-Saxon heathenry, Rodnovery, Hellenismos via the Orphic mystery cult, etc., they all have it. And I think you have something in common with most of us in that, we unapologetically glorify it too!

So I'm not sure if you're mired in baggage, exactly. But I think there are a lot of modern conceptions of "good" and "right action" that may be a Christly hangover, may be convergent evolution, may be a mix of both. I've read John Gray, though, so I'm inclined to believe that our modern flavor of thanatophobia definitely has its roots in world-denying doctrines, which tend to be blamed exclusively on Christianity, but is also probably more likely a combination of Christ + scientism. I'm a 4th generation Christian Scientist as well (ex-, thank goodness), so I know this fear of death and illness intimately.

Where gods are concerned, I think there's definitely a kind of sandboxing effect, but I think this happens in Christianity (Abrahamic religions?) as well, just differently. If you ask YHWH to get you a shiny new Ferrari in exchange for more praise and piety, the odds are against you. That kind of specificity doesn't really work. You'll shoot your eye out, kid! For Christians, right relationship is sort of a one-way street, though, and I think that's the difference: you're an ambassador for god, stuck in a foreign embassy until you get to come home, and that's mostly it. For the polytheistic worldview, you're more an ambassador for humans in the presence of gods. It's a very messy relational type of interaction, but right relationship is good etiquette, table manners. It's primarily a social thing, where all the worlds are your neighbors and pissing them off is just a plain bad idea.

I'm part of a group of monists who've been discussing the concept of enlightenment recently, and it made me think of this. I'm monist, in a sense - it's the cosmic background radiation of my practice, but while I'm here in this flesh bundle, there's really no reason to think much about it. I can thoroughly explore that kind of oneness after I'm dead. And this is where the Zen comes in, because I firmly believe "enlightenment" is a process rather than a destination, because there's no straight lines. So in this way, to come back full circle too, right relationship is the culmination of deliberate actions that keep the void - nihilism, one of the few true evils - at bay.

This is also my roundabout way of saying that yes, it is possible to live in a society that skins people alive in sacrifice to a god (of rebirth and renewal, mind), and also be in possession of a fierce desire to live in compassion and right relationship.

I would also be very interested to read your thoughts in essay form, for what it's worth!

Round-Up #31

Our feature presentation reminds you to cultivate your garden.

 

Aphorisms and Shorts
===

 While a Matrix metaphor might work when describing the masses, it is better to think of the elites in the U.S. as lotus eaters.  They are too doped up on greed to make any moves.  Alas, they've also locked the doors to the cockpit and are the only ones who can steer.

Possible rule to blunt consumerism: after you have secured food, shelter, heating/cooling, only buy things that you will do at least three hours of work with.

"History is an art, like the other sciences" Veronica Wedgood.

"Liberty is not the fruit of order alone; it is the fruit of mutual concessions between order and disorder." Don Colacho.  I despair of this ever being widely (enough) understood.

Rank and file Republican voters think everything is a conspiracy, and then vote in such a way as to conspiracies happen.  (Democrats now do it too, but with different conspiracies).

In the age of the printing press,  anonymity was a way to avoid the hectoring of the outside world and achieve authenticity.  In the internet age, anonymity is a way to join in the hectoring and with it the pan-societal effort to make sure no can be authentic anywhere.

Why has all conservatism become a project in personal vanity?  It's the logic of profit that surrounds our culture.  It's impossible for nearly anyone to imagine investing in something that might cost them more than they receive.  Thus the conservatives feel their best return on investment is to set back and proclaim.

Traditionalism in America has nothing to do with tradition.

Related.  "Speech is sharing -- a cooperative art.  You're not sharing, merely egoizing."  Ursula Le Guin.  From The Dispossessed.

The real curse of living in interesting times is watching people try to win iteration after iteration of a negative sum game.

Links and Research
===

I likee.

Always looking for the visually stunning.

Here's a sub-Reddit that aggregates interesting articles better than I do.  I think I am going to stop doing that soon.

Speaking of Reddit, here is a good thread of Weird Collapse thought, one not destined for the kind of aggregation mentioned just above.  

Cal Newport on the dying art of book reading.

I am working on another spiral through Western History for deeper understanding and amusement.  I started at 1455 and am reading each year in Wikipedia.  This will explain why my tid-bits might cluster together by year for a while.  I have no time-frame for how long this project will take.  I also will follow my own inclinations in reading whatever I want

The 1518 Dancing Plague -- maybe mushrooms, maybe mass hysteria.

I read this  short book on Martin Luther.  And it made me think of the nature of the Reformation as a revolution. From the text:

He [Martin Luther] was a revolutionary, but a conservative one.  

. . .

So often a new movement suffers from overenthusiasm. The Reformation was no exception in this respect. Zealots took the usual shortcut from bondage to freedom by way of turmoil instead of restrained orderly procedure. 

In parts of Germany the old ways were thrown off hastily. Organs, paintings, and statues were thrown from the churches, vestments were discarded, bread and wine were both administered to the laity, priests married, nuns took husbands, monastic vows were renounced, various forms of the mass were discontinued, priests and worshipers who persisted in the traditional forms were attacked.

It is interesting to contrast this with the French Revolution, which I recently learned more about in a book by J. F. Bosher.

Looking for a really basic investment strategy?  You could do worse than this.

The Gambler's Edge

Nack Ballard, in all probability the most dominate backgammon player of all time, once in an interview described the time of his life he was first able to support himself through gaming and mentioned the following man:

There was a wonderful German fellow with an unquenchable spirit named Klaus who smoked a constantly pivoting pipe and would sometimes drop a hundred points to me in his lunch hour; that went a long way.

I used to have a hard time understanding what could motivate someone to play someone better than them for significant amounts of money, and often do so no plan to get any better.

Now I realize that people like Klaus are trying to feel alive for those moments.  They are trying to experience what Pirsig refers to Dynamic Quality, as well as the "cutting edge of reality."  I think I part company with Prisig on the semi-theological capitalization, and on the use of “the” in “the cutting edge of reality.”  I think we shouldn’t lose track of the fact that this Quality (last time I’m capitalizing) has multiple edges.  I am not sold on their being one, and only one, thing [1]; rather, I limit myself to the claim that there are spaces beyond our ability to use language.  We know more than we can say.  Also, that is where we feel alive, in a precognitive bliss of play and possibility.

Back to our gambler, the one who is simply donating money to a superior player.  He has a deficiency of feeling alive during the day, and so he wants to do something about it.  He has a socially conditioned pattern that says money has value, so playing for money adds a context for results to have meaning.  The number of positions on a backgammon board is vast, so he can enjoy variety.  Also, he has internalized the rules of the game so he can move the pieces with some fluidity, a feeling that is only heightened because he isn’t slowing himself down with hard calculations or worrying about what he doesn’t know about the game. (In a way, he is trading money for not having to make the vastness of possible moves into a trouble spot). The tactile feeling of the pieces, and the sounds of them clicking on the board, along with the sounds made by the roll of the dice is pleasant.  And it is great to have people around.

Instead of "the cutting edge of reality," I often prefer the term "the cutting edge of creation."  But Klaus the gambler isn't creating, is he?  You can make an argument for our gambler being on the edge of creation, as long as you realize he is not one who is creating.  It can be a joy to watch someone showing mastery of a difficult game.  And our gambler can be seen as paying for a front-row seat [2].

It is interesting how many similarities there are between the gambler’s experience and when I go to a coffeehouses to write.  I get a tactile experience, and even sometimes the sound of my work.  I get to see people in a comforting way.  I am also on the edge of creation/ Dynamic Quality/ whatever you want to call it, because it is a gQtimptan.  The main difference being, of course, that  I am not playing for money stakes.  I have enough to load into my mind to push the event to a high level of gqtimpTAn, about the highest Quality my life can be.  I do not judge the backgammon player who "wasted" his money, or at least I do not judge him as much as I used to.  He just seems like someone trying to get something more out of life, something that are current systems are not built around providing.  There is something noble about losing graciously, repeatedly.  I admire this man, with some distance . . .  I love bad decisions.  I could watch them all day.

===

[1] I am not convinced by Pirsig's reasoning here in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

What Phaedrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things.  There is no contradiction.  There never really can be between the core terms of monistic philosophies.  The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece.  If it's not, you've got two (386). 

 Interestingly enough, earlier in the book, there is another quote calling this into question.

. . . I don't know whether Phaedrus' claim that Quality is the Tao is true.  I don't know of any way of testing it for truth, since all he did was simply compare his understanding of one mystic entity with another.  He certainly thought they were the same, but he may not have completely understood what Quality was.  Or, more likely, he way not have understood the Tao.  (256). 

I feel like it might be an egregious spoiler to explain what happened to Phaedrus that might explain the change.  As is usual, it is best to go the source and read it for yourself.  (But who has he time?) 


[2]  This will be a long aside about tennis. . .

Damn, it was a joy to watch Roger Federer play. He forced his opponents to scramble across the court, grunting and straining while it often seemed like he barely moved.  He took the fewest steps possible, never appearing to hit  all that hard.  I am glad that my grandparents were fans of tennis, so I got to see this type of greatness, a  beauty of wei wu wei, or action through non-action.  Wei wu wei is probably easier to understand as actions that are so efficient they barely show up to normal, untrained human perception.  That was how Roger Federer played tennis.  I’d be remiss to not point out the counter example of Rafa Nadal.  He looked like a wild man on the court, with dust flying everywhere and maximum power on virtually every play.  The fact that still style worked best on clay courts, especially early in his career, added to the scene of dirt and destruction.  He even expended energy between sets, with a whole series of nervous tics before nearly every point, power just leaking out of his muscly frame.  It certainly wasn’t wei wu wei, but to tell the truth, even if inconvenient to my project of endorsing daoist aesthetics, it was stunning to watch as well.  First, there was a certain transitive property: Federer had beauty through mastery of a game, and Nadal could master Federer, ergo. . . Secondly, I must confess a certain lifelong pleasure in what others call "winning ugly."  I’m not sure other people would agree that Nadal won ugly; after all, tennis is an individual sport and he was personally charismatic, but when you think about his style of play, it had a lot in common with what is called “winning ugly” in the context of team sports: a focus on playing defense so well that you eventually grind down your opponent's flow, allowing you, eventually, to get the scores you need from their mistakes.  Wear down the body, and the flow will fall.  Also, it is an appreciation of austere beauty, in that a defensive game can give you a clear focus that removes so much possible clutter.

But in the final analysis, having Nadal and Federer together in the same era made for a perfect yin yang.

Where the Author Introduces a Deliberately Odd Term

Many of the best works on daoism don't even mention the word "dao."  This makes perfect sense.  After all, the daodeing, though it is a book that uses the word dao still begins with the warning

Dao called Dao is not the eternal Dao
Names that can be named are not eternal names.

One book that is long on daoism, but short on using the word is The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. After the opening pages of the book, which read as mysticism [1], Alexander proceeds in pages 29 to 40 to prove the need for the mystical language by giving a demonstration of the inadequacy of language to describe what makes spaces wonderful to be in and around.  To begin with, he tries to use the dichotomy of alive/lifeless:

Things which are living may be lifeless; nonliving things may be alive.  A man who is walking and talking can be alive; or he can be lifeless.  Beethoven's last quartets are alive; so are the waves at the ocean shore; so is a candle flame; a tiger may be more alive, because more in tune with its own inner forces, than a man (pg 29).

But alive is just a metaphor, and that leaves the word too imprecise.

The metaphor makes us believe that we have found a word to grasp the quality without a name.  But we can only use the word to name the quality, when we already understand the quality (pg 30).

So, he tries the word "whole," but then finds that whole implies enclosure.  The word is more cramped than the quality (Quality?)

So, he tries "comfortable."  But you can become so comfortable that you become lifeless, too sheltered.

So, he tries "free." But finds that could be "too theatrical: a pose, a form, a manner" (pg 34).  So-called "free style" art is often not whole, and certainly rarely comfortable.

So . . . "a word which helps restore the balance is the word exact" (pg 34).  That's an odd turn for mysticism, no? Well, so be it.  Alexander uses the example of trying to add a table to a landscape so that blackbirds would made us of it. To make it work, you need to make it exact in ways that work for the birds.  If you keep observing and adjusting, you'll probably get there.

Of course "exact" is loaded down with too much linguistic baggage as well -- too mechanical, cold, cookie-cutter.

So. . . egoless?  But we're not trying to efface the creator. The creator has forces that need to be balanced harmoniously as well.

So . . . eternal?  No.

It hints at a religious quality.  The hint is accurate.  And yet . . . It is not mysterious.  It is above all ordinary.  What makes it eternal is its ordinariness.  The word "eternal" cannot capture that (pg 39).

As a person who had made a study of daoism/quietism for some time before reading these passages --  which, I had read after A Pattern Language -- and thought I had a good grasp on the subject, I was greatly surprised and then moved by this argument that the dao is unnameble because it is more precise than any word we can use [2]. I felt my mind put up resistance to the idea, but quickly realized it was the truth [3].

ii

Our words are what traps us.  But since we are still trapped using words, ie there is no outer text, what are we to do?  We still must use words, but provide the feedback when someone tries to use words as a replacement for reality more precise than the word used.  This bears repeating:

Dao called Dao is not the eternal Dao
Names that can be named are not eternal names. 

To help the process along, I think there is a lot to be gained from using a word outside of one's language.  It gives a connotation of the exotic which can help you from too quickly settling upon one meaning and then making the map-replaces-territory mistake.

It is like yoga instructors using the word "namaste" at the end of a session, rather than "farewell."  Even if you put quite a bit of spiritual lilt into your voice when use that old timey English word, and, it just is not the same.  With that said, this use particular use of namaste shows how quickly a word can be encapsulated in bullshit.

The word dao/tao, as well as the Chinese symbols, really just means way, or path.  They are everyday words, and their spiritual use exist both is so-called daoism as well as Confucianism [4].  This allows for some great confusion as these two schools say very different things about the nature of hierarchy, ritual, and the like [5].

Instead of a word from another language, I propose a deliberately odd term, however, to try to keep the conceptual space in free play:

GQTIMPTAN!

Which comes from the acronym of a (others would say "the" or "The"; I still content a) Good Quality That Is More Precise Than any Name.

Also, to keep the play going, keep shifting around which letters are capitalized

GqTIMptan, gqtimPTan

. . . and so on. The idea is to always leave it something weird.

Perhaps this will be a worthy contribution to a cluster of ideas I cherish so well.


===

[1] For example

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness.  This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. pg ix.

The dao meets architecture and city planning.

[2] See Sarah Perry for a discussion of Alexander's sense of objectivism. One, two, three

[3] My first understanding of dao all had to do with pace. I noticed the beauty in those who take their time.  I saw it in my grandparents, and I saw it the unfolding of nature over a season.  I now realize that one takes ones time to make sure their is precision where it matters.  A system needs slack.

[4] See Slingerland's Trying Not to Try for a great discussion of this.  The whole book is the discussion.

[5] As an example of this confusion:

It is melancholy, and slightly disturbing, to realize that these passive, mystical doctrines, expressed with such beauty and vigor, helped set in motion a system of despotism that lasted almost unchanged for 2,000 years.

To attribute this all to daoism with no mention of Confucianism and its fundamentally conservative project is a mistake.

To my Favorite Cat

It was a moment where you leaned in and I pet your head gently, the way that you like -- not the rough play (roughness I keep at appropriate level for your 8.5 pound frame) which I sometimes desire and you had early on learned to accept.  Oh, hell, maybe you like both, each in there own time.  Perhaps I should not forever reproach myself.

. . . I had pet your head gently, the way you like -- with all the qualifications above noted --  and I asked you out loud, putting well-practiced lilt into my voice, "where does the grace and beauty inside of you come from?"

And immediately I understood your beauty and grace is not inside of you --that I had been over this again and again thinking about the Timeless Way, but clearly not applied it here, and had not made it fully a habit of thought. Rather, it is how you interact with the  materiality around you, in you, through you -- whatever fabric of reality with which you have to play (when you are rested and in a good mood; I have seen you with bags under your eyes, jaded to all this damn materiality, self-consequence and noise.  Oh George the cat, you and I get each other). 

A reminder that what is good is nothing permanent, but an inter-play, and NOT strictly speaking inner-play, as I now see, on a deeper level.

Bradbury and the Great Saving

Part I began as a tweet storm responding to some folly.  It is lightly edited.

==

Part I

==

The folly as prompt:

But avoid, if at all possible, reading Fahrenheit 451. . .  That's [high school] about the right stage of emotional maturity for enjoying it. Reread it recently and was mortified.  

My reply:

There should be books for different phases on one's life.  If you're going to read a book out of phase, then you have to adjust how you read, and provide that caveat -- not tell people to avoid reading if at all possible.

Fahrenheit 451 is one of the best books to give someone young at heart to show them that there are things worth saving, and that a society unaware of this can run amok.

Though the long speeches are clunky (ironic in a book with so much other prose experimentation) they provide tools to figure out what quality is.

Don't just look in books, it says, look in older art (it cites old phonographs and motion pictures, but the context of a society that has wiped up other art), old friends, in Nature, and yourself. . .

It is a book written by a man who grew up in small-town America, who would never own a car, writing at the beginning of the television -- when he wrote the short stories the book would grow out of, around 10% of US families had TV, by the time of the book, 65% did.

He looked at these rapid changes with his own eyes, not with the symbols and slogans of Progress, and saw that car culture and TV were things to be wary of, if not feared --things that would get in the way of the Great Saving which is each generation's duty.

These are just fine messages for the young, young at heart, or someone able to read in the romantic mode, a mode which requires a suspension of jaded filters (and few have more jaded filters than me. . . I can only suspend them, myself, when I read authors who gush).

For the older set -- or young people able to read in an older mode -- there is still Ivan Illich (the Catholic social critic, though the Tolstoy book of similar name will do some good), Postman, Gatto, Chesterton, Christopher Alexander, James C Scott.

But let the young have their books.

(And don't you dare make a comment about the length of this least you expose yourself completely as the philistine I already suspect you are).

==

Part II

==

Conservatism isn't really an ideology, it is an emotional stance.  This in itself is not a criticism -- it is perfectly fine to have some attachments to what is good and beautiful.  First, however, we should strive to follow Aristotle's idea of being angry in proportion to the offence.  Instead, American conservatives are well trained to seek out their hit of Two Minutes Hate daily, at least.  Though they've now been joined by Democrats on Twitter, that doesn't make either side one bit less unhinged.  Secondly, we should first figure out what is good and beautiful.  In other words, the principled conservative needs to carefully figure out what he or she is trying to conserve.

Bradbury was trying to conserve the small town Midwest of the 1920s.  Features of what he was aiming for included extended families who frequently see each other, people of different economic means living in close proximity, walkablity in general, and wild areas to explore.

Contrast this with those who wanted to Make America Great Again in 2016.  They were by and large trying to recreate the 1950s.  But it was the 1950s that Bradbury was writing against!  The 50s was the destruction of community values to feed economic growth.

I want to emphasis this fact: you can't conserve disruption.  You cannot do so because eventually all sources of value are totally pilfered.  This leaves the right wing fantasy  --  enacting a restoration to times of value destruction -- a completely absurd project.  There are many men who want to be the head of a nuclear family, but not the key wage earner for an extended family, where grandparents move in for old age, sharing opinions on child-rearing and other issues.  Those men wouldn't want to be co-equal owners of a family enterprise with brothers and cousins.  They wouldn't want to have their social life organized around visiting that family, sitting on porches or playing dominoes; instead, they would rather watch their shows and purchase status symbols to show off to people they only superficial know.

There is a nostalgia for the heady days when there were decades of additional exploitation and using up ahead, when everything unhurried and pure could still be thrown into the fires that feed GDP.  These people don't miss the old ways; if they did, they could start practicing them.  They miss what they could get from burning those things up for profits.

I think it is appropriate to give Bradbury the last word, from his masterpiece:

Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches. 

===

Another similar conversation on similar themes was held here.