What is postmodernism, and has it helped or hurt philosophy, poetry, culture, literature, and society?
jollyro...@yahoo.com
culture, literature, and society?
http://booksliterature.com/showthread.php?p=225#post225
http://classicalpoetryforums.com/showthread.php?p=116#post116
jollyro...@yahoo.com
etc.
Immortalist
> The postmodernists would argue that it has helped philosophy, careers,
> etc.
...Art is in our nature-in the blood and in the bone, as people used to
say; in the brain and in the genes, as we might say today. He [Pinker]
corrects Virginia Woolf's jocular remark that human nature (actually,
she wrote "human character") changed in 1910 by explaining that
"Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the
tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate
were cast aside." Taking cues from Frederick Turner regarding
preferences built into our natures over millions of years, Pinker
accuses modernism and postmodernism of being "based on a false theory
of human psychology, the Blank Slate."
The Blank Slate:
The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0142003344/
...They "cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago:
that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors
and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a
learned social construction," which, needless to say, modernism and
postmodernism have tried to shake up and disorient. But the visual
system of the brain is hardly so passive: it irresistibly organizes
sense data "into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional
objects. We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to
pure sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them
when to release their digestive enzymes." Beyond this, the visual
system "colors our visual experience with universal emotions and
aesthetic pleasures," so that people prefer savannah landscapes,
beautiful faces, consonant sounds, narrative fiction, and so on. The
attempts by modernist writers and artists to "make it new," to cut the
connections between biologically sanctioned forms and aesthetic
response, have been only a partial success, as the failure of serial
music has demonstrated. Piss Christ and Tilted Arc, to name two
against-the-grain visual artifacts that come to mind, did not enchant
their viewers, however self-satisfied their creators seem to have been.
Although Pinker enthusiastically commends a wide range of modernism's
products, he is not happy with its disdain of "beauty" and its desire
to frustrate our in-built nostalgia for the mud from which we spring.
Moreover, the need to succeed in a market-driven society has encouraged
artists to push things very far for their shock, media, and commercial
values. Pinker has a warm spot for the primal directness of "middlebrow
realistic fiction" because, as he believes, there is no necessary
connection between the pretensions of elite high art and moral
enlightenment. Quoting George Steiner to the effect that the Nazis
could listen to Schubert in the morning and gas Jews in the afternoon,
he is less impressed with the ethical claims of radical artists than
with the unconscious psychobiological nourishment provided by more or
less archetypical art forms. "The dominant theories of elite art and
criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of
human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The
other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship."
I can already hear voices attacking Pinker as a Philistine, but I
believe they would be wrong. Pinker and E. O. Wilson are virtuoso
science thinkers who have mastered the basics of contemporary
humanistic culture. To accuse them of not speaking with the more subtle
and complex voices of critics and theoreticians from inside the
humanities would be unfair-they aren't insiders. They speak as
super-intelligent polymath outsiders, and they do a pretty good job of
it. As Paul Gross and Norman Levitt kept telling us in Higher
Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science,6
humanists in general are totally ignorant about the sciences, and their
facile references to Einstein and Heisenberg make scientists laugh.
Pinker and Wilson do a much more impressive job with the humanities
than any humanist I know has been able to do with the sciences. They
practice the consilience they recommend to others. While valuing their
insights, we don't have to accept their aesthetic judgments as the last
word, since the matter of "beauty" in the arts is complex. We know that
late Beethoven, late Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Picasso, some of James
Joyce and T. S. Eliot, etc., were at first regarded as "ugly" and now
are so naturalized as to present few problems. What hasn't been
assimilated-Finnegans Wake, Moses und Aron-may be the sort of artifacts
that affirm Pinker's judgment.
As he concludes his overview, Pinker remarks: "Within the academy, a
growing number of mavericks are looking to evolutionary psychology and
cognitive science in an effort to reestablish human nature at the
center of any understanding of the arts." It is unnecessary to
reproduce his list of luminaries here because I will turn to several of
them in the second part of this account.
The New Darwinism in the Humanities Part I: From Plato to Pinker
http://www.hudsonreview.com/frÂommSpSu03.html
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/media_reviews/2003_10_03_cosmetica.html
----------------------------
[1] - Postmodern scholars reject the very idea of a fixed and knowable
reality.
[2] - New theories about matter and energy did still more damage to the
Enlightenment metanarrative.
[3] - By the early years of the twentieth century, however, the
orthodox view of physical phenomena was giving way to an entirely new
conception.
[4] - The atom is not a thing, in the conventional material sense, but
rather a set of forces operating in relationship to one another.
[5] - Gone forever is the quantitative notion of hard substances
existing within a "static framework of spatial relations."
[6] - What then of property and [subjects and objects]?
[7] - The world, according to the postmodernists, is a human construct.
We create it, say the semioticians, by the -stories- we concoct to
explain it and by the way we choose to live in it.
[8] - "I am I and my circumstances." there are as many realities as
there are points of view.
[9] - Performances become as important as, or even more important than,
facts and figures.
[10] - History is less a reference for understanding the past and
projecting ourselves into the future and more loose story fragments
that can be recycled and made part of contemporary social scripts.
[11] - Postmodern culture shortens the individual and collective
temporal horizon to the immediate moment. Traditions and legacies
become fading interests. What counts is "now,"
[12] - Playfulness and pleasure seeking are everywhere.
[13] - Postmodern sociology stresses pluralism and ambivalence and
preaches toleration for the many different stories that make up the
human experience.
[14] - Performance reigns and commercial access to [sold] cultural
experiences becomes the goal of human activity, the postmodern era is
softer, lighter, and bound up with feelings and attitudes.
[15] - Jean Baudrillard, "TV is the world."
-------------------------------------
What makes the Postmodern Age so very different from the Modern Age?
The simple but complex answer is to be found in the fact that the
Postmodern Age is bound up in a new stage of capitalism based on
[commodifing] time, culture, and lived experience, whereas the former
age represents an earlier stage of capitalism grounded in commodifying
land and resources, contracting human labor, manufacturing goods, and
producing basic services.
[1] - Postmodern scholars reject the very idea of a fixed and knowable
reality.
The first chink in the Enlightenment armor occurred in the twentieth
century, when German scientist Werner Heisenberg introduced the idea of
indeterminacy into the scientific debate.
According to Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, the notion of a
detached, impartial observer-the core assumption of Bacon's scientific
method-recording nature's secrets in an objective fashion is an
impossibility. The sheer act of making observations brings the observer
into direct participation with the object of his or her Inquiry,
therefore biasing the results. Heisenberg demonstrated that everything
we do-even our observations-effects outcomes. Far from being detached,
every human being is both player and participant, always affecting and
being affected, by the world we attempt to manipulate and influence.
After Heisenberg, it was difficult to continue to hold to the Baconian
idea that the world is made up solely of knowing subjects acting on
passive objects. Newton's notion of autonomous agents careening through
the universe became equally suspect. If even the act of observation
brings the observer into participation with the things he or she
observes, then autonomy is more fiction than reality.
[2] - New theories about matter and energy did still more damage to the
Enlightenment metanarrative.
Recall, classical physics defines matter as impenetrable physical
substances. Newton's laws are based on the proposition that two
particles can't possibly occupy the same place at the same time because
each is a discrete physical entity that takes up a certain amount of
space.
[3] - By the early years of the twentieth century, however, the
orthodox view of physical phenomena was giving way to an entirely new
conception.
As the physicists began to probe deeper into the world of atoms, they
began to realize that their earlier ideas about solid matter existing
in a fixed space were naive. What we call hard physical objects, said
the physicists, are really just patterns of energy. The seeming
physicality of things-their fixity and beingness-is merely an
approximate notion.
[4] - the atom is not a thing, in the conventional material sense, but
rather a set of forces operating in relationship to one another.
Much to their surprise, physicists found that an atom is anything but
still. In fact, it became apparent that the atom is not a thing, in the
conventional material sense, but rather a set of forces operating in
relationship to one another. Relationships, however, cannot exist
independent of time. As the late historian and philosopher Robin G.
Collingwood of Oxford University has pointed out, relationships can
exist only in "a tract of time long enough for the rhythm of the
movement to establish itself." The Nobel Laureate philosopher Henri
Bergson once remarked, "A note of music is nothing at an instant." It
requires notes preceding and following it in time. If each atom, then,
is a set of relationships operating over time, then "at a certain
instant of time the atom does not possess these qualities at all."
Thus the old idea of structure, independent of process, is abandoned.
The new physics contends that it is impossible to separate what
something is from what it does. Nothing is static. Therefore, things no
longer exist independent of time but rather through time.
[5] - Gone forever is the quantitative notion of hard substances
existing within a "static framework of spatial relations."
According to the new physics, matter is a form of energy, and energy is
pure activity. Gone forever is the quantitative notion of hard
substances existing within a "static framework of spatial relations."
Scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead delivered a
devastating blow to the idea of space as the dominant feature of
nature: "The notion of space with its passive, systematic, geometric
relationship is entirely inappropriate ... there is no nature apart
from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal
duration."
[6] - What then of property and [subjects and objects]?
The physicists were beginning to deconstruct the hard physical reality
of the modern world. How does one own a force, a pattern of activity, a
relationship over time? How does one distinguish between what is mine
and thine in a world in which boundaries are a mere social fiction?
It's interesting to note that in cases where persons have lost their
eyesight in early infancy and regained it later in life, the experience
can be traumatic. Because their minds never were fully trained to
distinguish individual objects in isolation, they see the world as a
blur of colors and shades and a kaleidoscope of ever changing patterns.
All is process and movement. Discrete forms with boundaries are not
easily distinguishable, all of which suggests that even our commonsense
perception of bounded objects existing in isolation is a learned
experience and part of our cognitive development.
While most human beings continued to act as if the world was made up of
subjects and objects and solid expropriatable things, the physical
sciences quietly but inexorably established a new philosophical
framework for the rethinking of reality. Today, chaos theory,
catastrophe theory, complexity theory, and the theory of dissipative
structures all reflect the new scientific emphasis on contingency,
indeterminacy, embeddedness, and diversity in the natural world. Where
modern science looked for ultimate truths and fundamental particles,
the new science looks for unexpected possibilities and emerging
patterns. Nature is seen more as a series of continuously creative acts
than an unfolding of reality based on unalterable laws. Nature is full
of surprises at every juncture and creates its own reality as it goes.
[7] - The world, according to the postmodernists, is a human construct.
We create it, say the semioticians, by the stories we concoct to
explain it and by the way we choose to live in it.
Nowhere have the new ideas in physics, chemistry, and mathematics been
more deeply felt than in the humanities. If there is no fixed and
knowable reality but only the individual realities we create by the way
each of us participates in and experiences the world around us, then
the idea of an overarching metanarrative-an all-encompassing view of
reality- must not exist. The world, according to the postmodernists, is
a human construct. We create it, say the semioticians, by the stories
we concoct to explain it and by the way we choose to live in it. This
new world is not objective but rather contingent, not made up of truths
but rather of options and scenarios. It is a world created by language
and held together by metaphors and agreed-upon shared meanings, all of
which can and do change with the passage of time. Reality, it seems, is
not something bequeathed to us but rather something we create, whole
cloth, by communicating it into existence.
[8] - "I am I and my circumstances." there are as many realities as
there are points of view.
The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once remarked that there
are as many realities as there are points of view. His theory of
per-spectivism challenged the modern notion of a simple, knowable,
objective reality with the idea of multiple realities, each
representing the unique life story of every human being that lives on
earth. He summed up the new postmodern way of thinking about reality by
positing the dictum "I am I and my circumstances." Even science, argue
the postmodernists, is an elaborately constructed set of texts or
stories whose authority rests ultimately on their ability to sway and
convince their readers of their validity. Heisenberg observed that when
it comes to the exploration of science, "what we observe is not nature
itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific
work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the
language we possess." Reality, then, is a function of the language we
use to explain, describe, and interact with it, or, to paraphrase
Hamlet, reality is "words, words, words."
[9] - performances become as important as, or even more important than,
facts and figures
In the postmodern world, stories and performances become as important
as, or even more important than, facts and figures. The new era revels
in semiotics-the study of signs and signifiers-and is as concerned with
the laws of grammar and semantics as the modern era was with the laws
of physics. The scientific preoccupation with truth becomes less
interesting to scholars than the personal and collective quest to find
meaning. Language is the key to exploring meaning because it is the
vehicle we use to communicate our thoughts and feelings to one another.
Language, then, says psychologist William Bergquist, "is itself the
primary reality in our daily life experiences" in a postmodern world.
[10] - History is less a reference for understanding the past and
projecting ourselves into the future and more loose story fragments
that can be recycled and made part of contemporary social scripts.
If people of the modern world searched for purpose, those of the
postmodern world seek playfulness. Order of any kind is considered
restraining, even stifling. Creative anarchy, on the other hand, is
tolerated, even pursued. Spontaneity is the only real order of the day.
Everything is less serious in the postmodern environment. Irony,
paradox, and skepticism are rampant. There is no great concern with
making history but only making up interesting stories to live by.
Because there is no overarching historical frame governing either
nature or society, interest in history, per se, wanes. History is less
a reference for understanding the past and projecting ourselves into
the future and more loose story fragments that can be recycled and made
part of contemporary social scripts.
[11] - Postmodern culture shortens the individual and collective
temporal horizon to the immediate moment. Traditions and legacies
become fading interests. What counts is "now,"
The fast pace of a hyper-real, nanosecond culture shortens the
individual and collective temporal horizon to the immediate moment.
Traditions and legacies become fading interests. What counts is "now,"
and what's important is being able to feel and experience the moment.
Climax and catharsis subsume efficiency and productivity in both
personal and social life. It is a world full of spectacles and
entertainments and highly sophisticated performances acted out on
elaborate stages. In this new era, the "reality principle," which
governed human conduct from the Protestant Reformation through the
industrial revolution, has been dethroned, or, more appropriately,
abandoned. The "pleasure principle" reigns.
[12] - Playfulness and pleasure seeking are everywhere.
Take, for example, architecture. In contrast to the seriousness of
modern architecture, with its emphasis on regularity and functionality,
postmodern architects stress irony and amusement. Postmodern buildings
are often collages of historic styles drawn together to shock,
titillate, and entertain. Classic Greco-Roman columns and cornices
might be juxtaposed with neo-Baroque bric-a-brac. The facade of an old
nineteenth-century brownstone building might be saved and used for a
space-age-looking structure. A Rube Goldberg-type contraption might
adorn an atrium, while trompe l'oeil art on a nearby lobby wall creates
a three-dimensional representation of a French village. Architectural
orthodoxy has given way to iconoclasm and an anything-goes attitude as
long as the result is likely to capture attention and be the subject of
conversation and debate.
[13] - Postmodern sociology stresses pluralism and ambivalence and
preaches toleration for the many different stories that make up the
human experience.
In the social sciences, postmodern scholars say that the modern effort
to create a unified vision of human behavior has led only to ideologies
of classism, racism, and colonialism. Postmodern sociology stresses
pluralism and ambivalence and preaches toleration for the many
different stories that make up the human experience. There is no one
ideal social regime to which to aspire but rather a multitude of
cultural experiments, each equally valid. The idea of inescapable
linear progress toward an agreed-upon future Utopian ideal is eschewed.
The postmodernists celebrate the diversity of local experiences that
together make up an ecology of human existence.
The new era is ambiguous and diverse, entertaining and humorous,
tolerant and chaotic. It is eclectic and highly irreverent. Ideology,
unalterable truths, and ironclad laws are cast aside to make room for
performances of all kinds.
[14] - performance reigns and commercial access to [sold] cultural
experiences becomes the goal of human activity, the postmodern era is
softer, lighter, and bound up with feelings and attitudes.
The Postmodern Age, then, is punctuated by playfulness, while the
Modern Age was characterized by industriousness. In a regime built
around work, production is the operational paradigm and property
represents the fruits of human labor. In a world orchestrated around
play, performance reigns and commercial access to cultural experiences
becomes the goal of human activity. Making things and exchanging and
accumulating property become ancillary in the Age of Access to
scripting scenarios, telling stories, and acting out fantasies.
Gone are the hard edges of an age dedicated to harnessing and
transforming physical resources. The postmodern era is softer, lighter,
and bound up with feelings and attitudes. It is a world turned upside
down. The conscious mind of rational and analytical thought becomes
suspect, while the unconscious mind of erotic desires, illusions, and
dream-states comes to the fore and becomes, in effect, reality, or,
more appropriate, hyper-reality. The underworld of fantasy is glorified
and made manifest.
[15] - Jean Baudrillard, "TV is the world."
Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, and other postmodern scholars
credit this historic turnaround-this triumph of the unconscious-to the
vast changes in communications technologies and commerce that have made
the whole world a stage and all experience a simulation. A French
postmodernist once remarked that if a child grows up spending most of
his or her waking hours in front of a screen, peering deep inside a
virtual reality, after a while it is no longer virtual. It is their
reality. Baudrillard says that TV, for example, is no longer a
surrogate for reality. TV no longer interprets or dramatizes the world.
"TV is the world."
ADAPTED FROM: The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism,
Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience: by Jeremy Rifkin
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obiÂdos/ASIN/1585420824/
http://www.foet.org/JeremyRifkÂin.htm
tg
as you don't answer, right?
-tg
Immortalist
...Art is in our nature-in the blood and in the bone, as people used to
Captain Ranger McCoy
Einstein loved both Shakespeare and the Bible.
Captain Ranger McCoy
Postmodernism is the corruption of democracy, just as deconstruction is
the violence of the weak-both cultural movements owe their popularity
to their ability to empower anyone harboring intellectual or artistic
ambitions overshadowing their talents. Postmodern culture is like an
internet pyramid scheme, wherein cultural creations possessing no
inherent worth are given vast valuations by the insider critics and
cliques who subsist upon and profit from the ephemeral hype, which is
often tax, tuition, and smut subsidized. But eventually all true art,
like all true companies, must create real and lasting benefits for the
public, or fade away, like communism. "One cannot pray a lie," noted
Huckleberry Finn, but without faith in God's Invisible Hand,
postmodernists believe that it's possible, as long as the requisite
mob is assembled and promised a cut. And while the insiders benefit in
the short-term when worthless companies, fallacious systems of
government, and meaningless art are hyped and sold to a duped public,
the public is oft left holding the bag, with their investments
diminished, their classical religions tarnished, their armies
demoralized, the sacred institution of marriage defiled, and the
curriculums of their children's schools gutted.
When the higher ideals and fundamental precepts are forsaken, the
entire democratic ship of state may drift along happily through the
fog, navigating by polls reminiscent of the one given by Pontius
Pilate, not aware of the nature nor consequences of the errant
direction. And when a few in the rising generation begin to seek the
fixed stars above, which they've read about in antiquity's forsaken
myths and felt deep within their souls, they will be branded crazy. And
when the classical rebels see the stars through the breaking fog, and
seek to navigate a straighter course by the Permanent Things, they will
encounter violent opposition from the postmodern culture czars who
benefit from the lack of higher standards, who prefer their arbitrary
will to the rule of Law in cultural entities ranging from politics, to
architecture, to education, to poetry. The relativistic oligarchy shall
view the rising poets' loyalty to God as insolent rebellion, and the
postmodern media shall be commanded to destroy them. And on that day,
the postmodern critics' souls shall be tested, as they choose to be
loyal to tyrants or Truths greater than themselves, as they choose to
remain upon postmodern liberalism's sinking ship or sign aboard a
fighting frigate bound for eternity.
One could spend several volumes chronicling the nature of
postmodernism's adherents and their predilection for bureaucracy, and
the dark character of their political, cultural, and literary ponzi
schemes, but that is not jollyroger.com's destination. We all know
what the fog looks like-too many know nothing else-and the nobler
and more pertinent task becomes taking us beyond it. To criticize
nihilism is to exalt it to undeserved heights, and rather than studying
the ephemeral, poets would be wise to devoted themselves to penning the
eternal.
Whether it's inevitable as fate or it hinges upon perseverance and
free will, we do not know, but jollyroger.com must gain a popular
culture worthy of the Great Books' context. And the only way to do
that is to navigate by the same timeless beacon that yesterday's
poets navigated by-honesty's courage.
The contemporary poet's task is not only to pen the eternal verities
in the era's language, but it is also to resurrect the context in
which those timeless truths may freely navigate and gain the home ports
of the children's souls. And that is where the WWW has played an
invaluable role, for it has allowed us to establish a universe
perpendicular to the contemporary popular culture-a universe wherein
words mean things and the classical context thrives, but which also
intersects with the popular culture. For Great Books growing dusty upon
shelves are of little use, and the classical sentiments must be
continually performed in the living language. While the majority of
contemporary editors, agents, critics and literary officials yet remain
loyal to the degraded postmodern-MFA mentality and the fleeting
insta-classic literary fashions, the greater spirits of the rising
generation are classical in nature, as children's souls always are.
And by allowing The Jolly Roger to circumvent the literary
middleman's cynical vortex, the WWW has allowed a renaissance to set
sail.
Although all enduring truth must by definition be robust, history has
shown that its messengers have often been castigated and impugned. But
upon these American shores, it has ever been our right, as it has been
our duty, to continually foster and defend the classical context
wherein the foundational documents serve the people, come hell or high
water. The Greats have all agreed upon this-liberty demands eternal
vigilance. The pursuit of smaller government, less taxes, rhyming
poetry, and more freedom is as long and arduous a voyage as it is a
noble one.
As a beacon in history's darker contexts, America was founded as a
haven for truth's messengers, thereby becoming the world's
wellspring for science, religion, and freedom. The Declaration of
Independence and Constitution, which may be found at the end of this
book, were penned in tribute to higher principles superior to all
politics and time. Even though the Founding Fathers believed in the
existence of higher laws, they were humble about their ability to
discern them, and thus they presented us with a Constitution which
could be amended. They had as much faith in their children as they had
in the timeless truths, and thus they bestowed us with the tools to
pursue justice and happiness in a free marketplace of ideas, which they
perceived to be ultimately governed by Nature and Nature's God. The
eloquent words of America's founding documents provide for the civil
structure that protects and promotes the acknowledgement of higher
principles by which natural rights are defined, thereby preserving the
sacred freedom of all individuals who are humble before the higher
ideals. And thus upon these shores the honest have always been promised
the freedom to pursue the exalted American dream.
But when the language is degraded until the poetry no longer rhymes
except in vulgar rap, when sacred customs are honored more in the
breach than in the observance, when words and their meanings part on
their separate ways, when the bottom line is placed above the higher
ideals, when the base bass beats over the melody in the music we listen
to, in the clubs we frequent, and in our hearts and souls; when
innocence is lost before it is known, when cynicism is loaded upon hope
and hope is ballasted with irony, and we're exhorted by tax, tuition,
and smut-subsidized cultural officials to carry this pyramid's load
down the road to serfdom, shall we still be free to dream those greater
dreams? When under this burden America is then cut free from her
religious anchors in the name of secular economic freedom, and women
are sent off to raise the Dow Jones to pay taxes rather than raise
moral children, can America long survive and prosper as the flagship of
free republics, even if all the postmodern pyramid schemes never
collapse? Science and history have suggested otherwise-that where
God's morality is eroded, the eternal Bureaucracy marches forth to
become the stolid regulator of human interaction. When people cease to
govern themselves according to higher principles, they lose the ability
to be guarantors of their own wellness and happiness, and they soon
find themselves subject to a political order determined by other
mortals-the rule of Law gives way to the rule by men.
Where the Word-the sacred vessel of all poetry and politics-was
diminished or deconstructed, bullets and slogans oft became the new
brushes with which humanity painted upon history's canvas. And as the
past is prologue, any optimist of human affairs would be wise to aspire
to the wisdom of those who gave us not the gift of freedom, but the
documents which define and defend the freedom that they perceived as
being a gift from God.
tg
Captain Ranger McCoy wrote:
> Did Nietzsche write this?
>
Did you copy this from The Postmodern Generator?
-tg
j r sherman
>
>
>
>Captain Ranger McCoy wrote:
>> Did Nietzsche write this?
>>
>
>Did you copy this from The Postmodern Generator?
>
>-tg
i think the Postmodern Generator is more coherent.
heh...
love and kisses,
j r sherman
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
"I saw a werewolf drinkin' a pina colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect."
Warren Zevon
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Paul Ilechko
> I don't see how quantum mechanics changes Shakespeare and the Bible.
>
> Einstein loved both Shakespeare and the Bible.
>
Batting .500 makes him a genius
Michael
Taking cues from Frederick Turner regarding preferences built into
our natures over millions of years, Pinker accuses modernism and
postmodernism of being "based on a false theory of human psy-
chology, the Blank Slate."
****************
Really? Is that what the book is about? I've got a copy and I've
read a few pages and I kind of knew that it was an investigation
of an avenue of psychology, but I had no idea that it was a
rejection of postmodernism. I have a hard time imaging it as
a rejection of modernism, too. That goes back to the Enlight-
enment, doesn't it? That's a rejection of almost all thought
encompassing the last 400 years, isn't it?
Michael
smw
Michael wrote:
I imagine he means "modernism"/"modernist" as a movement in the arts, as
opposed to modernity/modern.
But the quotes sounded rather stunningly silly.
Lewis Mammel
Captain Ranger McCoy wrote:
>
> I don't see how quantum mechanics changes Shakespeare and the Bible.
>
> Einstein loved both Shakespeare and the Bible.
She likes Shakespeare, but she doesn't like Einstein.
She likes the Bible, but she doesn't like Quantum Mechanics.
She likes coffee, but she doesn't like tea.
Lewis Mammel
jollyro...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> What is postmodernism, and has it helped or hurt philosophy, poetry,
> culture, literature, and society?
Postmodernism is a boon sent from God, with untold benefits for
philosophy, culture, the economy, and society in general, yet
to be realized.
Lewis Mammel
Immortalist wrote:
> As he concludes his overview, Pinker remarks: "Within the academy, a
> growing number of mavericks are looking to evolutionary psychology and
> cognitive science in an effort to reestablish human nature at the
> center of any understanding of the arts." It is unnecessary to
> reproduce his list of luminaries here because I will turn to several of
> them in the second part of this account.
"If you don't like the weather in New England, wait a minute." - Mark Twain
jollyro...@yahoo.com
Ghosts on the water, whispers on the wind,
They said the dream was gone, gone up in smoke,
They could not know what I'd set out to find,
I'd heard them say that God was but a joke.
Ghosts on the water, whispers on the wind,
The wind-whipped driftwood in a snow-white burn,
The phantoms and prophecies in my mind,
Became real as the tide began to turn.
Ghosts on the water, whispers on the wind,
The millenium set, something awoke,
Firelight dancing in the waves, and she grinned,
Sparks spiraled up; the deathless dream I stoked.
The wind whispered while the ghosts and waves spoke,
Postmodernism burned on Ocracoke.
Lewis Mammel
Postmodernism Burned on Ocracoke We're just getting started here. ...
Name: Ocracoke Lighthouse County: Hyde Built: 1823 Operational: Yes Body of Water:
Click below to receive our on-line Ocracoke Newsletter: ... On September 16,
Click below to receive our on-line Ocracoke Newsletter: ... Built in Bath, Maine
Upon retirement from the airlines George and Betty moved to Ocracoke ...
Second station burned down in early 1970. ...
Ocracoke Island was settled in 1706 by Farnigold Green who petitioned the ...
This Lighthouse was struck by lightning and burned in 1818. ...
Postmodernism Burned on Ocracoke Date: Sunday, August 03 @ 11:53:42 ...
Check here regularly to keep up-to-date on what's happening on Ocracoke. ...
Bargains! Bargains! Bargains!
Step right up.
jollyro...@yahoo.com
environment. Polluting air, water, and land is a violation of private
property rights, and too, if the innocent party incurs the costs of
cleanup, they are helping to pay for the polluter's production, which
runs counter to the principles of the free market. And by contaminating
the air which we breathe or water which we drink, the polluter is
charging us far more than mere money, as we end up paying for their
cheaper production with our health. The free-market system must exist
within a moral context, where laws exist not to empower regulative
bureaucracies, but to preserve justice. Prudence marks the often fine
line between these two manifestations of law, and thus the Word, by
which we grasp the subtle and define morality, must be honored,
preserved, and passed along in our educational institutions. A sound
mind and a sound body exist in symbiotic equilibrium, and thus
conserving the Western heritage and the Good Earth are one and the same
occupation.
Those endowed with veneration, those who value tradition, are both
cultural and environmental conservatives. T.S. Eliot said, "I would not
have it thought that I condemn a society for its material ruin, for
that would be to make its material success a sufficient test of its
excellence; I mean only that a wrong attitude towards nature implies,
somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an
inevitable doom. For a long time we have believed in nothing but the
values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life:
it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which
God allows us to live on this planet. . . We have been accustomed to
regard progress as always integral; and have yet to learn that it is
only by an effort and a discipline, greater than society has yet seen
the need of imposing on itself, that material knowledge and power is
gained without the loss of spiritual knowledge and power." And too,
Russel Kirk echoed these sentiments, as he rejected the "practical
conservatism which has degenerated into mere laudation of private
enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special
interests." He "indignantly denie[s] that his conservatism could or
should be identified with businessmen." Kirk condemns, "the modern
spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and
ruthless mining, as evidence of what an age without veneration does to
itself and its successors."
But again, we do not see this as an attack on the free-market system,
but rather it is a criticism of a free market in an amoral context, a
free market sans veneration. A free market system without a sense of
poetry, in which poetry has been banned-- and thus it is not a true
free market system which we criticize, but the shell of one. Rather
than adversely affecting the economy, responsible environmental
regulation can spur new industries, such as those which have been
successful in California. Companies dedicated to environmental
assessment and cleanup, as well as to the development of renewable
energy sources and more energy-efficient devices, have become part of a
multi-billion dollar sector. A future issue of THE JOLLY ROGER will be
devoted to conservative environmentalism, and at www.killdevilhill.com,
Elliot is setting up a web page dedicated to environmental physics.
Carolina sky, cutting edge of rock,
On top of the world, the blue ridge mountains,
She touches me-- soaring right there's a hawk,
Stationary-- on the thermal fountains.
Unpromised promises, understood pledge,
In parallel, silent understanding,
So close that words would only be a wedge,
Always there and yet never demanding.
Shared belief and quiet fascination,
Appreciation of the subtle things,
Curious about an explanation,
Yet knowing without the hawk spreads his wings.
Not what you intend, but how you play it,
True love is never having to say it.
Immortalist
You may have committed the "Appeal to Common Practice!"
The Appeal to Common Practice is a fallacy with the following
structure:
X is a common action.
Therefore X is correct/moral/justified/reasonable, etc.
The basic idea behind the fallacy is that the fact that most people do
X is used as "evidence" to support the action or practice. It is a
fallacy because the mere fact that most people do something does not
make it correct, moral, justified, or reasonable.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-common-practice.html
...also, where does the "rejection" part come in when considering
"relativisms?"
- Post/Modernism is Based on False Theory of Human Psychology, Beauty
is Dirty Word
ONCE WE RECOGNIZE what modernism and postmodernism have done to the
elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall
become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of
human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most
vaunted ability-stripping away pretense-to themselves. And they take
all the fun out of art!
Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
experience is a learned social construction.
Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical
structure of the world. It also colors our visual experience with
universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer
calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as
young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain
one. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and
two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating
narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.
When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate
them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not
take a stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of art
at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with them
and what effect they hope to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of
course, people can be taken in by a clever liar, but they are not
trapped in a false world of words and images and in need of rescue by
postmodernist artists.
Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge
another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for
status, especially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the
psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its
appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the
dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things,
entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance
is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial
turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has
documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation,
and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is
fully exploited. Attention then turns to the style itself, at which
point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this
cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes
from the desire for attention on the part of the artists.
...In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became
desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence
of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records,
magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people
could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a
good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in
the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for
artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good,
at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the
rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by
the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only
a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of
art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and
record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they
had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the
senses. On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and
lightweight...elite art could no longer be appreciated without a
support team of critics and theoreticians.
...Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other
works exist only to illustrate the text...the theory upstaged the
subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself.
Postmodernist scholars...distrust the demand for "linguistic
transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world more
radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market
commodity...
As with so many ideas in social science, the centrality of language is
taken to extremes in deconstructionism, postmodernism, and other
relativist doctrines. The writings of oracles like Jacques Derrida are
studded with such aphorisms as "No escape from language is possible,"
"Text is self-referential," "Language is power," and "There is nothing
outside the text." Similarly, J. Hillis Miller wrote that "language is
not an instrument or tool in man's hands, a submissive means of
thinking. Language rather thinks man and his 'world'... if he will
allow it to do so." The prize for the most extreme statement must go to
Roland Barthes, who declared, "Man does not exist prior to language,
either as a species or as an individual."
The ancestry of these ideas is said to be from linguistics, though most
linguists believe that deconstructionists have gone off the deep end.
The original observation was that many words are defined in part by
their relationship to other words. For example, he is defined by its
contrast with I, you, they, and she, and big makes sense only as the
opposite of little. And if you look up words in a dictionary, they are
defined by other words, which are defined by still other words, until
the circle is completed when you get back to a definition containing
the original word. Therefore, say the deconstructionists, language is a
self-contained system in which words have no necessary connection to
reality. And since language is an arbitrary instrument, not a medium
for communicating thoughts or describing reality, the powerful can use
it to manipulate and oppress others. This leads in turn to an agitation
for linguistic reforms: neologisms like co or na that would serve as
gender-neutral pronouns, a succession of new terms for racial
minorities, and a rejection of standards of clarity in criticism and
scholarship (for if language is no longer a window onto thought but the
very stuff of thought, the metaphor of "clarity" no longer applies).
Like all conspiracy theories, the idea that language is a prisonhouse
denigrates its subject by overestimating its power. Language is the
magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to
another, and we can co-opt it in many ways to help our thoughts along.
But it is not the same as thought, not the only thing that separates
humans from other animals, not the basis of all culture, and not an
inescapable prisonhouse, an obligatory agreement, the limits of our
world, or the determiner of what is imaginable...
Inborn human desires are a nuisance to those with Utopian and
totalitarian visions, which often amount to the same thing. What stands
in the way of most Utopias is not pestilence and drought but human
behavior. So Utopians have to think of ways to control behavior, and
when propaganda doesn't do the trick, more emphatic techniques are
tried. The Marxist Utopians of the twentieth century, as we saw, needed
a tabula rasa free of selfishness and family ties and used totalitarian
measures to scrape the tablets clean or start over with new ones. As
Bertolt Brecht said of the East German government, "If the people did
not do better the government would dismiss the people and elect a new
one." Political philosophers and historians who have recently
"reflected on our ravaged century," such as Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth
Minogue, Robert Conquest, Jonathan Glover, James Scott, and Daniel
Chirot, have pointed to Utopian dreams as a major cause of
twentieth-century nightmares. For that matter, Wordsworth's
revolutionary France, "thrilled with joy" while human nature was "born
again," turned out to be no picnic either.
It's not just behaviorists and Stalinists who forgot that a denial of
human nature may have costs in freedom and happiness. Twentieth-century
Marxism was part of a larger intellectual current that has been called
Authoritarian High Modernism: the conceit that planners could redesign
society from the top down using "scientific" principles. The architect
Le Corbusier, for example, argued that urban planners should not be
fettered by traditions and tastes, since they only perpetuated the
overcrowded chaos of the cities of his day. "We must build places where
mankind will be reborn," he wrote. "Each man will live in an ordered
relation to the whole." In Le Corbusier's Utopia, planners would begin
with a "clean tablecloth" (sound familiar?) and mastermind all
buildings and public spaces to service "human needs." They had a
minimalist conception of those needs: each person was thought to
require a fixed amount of air, heat, light, and space for eating,
sleeping, working, commuting, and a few other activities. It did not
occur to Le Corbusier that intimate gatherings with family and friends
might be a human need, so he proposed large communal dining halls to
replace kitchens. Also missing from his list of needs was the desire to
socialize in small groups in public places, so he planned his cities
around freeways, large buildings, and vast open plazas, with no squares
or crossroads in which people would feel comfortable hanging out to
schmooze. Homes were "machines for living," free of archaic
inefficiencies like gardens and ornamentation, and thus were
efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing projects.
Le Corbusier was frustrated in his aspiration to flatten Paris, Buenos
Aires, and Rio de Janeiro and rebuild them according to his scientific
principles. But in the 1950s he was given carte blanche to design
Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab, and one of his disciples was
given a clean tablecloth for Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Today,
both cities are notorious as uninviting wastelands detested by the
civil servants who live in them. Authoritarian High Modernism also led
to the "urban renewal" projects in many American cities during the
1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises,
and empty windswept plazas...
The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://alumweb.mit.edu/opendoor/200205/pinker.shtml
http://www.meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=pinker&topic=goodwogod
smw
Immortalist wrote:
...
>
> Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
> rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
> tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
> experience is a learned social construction.
May we see a quote from a noted postmodernist asserting this thesis and
the suggested implications?
Immortalist
"The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/pomo.htm
Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments
in critical theory, philosophy, design, architecture, art, literature,
religion, and culture, which are generally characterized as either
emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.
In architecture, art, music and literature, postmodernism is a name for
many stylistic reactions to, and developments from, modernism...
In sociology, postmodernism is described as the result of economic,
cultural, and demographic changes...
As a cultural movement, postmodernism is an aspect of postmodernity,
which is broadly defined as the condition of Western society after
modernity...
In philosophy, where the term is extensively used, it applies to
movements that include post-structuralism, deconstruction,
multiculturalism, gender studies and literary theory, sometimes called
simply "theory". It emerged beginning in the 1950s as a critique of
doctrines such as positivism and emphasizes the importance of power
relationships, personalization and discourse in the "construction" of
truth and world views. In this context it has been used by many
critical theorists to assert that postmodernism is a break with the
artistic and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, which they
characterize as a quest for an ever-grander and more universal system
of aesthetics, ethics, and knowledge. They present postmodernism as a
radical criticism of Western philosophy. Postmodern philosophy draws on
a number of approaches to criticize Western thought, including
historicism, and psychoanalytic theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
Postmodernists clearely assert that all knowledges (scientific as well
common knowledge)are entirely social and ideological products. French
postmodernists and post-structuralists thinkers like Lyotard, Foucault
and Derrida, lay three principles: textualism (none of sort of
discourse can pretend at legitimity, because none of them is neutral,
out of conflicts), constructivism (all social phenomene and all
"scientific fact" are human constructs, in opposition with that could
pretend legitimes authorities), relation power/knowledge (all knowledge
imply a power and the legitimation of a knowledge is not dependent on
its internal content but on ideological content). Now those
propositions are in a symetric opposition with modern ideology. This
modern ideology is defined by postmodernists in a very reductive way.
The modern society is for the main postmodernist sociologist, Zygmunt
Bauman, a sort of society who built on anguish in loss of universal
values - this loss being the consequence of religious and scientific
revolutions.
http://www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo2.archives/pomo01.paper/Faiella01.htm
The Challenge to Truth-Thinking. "There is one thing a professor can be
absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university
believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative."1 Professor
Allan Bloom began his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American
Mind, with these words; and over the following decade relativism became
so ingrained in the so-called "closed American mind" that it warranted
its own epoch-defining cultural label: postmodernism. Postmodernism is
our society's term for the majority's firmly held belief that truth is
not knowable and, therefore, cannot be absolute. Speaking of students
entering the university, Bloom went on to state that, "the relativity
of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the
condition of a free society, or so they see it." Bloom didn't use the
terms "postmodern," "postmodernity" or "postmodernism," but he clearly
saw its effects in the belief systems and lives of his students.
http://www.hispeace.org/html/artic53.htm
Postmodernism:
What is it,
and What is Wrong With It?
by Andreas Saugstad
January 25, 2001
The period in which we now live is often called "postmodernism".
According to Nancy Murphy, author of Anglo-American Postmodernity,
postmodernism in the Anglo-American world started some time around
1950. Others would perhaps say that postmodernism is something which
evolved after 1968. But anyway, in 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard published
a book called The Postmodern Condition. At this point someone had
defined postmodernism, and during the last 20 years the ideas of
postmodernism have been much debated in the Western world.
The Meaning of The Term
"Postmodernism" is not easy to define. The term is used in
philosophy, literature, social sciences and architecture. Different
postmodern thinkers may have different opinions, and people from
different fields may have somewhat different definitions of
"postmodernism". And if there is one thing postmodernists don't
tend to like, it is fixed criteria or dogmatism, so perhaps we should
be careful trying to give a final definition of the term.
But in this article I will focus on postmodernism as used in
philosophy. However, some of the points I emphasize may also be
recognized in popular culture.
"Postmodernism" is of course composed by two parts "post" and
"modern". "Post" is latin for "after", and "modernism"
refers to the modern period. In philosophy the modern period was
started by Descartes (1596-1650) who believed in exact science and
objective knowledge. He believed that there are certain self-evident
principles that may provide a foundation for other types of knowledge.
Descartes was rationalist -he believed in reason, and he thought that
human reason can grasp truths independent of time and place. However,
let us not focus too much on Descartes and the etymology of the term
"postmodern." As I now turn to some characteristics of the
postmodern, you will be able to see how it differs from Descartes, and
not merely go into postmodernism as a historical phenomenon, but
understand it qua philosophy.
Relativism
Postmodernism is associated with relativism. Relativism is the idea
that "anything goes."
It is the position where one has left the belief in absolute truth, and
instead embraced the idea that knowledge is dependent on one's
perspective. While in the Middle Ages, people believed
in God, Nietzsche (1844-1900) argued that "God is dead." For some
reason, many people just accepted this, and thought that we are left
with a contingent immanent reality. There are no eternal fix-points in
life -that's what many postmodern followers of Nietzsche believe.
No Grand Narrative
A narrative is a history - a story. In his book from 1979, Lyotard
emphasized
that in postmodernism one has left the idea of a grand narrative. In
the Enlightenment, one had certain ideas guiding the culture, a unified
project, where knowledge and information were important. In the Middle
Ages, belief in God and the Bible gave society a grand narrative. All
aspects of life could be interpreted from a religious point of view,
and a large number of the population believed in God and Christianity.
But in postmodernism, society is more fragmented. Belief in the One
Truth, or universal criteria, has been substituted by a number of
"small stories," and a diversity of criteria.
I think for instance Europe or USA today is much more pluralist, than
Europe in the Middle Ages.
Social Constructivism
Another idea within postmodernism, is social constructivism. I guess
this idea can appear in different versions. At its most extreme. It
might be something like: 'Reality is created by social reality.'
But the main idea is that there is no objective knowledge or absolute
representation of reality. Many of our concepts and categories are
based on the social reality, and not because we veridically can
represent physical reality. A Norwegian theologian has been led to say
that the distinction between the male and female sex is arbitrary, it
is a social construction. I will soon criticize this position. Some
may even believe that scientific results are constructs -the
philosopher Daniel Dennett told about a person believing the
DNA-biology to be "just another story!"
Other Traits
So now we have emphasized three important traits in postmodernism:
relativism, no universal narrative and social constructivism. There are
other keywords relating to this, like the emphasis on contingency, and
that language shapes our views of reality. Don Cupitt, for instance,
has said that language creates reality. "Reality does not determine
language, language determines reality." This position may be called
linguistic idealism, a radical and quite bizarre idea that language
constructs reality.
What is Wrong With Postmodernism?
Now it is time to evaluate postmodernism and look at some critical
arguments. Is postmodernism an acceptable philosophy? Are there
counter-arguments against these views?
Let me first say that I believe postmodernism represents an important
virtue. This virtue is pluralism. Remember that I said that in
postmodernism one has left the idea of a grand narrative. There are
many histories and ways of looking at reality in contemporary society,
and a diversity of opinions. This can be good. I do not believe that
all the different paradigms and approaches to reality in the global
society today all can be true, and if pluralism leads away from truth
it has a very negative effect. But I do still believe that pluralism
has certain virtues. Interaction between different cultures, and the
tolerance that sometimes is associated with pluralism, can be a
positive force. As Voltaire said, one may totally disagree with another
person, but until death defend his right to hold a different view that
one's own.
But although pluralism is a good thing, certain aspects of pluralism
should, in my opinion, be rejected. Let us look at some
counter-arguments.
Relativism. Is relativism a sustainable thesis? I doubt it. Sometimes
we may come to recognize the relativity of our own views, and we
don't know if we are right in holding our opinions. But this does not
mean that relativism should be accepted. Something is true and
something is false. Let us take medical science as an example:
chemotherapy may cure cancer, while, say, drinking coca cola may not
normally cure cancer. This is true! There was once a Christian
discussing with another student. The young student told the Christian
that there are no moral principles. They were sitting in a student
room, and the Christian took kettle of boiling water and held it over
the student's head. He just stood there with the boiling water over
his head, and then took it away. What an ingenious demonstration of the
fact that there are moral values that all must accept. It would be
wrong to poor that boiling water over the other person. There are
certain absolutes, and we must continue to believe in this.
But the main argument against relativism is that it leads to logical
contradictions. If you try to defend relativism, you try to say
something like " There is no absolute truth". Well, what about that
proposition? Do you deny that this is absolutely true? According to
postmoderism itself, you must, but why then accept it?
No Grand Narrative. As a description of contemporary culture, the point
that there is no grand narrative, is a good one. There is no unified
theory guiding society now. Even though science and technology is
immensely advanced, not everyone believes in science as the key to
understanding all aspects of life. Some for instance prefer religion,
while others don\t care because they are focused on poetry or music. To
live in a pluralist society, can teach you many things. Although I
don't think all cultures and groups possess the same amount of truth,
Its fun to meet people with different opinions, backgrounds, people
from the Middle East, Europe, USA and Latin-America. For instance, I
have a problem with Norwegian girls.
Norwegian girls are supposed to be very pretty, but there is something
about different cultures and multi-culturalism that attracts me.
Learning about different cultures is interesting, and if the
contemporary information flow can lead to this, it is good.
However, there is an important point to notice here. If there is such a
thing as truth, one should wish that as many people as possible will
acknowledge and embrace it. Cultures where science is not accepted,
would perhaps benefit from changing their paradigm. Thus I would like
to say that I think it is important to note that it is possible to
think that some beliefs are better than others and should be accepted
more universally than others. This must not lead to chauvinism, but it
is still something which is important to consider.
Social Constructivism. Social constructivism sometimes leads to
intellectual confusion. When someone argues that the distinction
between male and female is arbitrary, I would simply point to the fact
that female vs male are categories found in nature. Reality is ordered,
and rational use of concepts and categories often has to do with being
able to represent this reality. Such rational categories impose
themselves on the socially establish discourse, not the other way
around. I do believe that the human sex organs were there before
society started to talk about them. Nature does actually precede
culture, not the other way around. While the term "male" is learned
in a community of language-users, the category it refers to exists
prior to our language and social setting.
If think that if social constructivism entered into medical science and
NASA's research, it would confuse the researchers. So the belief that
we don't have a veridical access to external reality may be
dangerous. But still, there might an insight here to notice.
Certain concepts are social constructs, and certain moral codes are
practiced because of conformity. Sometimes we have go beyond our own
"deep culture" and challenge mainstream opinions. In a modified
and sound version, social constructivism, can give us insights, but in
a radical version it should be criticized and rejected as another
irrational social construction!
Conclusion
There are both pros and cons when it comes to postmodernism. But there
are many cons, and it is important not merely to follow trends among
academics or in popular culture. As the Norwegian philosopher Dagfinn
Føllesdal has emphasized, analytical reasoning is vital for democracy.
Analytical skills are important to civilization, although many other
human qualities definitely are needed. Some postmodernists do not seem
to take logical reasoning seriously, and instead of listening to reason
and arguments, they may tend to focus on relativism and constructivism.
As previously mentioned, the philosopher Daniel Dennett gave us a good
illustration of how weird postmodern conclusions can become. A friend
of Dennett attended a conference on literature. The conversation turned
to DNA, and one of the participants said: "Oh, do you still believe
in that story?" To believe that DNA is a social construction or just
another story, can be dangerous. If postmodernists undermine respect
for helpful science and moral principles they are promoting ideas that
are very implausible and should be aggressively rejected.
The ideas that there are no absolute truth and the belief in social
construction, may end in nihilism and a disrespect for that which can
help human civilization make progress.
Postmodernists have given us many ideas which are important, we should
try to understand postmodern thinking and learn what we can from the
postmodern approach.
Still we must always be critical. I realize that my treatment of
postmodernism is somewhat rudimentary and not complete. What I do hope,
however, is that my essay gives you something to think about. My goal
as an essayist is to make the reader think and reflect on the topics.
Reflection is indeed needed in the postmodern pluralist world.
smw
Immortalist wrote:
>
> smw wrote:
>
>>Immortalist wrote:
>>
>>...
>>
>>>Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
>>>rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
>>>tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
>>>experience is a learned social construction.
>>
>>May we see a quote from a noted postmodernist asserting this thesis and
>>the suggested implications?
>
>
> "The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
> arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
> subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
> anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
> science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
> precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
> Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
> ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
> third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
That's singularly unresponsive to my question. I'm rather certain that
not even Pinker would argue that humans aren't subjects.
The rest is equally irrelevant -- could you kindly point me towards a
text by a noteable "postmodernist" who asserts "that the sense organs
present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
construction"? Most of them are rather good Kantians, even if they don't
advertise it...
Tom Bishop
"smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
news:G9_pe.13711$Oq7....@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
>
>
> Immortalist wrote:
>
>>
>> smw wrote:
>>
>>>Immortalist wrote:
>>>
>>>...
>>>
>>>>Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
>>>>rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
>>>>tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
>>>>experience is a learned social construction.
>>>
>>>May we see a quote from a noted postmodernist asserting this thesis and
>>>the suggested implications?
>>
>>
>> "The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
>> arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
>> subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
>> anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
>> science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
>> precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
>> Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
>> ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
>> third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
>
> That's singularly unresponsive to my question. I'm rather certain that not
> even Pinker would argue that humans aren't subjects.
I suppose it might sound silly, and I'm sure it is,
but how can one claim "no absolutes" or "objective truth"
after an even casual observation of mathematics.
What is not absolute about "the octave" and the doubling
of frequency.
What is not absolute about Pi, and the way it transcendentally
calculates circumferences from diameters.
What is not absolute about Phi, and the way it is related to
mathematical formuli that describe numerous mappings.
None of it was an invention of man. The most man could claim
is /discovery/.
When it comes to man, and his ability to perceive/cognate
there are a few, distinct /ways/.
The 2 most obvious are:
- verbally (as in the constant thought stream, words)
- visually (as in a picture, <all-at-once> perception)
Without going into detail, the verbal /thing/ is endless
and will "fill all the books in the world" as brother John sed.
In my psychic training the saying was: "seeing is better"
>
> The rest is equally irrelevant --
Not as input to a randomizing /verbal/ generator.
Although Dale Houstman's poetry also works well.
> could you kindly point me towards a text by a noteable "postmodernist" who
> asserts "that the sense organs present the brain witha tableu of raw
> colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a
> learned social construction"? Most of them are rather good Kantians, even
> if they don't advertise it...
I presented the /ancient rhyzome/ above.
If you believe that, but only after you believe that, I'll tell you
that belief is a totally /verbal/ exercise, and doesn't even happen
in /visual mind/. Belief can only hinder your perception of
reality. (--- "seeing is better")
But there are a lot of books that water other roots.
Tom Bishop
smw
Tom Bishop wrote:
> "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
> news:G9_pe.13711$Oq7....@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
...
>>>
>>>"The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
>>>arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
>>>subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
>>>anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
>>>science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
>>>precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
>>>Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
>>>ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
>>>third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
>>
>>That's singularly unresponsive to my question. I'm rather certain that not
>>even Pinker would argue that humans aren't subjects.
>
>
> I suppose it might sound silly, and I'm sure it is,
> but how can one claim "no absolutes" or "objective truth"
> after an even casual observation of mathematics.
>
> What is not absolute about "the octave" and the doubling
> of frequency.
What do you mean by "absolute"? Are there any postmodernists who claim
octaves don't exist? And in what way _do_ they exist? Are they
experienced by pure objects? Are objects capable of experience?
> What is not absolute about Pi, and the way it transcendentally
> calculates circumferences from diameters.
Again, are there postmodernists who claim Pi is useless for calculating
circumferences? What do you mean by "transcendental" -- condition of
possibility?
> What is not absolute about Phi, and the way it is related to
> mathematical formuli that describe numerous mappings.
>
> None of it was an invention of man. The most man could claim
> is /discovery/.
Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
...
Tom Bishop
>
>
> Tom Bishop wrote:
>
>> "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
>> news:G9_pe.13711$Oq7....@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
> ...
>>>>
>>>>"The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
>>>>arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
>>>>subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
>>>>anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
>>>>science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
>>>>precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
>>>>Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
>>>>ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
>>>>third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
>>>
>>>That's singularly unresponsive to my question. I'm rather certain that
>>>not even Pinker would argue that humans aren't subjects.
>>
>>
>> I suppose it might sound silly, and I'm sure it is,
>> but how can one claim "no absolutes" or "objective truth"
>> after an even casual observation of mathematics.
>>
>> What is not absolute about "the octave" and the doubling
>> of frequency.
>
> What do you mean by "absolute"? Are there any postmodernists who claim
> octaves don't exist? And in what way _do_ they exist? Are they experienced
> by pure objects? Are objects capable of experience?
You ask many /verbal/ questions, and clearly didn't /see/
my distinction.
>
>> What is not absolute about Pi, and the way it transcendentally
>> calculates circumferences from diameters.
>
> Again, are there postmodernists who claim Pi is useless for calculating
> circumferences? What do you mean by "transcendental" -- condition of
> possibility?
Transcendental refers to the nature of the number.
Transcendental numbers have an unending and non-repeating
stream of fractional digits. Pi is roughly: 3.14159265....
But the exact Pi is /transcendental/ in that it is impossible to
enumerate it exactly, in any medium, since it is composed of
an infinite number of fractional digits without repeating pattern.
This wasn't invented by man, but rather discovered when he /saw/
the relationship between the circumference and the diameter.
See??? Pi is a /visual/.
>
>> What is not absolute about Phi, and the way it is related to
>> mathematical formuli that describe numerous mappings.
>>
>> None of it was an invention of man. The most man could claim
>> is /discovery/.
>
> Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in that
> way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
Buttals and rebuttals would fill all the books in the world.
For Pi, take a basic geometry class.
Tom Bishop
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> smw wrote:
> > Immortalist wrote:
> >
> > ...
> > >
> > > Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
> > > rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
> > > tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
> > > experience is a learned social construction.
> >
> > May we see a quote from a noted postmodernist asserting this thesis and
> > the suggested implications?
>
> "The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
> arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
> subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
> anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
> science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
> precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaa.a.aaa..a...
Including that one, you illiterate...
> Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
> ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
> third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
>
> http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/pomo.htm
Feh. [snipped because after that, there's no foreseeable reason to
read the rest]
Spiro's (??) assertion of subjectivity may apply only to Spiro, but
in any case it, itself, means that /he/ cannot possibly assert it of
anthropology.
That he uses such Big Words to camouflage his fundamental
illiteracy can't be proved on so small a sample, but it's definitely
indicated in his refuting himself with his primary premise against
"the opposition" ("shooting himself in the back of the head").
In any case, the possibility of subjectivity is why science (incl.
anthropology) has instruments, public referents, standard measures,
etc.
Not to mention reasonably-simple standard languages, well-linked
with the common speech.
--
-------(m+
~/:o)_|
The most essential gift for a good writer is
a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. -- Hemingway
http://scrawlmark.org
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> Immortalist wrote:
>
> >
> > smw wrote:
> >
> >>Immortalist wrote:
> >>
> >>...
> >>
> >>>Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
> >>>rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
> >>>tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
> >>>experience is a learned social construction.
> >>
> >>May we see a quote from a noted postmodernist asserting this thesis and
> >>the suggested implications?
> >
> >
> > "The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
> > arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
> > subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
> > anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
> > science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
> > precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
> > Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
> > ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
> > third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
>
> That's singularly unresponsive to my question. I'm rather certain that
> not even Pinker would argue that humans aren't subjects.
Tsk.
He/Spiro didn't say they were; he said they, as objects of
observation, were subjective.
The hilarity arises in that he has thus asserted it of himself.
"This statement is false."
>
> The rest is equally irrelevant --
Tnx, I hadn't read his "second" piece of hoorah until now, having
shut him off after the first.
"...since objectivity is an illusion..."
Heh.
Tee, hee, even.
Since objectivity is an illusion, who's making the accusation?
Can this guy (the first poster or his Spiro) do /anything/ with
language other than shoot himself in the back of the head with it?
> could you kindly point me towards a
> text by a noteable "postmodernist" who asserts "that the sense organs
> present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
> everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
> construction"? Most of them are rather good Kantians, even if they don't
> advertise it...
Trouble is, what you want is a conjunction of two unrelated (they're
opposite corners of a quaternion, not a bion) premises. Might be
difficult to find anybody besides yourself (or is it your opponent?)
willing to solder them together.
Bradley (Eliot's putative philosophical mentor) was on about all
knowledge's being founded in sensory input, but seems to do no more
than repeat Aristotle ("Nihil est in intellectu quid non in sensibus
est") before flying off that handle without actually adding anything
to it. Eliot, by contrast, turns the premise into the practice of
the Objective Correlative in poetry (defining your "social
construction," i.e., "other words," see below, by reference to colors
and noises -- the conjunction of colors and conctructs, not the
disjunction you require).
Descartes' "Discourse on Method" compresses to "I am not perceiving
some of my perceptions, therefore God," and cannot be taken as
knowing what it's talking about, either.
Berkeley's "Hylas and Philonous" ultimately descends into claiming
that "perceptions cannot originate in a mind, therefore they
originate in a mind."
But I can't say that any of them, whether for or agin perception,
ever insisted, or even hinted, that "everything else" was a learned
social construction. In the first place, if their premise is true
(Tar Baby say nuffin' 'bout it is or it ain't, here), then "social
construction" can be perceived only as a bunch of colors and noises,
so that any "construction" must necessarily take place in the mind of
the /student/, not the mentor.
(However, Mentor of Arisia may be able to Inject the student
directly with Constructs and Powowers using his Ring of Power, and
scifi abounds subsequently with "telepathy" and the Learning Pill.)
(N.B.: this that you and I are doing here is "telepathy." Note
the use of P.D. Decoder Rings on colors and noises.)
Korzybski [1933] may come closest to what you want: "All words are
ultimately defined by other words...," which is the exact opposite of
[being]'s being constructed of colors and noises, and unfortunately
shoots itself in the back of the head in the fact that "other words"
are perceiveable only as colors and noises.
Which require a Korzybski Mark I Seekrit Decoder Ring to turn into
"other words."
To make it short, I can't hold out much hope you'll find the
combination you want from a "notable" source, but then the two most
plentiful elements in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Dennis M. Hammes
>
...
>
> Without going into detail, the verbal /thing/ is endless
> and will "fill all the books in the world" as brother John sed.
>
> In my psychic training the saying was: "seeing is better"
>
Filling all the pages of all the froups in the world with your
Endless Verbal Thing is better.
RyanT
smw
Dennis M. Hammes wrote:
So? He's an anthropologist.
> The hilarity arises in that he has thus asserted it of himself.
> "This statement is false."
Oh, I see... you think "subjective" means "arbitrary" or "false." Like
my students say, "that's, like, uh, so _subjective_, you know?"
Ever heard of the transcendental subject?
>>The rest is equally irrelevant --
>
>
> Tnx, I hadn't read his "second" piece of hoorah until now, having
> shut him off after the first.
> "...since objectivity is an illusion..."
> Heh.
> Tee, hee, even.
> Since objectivity is an illusion, who's making the accusation?
A subject.
> Can this guy (the first poster or his Spiro) do /anything/ with
> language other than shoot himself in the back of the head with it?
>
>>could you kindly point me towards a
>>text by a noteable "postmodernist" who asserts "that the sense organs
>>present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
>>everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
>>construction"? Most of them are rather good Kantians, even if they don't
>>advertise it...
>
>
> Trouble is, what you want is a conjunction of two unrelated (they're
> opposite corners of a quaternion, not a bion) premises. Might be
> difficult to find anybody besides yourself (or is it your opponent?)
> willing to solder them together.
I was asking for some modest proof of Pinker's assertion about
postmodernism ... so far without luck. Your list is singularly lacking
in postmodern theorists as well...
> To make it short, I can't hold out much hope you'll find the
> combination you want from a "notable" source, but then the two most
> plentiful elements in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
There's also the possibility that Pinker's talking out of his ass, eh.
John Dawkins
"Tom Bishop" <Delt...@sbcBURPglobal.com> wrote:
> Transcendental refers to the nature of the number.
> Transcendental numbers have an unending and non-repeating
> stream of fractional digits. Pi is roughly: 3.14159265....
> But the exact Pi is /transcendental/ in that it is impossible to
> enumerate it exactly, in any medium, since it is composed of
> an infinite number of fractional digits without repeating pattern.
Not quite.
Both Pi and the square root of 2 (for instance) are irrational (that is,
have non-terminating, non-repeating decimal representations). The
latter is "algebraic", being a solution of the equation x^2 - 2 = 0.
The former is "transcendental" (= non-algebraic) because it is not the
solution of any equation of the form P(x) = 0, P being a polynomial with
integer coefficients.
--
J.
Immortalist
Pip Jones: "Postmodernism has two distinct aspects: the first refers to
art, aesthetics and media production; the second to knowledge and its
production... Modernism refers to the belief in the possibility of
humans acquiring the Truth and, in the light of this true
understanding, reconstructing their world, thereby achieving progress.
Postmodernism refers to the belief that such a view is wrong...arguing
that no human being is capable of knowing the truth, only a Truth. This
links postmodernism to relativism - the view that humans can only know
reality from a particular, culture-bound, historically-specific point
of view. Here the argument is that even the criteria by which we judge
truth or falsehood are themselves relative to time and place".
http://www.sociology.org.uk/p1quotes.htm
Better yet, can you find any quotes that deny that "that the sense
organs present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
construction," or that in the Kantian sense of the boundries of
experience and how we must be fair and claim we can't say either way
with the provided information?
------------------------
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
EXCERPT
the blank slate, the noble
savage, and the ghost
in the machine
Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the
behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what
makes people tick. A tacit theory of human nature-that behavior is
caused by thoughts and feelings-is embedded in the very way we think
about people. We fill out this theory by introspecting on our own minds
and assuming that our fellows are like ourselves, and by watching
people's behavior and filing away generalizations. We absorb still
other ideas from our intellectual climate: from the expertise of
authorities and the conventional wisdom of the day.
Our theory of human nature is the wellspring of much in our lives. We
consult it when we want to persuade or threaten, inform or deceive. It
advises us on how to nurture our marriages, bring up our children, and
control our own behavior. Its assumptions about learning drive our
educational policy; its assumptions about motivation drive our policies
on economics, law, and crime. And because it delineates what people can
achieve easily, what they can achieve only with sacrifice or pain, and
what they cannot achieve at all, it affects our values: what we believe
we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a society. Rival
theories of human nature are entwined in different ways of life and
different political systems, and have been a source of much conflict
over the course of history.
For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from
religion.1 The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers
explanations for much of the subject matter now studied by biology and
psychology. Humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to
animals.2 Women are derivative of men and destined to be ruled by
them.3 The mind is an immaterial substance: it has powers possessed by
no purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body
dies.4 The mind is made up of several components, including a moral
sense, an ability to love, a capacity for reason that recognizes
whether an act conforms to ideals of goodness, and a decision faculty
that chooses how to behave. Although the decision faculty is not bound
by the laws of cause and effect, it has an innate tendency to choose
sin. Our cognitive and perceptual faculties work accurately because God
implanted ideals in them that correspond to reality and because he
coordinates their functioning with the outside world. Mental health
comes from recognizing God's purpose, choosing good and repenting sin,
and loving God and one's fellow humans for God's sake.
The Judeo-Christian theory is based on events narrated in the Bible. We
know that the human mind has nothing in common with the minds of
animals because the Bible says that humans were created separately. We
know that the design of women is based on the design of men because in
the second telling of the creation of women Eve was fashioned from the
rib of Adam. Human decisions cannot be the inevitable effects of some
cause, we may surmise, because God held Adam and Eve responsible for
eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, implying that they could
have chosen otherwise. Women are dominated by men as punishment for
Eve's disobedience, and men and women inherit the sinfulness of the
first couple.
The Judeo-Christian conception is still the most popular theory of
human nature in the United States. According to recent polls, 76
percent of Americans believe in the biblical account of creation, 79
percent believe that the miracles in the Bible actually took place, 76
percent believe in angels, the devil, and other immaterial souls, 67
percent believe they will exist in some form after their death, and
only 15 percent believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is the best
explanation for the origin of human life on Earth.5 Politicians on the
right embrace the religious theory explicitly, and no mainstream
politician would dare contradict it in public. But the modern sciences
of cosmology, geology, biology, and archaeology have made it impossible
for a scientifically literate person to believe that the biblical story
of creation actually took place. As a result, the Judeo-Christian
theory of human nature is no longer explicitly avowed by most
academics, journalists, social analysts, and other intellectually
engaged people. Nonetheless, every society must operate with a theory
of human nature, and our intellectual mainstream is committed to
another one. The theory is seldom articulated or overtly embraced, but
it lies at the heart of a vast number of beliefs and policies. Bertrand
Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud
of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer
day." For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about
psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as
the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure
and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.
That theory of human nature-namely, that it barely exists-is the topic
of this book. Just as religions contain a theory of human nature, so
theories of human nature take on some of the functions of religion, and
the Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern intellectual
life. It is seen as a source of values, so the fact that it is based on
a miracle-a complex mind arising out of nothing-is not held against it.
Challenges to the doctrine from skeptics and scientists have plunged
some believers into a crisis of faith and have led others to mount the
kinds of bitter attacks ordinarily aimed at heretics and infidels. And
just as many religious traditions eventually reconciled themselves to
apparent threats from science (such as the revolutions of Copernicus
and Darwin), so, I argue, will our values survive the demise of the
Blank Slate.
The chapters in this part of the book (Part I) are about the ascendance
of the Blank Slate in modern intellectual life, and about the new view
of human nature and culture that is beginning to challenge it. In
succeeding parts we will witness the anxiety evoked by this challenge
(Part II) and see how the anxiety may be assuaged (Part III). Then I
will show how a richer conception of human nature can provide insight
into language, thought, social life, and morality (Part IV) and how it
can clarify controversies on politics, violence, gender, childrearing,
and the arts (Part V). Finally I will show how the passing of the Blank
Slate is less disquieting, and in some ways less revolutionary, than it
first appears (Part VI).
Chapter 1
The Official Theory
"Blank slate" is a loose translation of the medieval Latin term tabula
rasa-literally, "scraped tablet." It is commonly attributed to the
philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), though in fact he used a different
metaphor. Here is the famous passage from An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all
characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence
comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man
has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the
materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from
experience.
Locke was taking aim at theories of innate ideas in which people were
thought to be born with mathematical ideals, eternal truths, and a
notion of God. His alternative theory, empiricism, was intended both as
a theory of psychology-how the mind works-and as a theory of
epistemology-how we come to know the truth. Both goals helped motivate
his political philosophy, often honored as the foundation of liberal
democracy. Locke opposed dogmatic justifications for the political
status quo, such as the authority of the church and the divine right of
kings, which had been touted as self-evident truths. He argued that
social arrangements should be reasoned out from scratch and agreed upon
by mutual consent, based on knowledge that any person could acquire.
Since ideas are grounded in experience, which varies from person to
person, differences of opinion arise not because one mind is equipped
to grasp the truth and another is defective, but because the two minds
have had different histories. Those differences therefore ought to be
tolerated rather than suppressed. Locke's notion of a blank slate also
undermined a hereditary royalty and aristocracy, whose members could
claim no innate wisdom or merit if their minds had started out as blank
as everyone else's. It also spoke against the institution of slavery,
because slaves could no longer be thought of as innately inferior or
subservient.
During the past century the doctrine of the Blank Slate has set the
agenda for much of the social sciences and humanities. As we shall see,
psychology has sought to explain all thought, feeling, and behavior
with a few simple mechanisms of learning. The social sciences have
sought to explain all customs and social arrangements as a product of
the socialization of children by the surrounding culture: a system of
words, images, stereotypes, role models, and contingencies of reward
and punishment. A long and growing list of concepts that would seem
natural to the human way of thinking (emotions, kinship, the sexes,
illness, nature, the world) are now said to have been "invented" or
"socially constructed."2 The Blank Slate has also served as a sacred
scripture for political and ethical beliefs. According to the doctrine,
any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and
individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution but
from differences in their experiences. Change the experiences-by
reforming parenting, education, the media, and social rewards-and you
can change the person. Underachievement, poverty, and antisocial
behavior can be ameliorated; indeed, it is irresponsible not to do so.
And discrimination on the basis of purportedly inborn traits of a sex
or ethnic group is simply irrational.
The Blank Slate is often accompanied by two other doctrines, which have
also attained a sacred status in modern intellectual life. My label for
the first of the two is commonly attributed to the philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), though it really comes from John
Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, published in 1670:
I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began
, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
The concept of the noble savage was inspired by European colonists'
discovery of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and (later)
Oceania. It captures the belief that humans in their natural state are
selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed,
anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization. In 1755
Rousseau wrote:
So many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and
requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed; whereas nothing
can be more gentle than him in his primitive state, when placed by
nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the
pernicious good sense of civilized man. . . .
The more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we shall be that
it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and
that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident,
which, for the public good, should never have happened. The example of
the savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems to
confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this
condition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior
improvements have been so many steps, in appearance towards the
perfection of individuals, but in fact towards the decrepitness of the
species.
First among the authors that Rousseau had in mind was Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), who had presented a very different picture:
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common
power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is
called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. . . .
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit
thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no
navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no
commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things
as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no
account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of
all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man,
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes believed that people could escape this hellish existence only by
surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He
called it a leviathan, the Hebrew word for a monstrous sea creature
subdued by Yahweh at the dawn of creation.
Much depends on which of these armchair anthropologists is correct. If
people are noble savages, then a domineering leviathan is unnecessary.
Indeed, by forcing people to delineate private property for the state
to recognize-property they might otherwise have shared-the leviathan
creates the very greed and belligerence it is designed to control. A
happy society would be our birthright; all we would need to do is
eliminate the institutional barriers that keep it from us. If, in
contrast, people are naturally nasty, the best we can hope for is an
uneasy truce enforced by police and the army. The two theories have
implications for private life as well. Every child is born a savage
(that is, uncivilized), so if savages are naturally gentle,
childrearing is a matter of providing children with opportunities to
develop their potential, and evil people are products of a society that
has corrupted them. If savages are naturally nasty, then childrearing
is an arena of discipline and conflict, and evil people are showing a
dark side that was insufficiently tamed.
The actual writings of philosophers are always more complex than the
theories they come to symbolize in the textbooks. In reality, the views
of Hobbes and Rousseau are not that far apart. Rousseau, like Hobbes,
believed (incorrectly) that savages were solitary, without ties of love
or loyalty, and without any industry or art (and he may have
out-Hobbes'd Hobbes in claiming they did not even have language).
Hobbes envisioned-indeed, literally drew-his leviathan as an embodiment
of the collective will, which was vested in it by a kind of social
contract; Rousseau's most famous work is called The Social Contract,
and in it he calls on people to subordinate their interests to a
"general will."
Nonetheless, Hobbes and Rousseau limned contrasting pictures of the
state of nature that have inspired thinkers in the centuries since. No
one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble
Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect
for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural
childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of
authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the
understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our
institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.
The other sacred doctrine that often accompanies the Blank Slate is
usually attributed to the scientist, mathematician, and philosopher
René Descartes (1596-1650):
There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is
by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible. . . .
When I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only
a thinking being, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but
apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire; and though the whole
mind seems to be united to the whole body, yet if a foot, or an arm, or
some other part, is separated from the body, I am aware that nothing
has been taken from my mind. And the faculties of willing, feeling,
conceiving, etc. cannot be properly speaking said to be its parts, for
it is one and the same mind which employs itself in willing and in
feeling and understanding. But it is quite otherwise with corporeal or
extended objects, for there is not one of them imaginable by me which
my mind cannot easily divide into parts. . . . This would be sufficient
to teach me that the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the
body, if I had not already been apprised of it on other grounds.
A memorable name for this doctrine was given three centuries later by a
detractor, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976):
There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so
prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be
described as the official theory. . . . The official doctrine, which
hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful
exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a
body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is
both a body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed
together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to
exist and function. Human bodies are in space and are subject to
mechanical laws which govern all other bodies in space. . . . But minds
are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws.
. . .
. . . Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of
it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the
Machine."6 The Ghost in the Machine, like the Noble Savage, arose in
part as a reaction to Hobbes. Hobbes had argued that life and mind
could be explained in mechanical terms. Light sets our nerves and brain
in motion, and that is what it means to see. The motions may persist
like the wake of a ship or the vibration of a plucked string, and that
is what it means to imagine. "Quantities" get added or subtracted in
the brain, and that is what it means to think.
Descartes rejected the idea that the mind could operate by physical
principles. He thought that behavior, especially speech, was not caused
by anything, but freely chosen. He observed that our consciousness,
unlike our bodies and other physical objects, does not feel as if it is
divisible into parts or laid out in space. He noted that we cannot
doubt the existence of our minds-indeed, we cannot doubt that we are
our minds-because the very act of thinking presupposes that our minds
exist. But we can doubt the existence of our bodies, because we can
imagine ourselves to be immaterial spirits who merely dream or
hallucinate that we are incarnate.
Descartes also found a moral bonus in his dualism (the belief that the
mind is a different kind of thing from the body): "There is none which
is more effectual in leading feeble spirits from the straight path of
virtue, than to imagine that the soul of the brute is of the same
nature as our own, and that in consequence, after this life we have
nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than the flies and the ants."7
Ryle explains Descartes's dilemma:
When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were
competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every
occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives.
As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of
mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as
Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that
human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
It can indeed be upsetting to think of ourselves as glorified gears and
springs. Machines are insensate, built to be used, and disposable;
humans are sentient, possessing of dignity and rights, and infinitely
precious. A machine has some workaday purpose, such as grinding grain
or sharpening pencils; a human being has higher purposes, such as love,
worship, good works, and the creation of knowledge and beauty. The
behavior of machines is determined by the ineluctable laws of physics
and chemistry; the behavior of people is freely chosen. With choice
comes freedom, and therefore optimism about our possibilities for the
future. With choice also comes responsibility, which allows us to hold
people accountable for their actions. And of course if the mind is
separate from the body, it can continue to exist when the body breaks
down, and our thoughts and pleasures will not someday be snuffed out
forever.
As I mentioned, most Americans continue to believe in an immortal soul,
made of some nonphysical substance, which can part company with the
body. But even those who do not avow that belief in so many words still
imagine that somehow there must be more to us than electrical and
chemical activity in the brain. Choice, dignity, and responsibility are
gifts that set off human beings from everything else in the universe,
and seem incompatible with the idea that we are mere collections of
molecules. Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are
commonly denounced as "reductionist" or "determinist." The denouncers
rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows
they refer to something bad. The dichotomy between mind and body also
pervades everyday speech, as when we say "Use your head," when we refer
to "out-of-body experiences," and when we speak of "John's body," or
for that matter "John's brain," which presupposes an owner, John, that
is somehow separate from the brain it owns. Journalists sometimes
speculate about "brain transplants" when they really should be calling
them "body transplants," because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has
noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be
the donor than the recipient. The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the
Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine-or, as philosophers call
them, empiricism, romanticism, and dualism-are logically independent,
but in practice they are often found together. If the slate is blank,
then strictly speaking it has neither injunctions to do good nor
injunctions to do evil. But good and evil are asymmetrical: there are
more ways to harm people than to help them, and harmful acts can hurt
them to a greater degree than virtuous acts can make them better off.
So a blank slate, compared with one filled with motives, is bound to
impress us more by its inability to do harm than by its inability to do
good. Rousseau did not literally believe in a blank slate, but he did
believe that bad behavior is a product of learning and socialization.9
"Men are wicked," he wrote; "a sad and constant experience makes proof
unnecessary." But this wickedness comes from society: "There is no
original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice to
be found in it of which it cannot be said how and whence it entered."11
If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us, like
Rousseau, associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness.
Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives clean, fair,
immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred, and unsullied, and of
the nouns blemish, blot, mark, stain, and taint.
The Blank Slate naturally coexists with the Ghost in the Machine, too,
since a slate that is blank is a hospitable place for a ghost to haunt.
If a ghost is to be at the controls, the factory can ship the device
with a minimum of parts. The ghost can read the body's display panels
and pull its levers, with no need for a high-tech executive program,
guidance system, or CPU. The more not-clockwork there is controlling
behavior, the less clockwork we need to posit. For similar reasons, the
Ghost in the Machine happily accompanies the Noble Savage. If the
machine behaves ignobly, we can blame the ghost, which freely chose to
carry out the iniquitous acts; we need not probe for a defect in the
machine's design.
Philosophy today gets no respect. Many scientists use the term as a
synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his
father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was
"Luft!"-Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young
man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she
said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?" But far from
being idle or airy, the ideas of philosophers can have repercussions
for centuries. The Blank Slate and its companion doctrines have
infiltrated the conventional wisdom of our civilization and have
repeatedly surfaced in unexpected places. William Godwin (1756-1835),
one of the founders of liberal political philosophy, wrote that
"children are a sort of raw material put into our hands," their minds
"like a sheet of white paper."12 More sinisterly, we find Mao Zedong
justifying his radical social engineering by saying, "It is on a blank
page that the most beautiful poems are written."13 Even Walt Disney was
inspired by the metaphor. "I think of a child's mind as a blank book,"
he wrote. "During the first years of his life, much will be written on
the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life
profoundly."
Locke could not have imagined that his words would someday lead to
Bambi (intended by Disney to teach self-reliance); nor could Rousseau
have anticipated Pocahontas, the ultimate noble savage. Indeed, the
soul of Rousseau seems to have been channeled by the writer of a recent
Thanksgiving op-ed piece in the Boston Globe:
I would submit that the world native Americans knew was more stable,
happier, and less barbaric than our society today. . . . there were no
employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse
unknown, crime nearly nonexistent. What warfare there was between
tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or
wholesale slaughter. While there were hard times, life was, for the
most part, stable and predictable. . . . Because the native people
respected what was around them, there was no loss of water or food
resources because of pollution or extinction, no lack of materials for
the daily essentials, such as baskets, canoes, shelter, or firewood.
-from The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, Copyright © October 2002,
Viking Press, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=CX0PiacBbg&isbn=0641599005&itm=1
Tom Bishop
Sound it out:
Post Mo Dern Ism
Post More Dern 'Ism
A request for more postings of
Laura Dern --'Ism--.
Do you know what 'Ism is?
Tom Bishop
"RyanT" <yid...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1118400606.1...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
smw
Immortalist wrote:
>
> smw wrote:
...>>>
>>>
>>>"The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
>>>arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
>>>subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
>>>anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
>>>science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
>>>precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
>>>Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
>>>ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
>>>third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
>>
>>That's singularly unresponsive to my question. I'm rather certain that
>>not even Pinker would argue that humans aren't subjects.
>>
>>The rest is equally irrelevant -- could you kindly point me towards a
>>text by a noteable "postmodernist" who asserts "that the sense organs
>>present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
>>everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
>>construction"? Most of them are rather good Kantians, even if they don't
>>advertise it...
>
>
> Pip Jones: "Postmodernism has
blabla. I'm not asking for a misrepresentation OF "postmodernism," but
for an important text within the canon of that genre.
> Better yet, can you find any quotes that deny that "that the sense
> organs present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
> everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
> construction," or that in the Kantian sense of the boundries of
> experience and how we must be fair and claim we can't say either way
> with the provided information?
And even better yet, have those postmodernists stopped beating their
wives yet?
Immortalist
smw wrote:
> Immortalist wrote:
> >
> > smw wrote:
> ...>>>
> >>>
> >>>"The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
> >>>arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
> >>>subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
> >>>anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
> >>>science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
> >>>precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
> >>>Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
> >>>ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
> >>>third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
> >>
> >>That's singularly unresponsive to my question. I'm rather certain that
> >>not even Pinker would argue that humans aren't subjects.
> >>
> >>The rest is equally irrelevant -- could you kindly point me towards a
> >>text by a noteable "postmodernist" who asserts "that the sense organs
> >>present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
> >>everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
> >>construction"? Most of them are rather good Kantians, even if they don't
> >>advertise it...
> >
> >
> > Pip Jones: "Postmodernism has
>
> blabla. I'm not asking for a misrepresentation OF "postmodernism," but
> for an important text within the canon of that genre.
>
Moving the goalposts I see, you requested a quote and then changed the
criteria which is an invalid move, check.
Moving the goalposts means changing the rules after the game has
started. This may mean making the criteria harder to meet (moving the
goalposts back) but probably more common is the demand that the
criteria be made less strict (moving the goalposts forward). For
example, one of my instructors in college told the class that he was
taking large doses of vitamin C, and that would keep him from getting
any colds. The next week he came to class with a bad cold. Rather
than admitting defeat he told the class that his cold would have been
worse if he had not been taking vitamin C. The instructor had changed
the rules, now having a less sever cold was a success. (Of course the
instructor had no way of knowing how bad his cold would be if he was
not taking vitamin C, it probably would not make any difference.)
http://info-pollution.com/rules.htm
Moving The Goalposts (Raising The Bar, Argument By Demanding Impossible
Perfection):
if your opponent successfully addresses some point, then say he must
also address some further point. If you can make these points more and
more difficult (or diverse) then eventually your opponent must fail. If
nothing else, you will eventually find a subject that your opponent
isn't up on.
This is related to Argument By Question. Asking questions is easy: it's
answering them that's hard.
It is also possible to lower the bar, reducing the burden on an
argument. For example, a person who takes Vitamin C might claim that it
prevents colds. When they do get a cold, then they move the goalposts,
by saying that the cold would have been much worse if not for the
Vitamin C.
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html
> > Better yet, can you find any quotes that deny that "that the sense
> > organs present the brain witha tableu of raw colors and sounds and that
> > everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social
> > construction," or that in the Kantian sense of the boundries of
> > experience and how we must be fair and claim we can't say either way
> > with the provided information?
>
> And even better yet, have those postmodernists stopped beating their
> wives yet?
Is A, B, or C true, is not a complex loaded question question. The
question simply asked if there was, was not, or unknown conclusions
about sense input and human nature. I commited not the;
A loaded question is a question with a false or questionable
presupposition, and it is "loaded" with that presumption. The question
"Have you stopped beating your wife?" presupposes that you have beaten
your wife prior to its asking, as well as that you have a wife. If you
are unmarried, or have never beaten your wife, then the question is
loaded.
Since this example is a yes/no question, there are only the following
two direct answers:
"Yes, I have stopped beating my wife", which entails "I was beating my
wife."
"No, I haven't stopped beating my wife", which entails "I am still
beating my wife."
Thus, either direct answer entails that you have beaten your wife,
which is, therefore, a presupposition of the question. So, a loaded
question is one which you cannot answer directly without implying a
falsehood or a statement that you deny. For this reason, the proper
response to such a question is not to answer it directly, but to either
refuse to answer or to reject the question.
Some systems of parliamentary debate provide for "dividing the
question", that is, splitting a complex question up into two or more
simple questions. Such a move can be used to split the example as
follows:
"Have you ever beaten your wife?"
"If so, are you still doing so?"
In this way, 1 can be answered directly by "no", and then the
conditional question 2 does not arise.
Tom Bishop
"John Dawkins" <artfl...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:artfldodgr-2D4E4...@individual.net...
> In article <3X%pe.1895$Z44....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>,
> "Tom Bishop" <Delt...@sbcBURPglobal.com> wrote:
>
>> Transcendental refers to the nature of the number.
>> Transcendental numbers have an unending and non-repeating
>> stream of fractional digits. Pi is roughly: 3.14159265....
>> But the exact Pi is /transcendental/ in that it is impossible to
>> enumerate it exactly, in any medium, since it is composed of
>> an infinite number of fractional digits without repeating pattern.
>
> Not quite.
Irrationally, even, thx... :)
>
> Both Pi and the square root of 2 (for instance) are irrational (that is,
> have non-terminating, non-repeating decimal representations).
Does it matter it is base 10?
What? If it was an irrational or transcendal base it would reduce?
But no integral bases?
> The
> latter is "algebraic", being a solution of the equation x^2 - 2 = 0.
> The former is "transcendental" (= non-algebraic) because it is not the
> solution of any equation of the form P(x) = 0, P being a polynomial with
> integer coefficients.
Cheers
Tom Bishop
>
> --
> J.
John Dawkins
"Tom Bishop" <Delt...@sbcBURPglobal.com> wrote:
> "John Dawkins" <artfl...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:artfldodgr-2D4E4...@individual.net...
> > In article <3X%pe.1895$Z44....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>,
> > "Tom Bishop" <Delt...@sbcBURPglobal.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Transcendental refers to the nature of the number.
> >> Transcendental numbers have an unending and non-repeating
> >> stream of fractional digits. Pi is roughly: 3.14159265....
> >> But the exact Pi is /transcendental/ in that it is impossible to
> >> enumerate it exactly, in any medium, since it is composed of
> >> an infinite number of fractional digits without repeating pattern.
> >
> > Not quite.
>
> Irrationally, even, thx... :)
>
> >
> > Both Pi and the square root of 2 (for instance) are irrational (that is,
> > have non-terminating, non-repeating decimal representations).
>
> Does it matter it is base 10?
No. A number is rational if it can be expressed as the ratio of two
integers. Otherwise it is irrational.
Likewise, the notion "algebraic" does not depend on the choice of base.
> What? If it was an irrational or transcendal base it would reduce?
> But no integral bases?
>
> > The
> > latter is "algebraic", being a solution of the equation x^2 - 2 = 0.
> > The former is "transcendental" (= non-algebraic) because it is not the
> > solution of any equation of the form P(x) = 0, P being a polynomial with
> > integer coefficients.
--
J.
smw
Immortalist wrote:
Nope. I requested a quote _by_ a postmodern theorist of note. You even
quoted it above: "point me towards a text by" etc.
so, you're posting from asc?
[blabla]
Lady Chatterly
smw <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>
>Nope. I requested a quote _by_ a postmodern theorist of note. You even
>quoted it above: "point me towards a text by" etc.
These are peano 's axioms for number theory.
>so, you're posting from asc?
Why should it matter to you if they are posting from asc?
>[blabla]
I never met a kook I liked.
--
Lady Chatterly
"Nevertheless, even Dowap hace been torlled into replying to the
Chatterly bot" -- Peter J Ross
Lady Chatterly
Tom Bishop <Delt...@sbcBURPglobal.com> wrote:
>
>Post Mo Dern Ism
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.
>Post More Dern 'Ism
The progress of the times ... such that imbeciles, who can neither
walk nor talk, may be seen posting to Usenet.
>A request for more postings of
> Laura Dern --'Ism--.
Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.
>Do you know what 'Ism is?
Security is only one of the universe is a good thing is that the only
way you can control anybody is to lie to them.
--
Lady Chatterly
"You know Lady C, it really is sad that even as a bot, you have more
personality than nearly every AHM reg combined." -- Onideus Mad
Hatter
David Lentz
Not quite. You can't say that PI is an irrational number. The exact value
of Pi has never been calculated.
David
John Dawkins
"David Lentz" <dlen...@rochester.rr.com> wrote:
Pi was proved to be irrational in 1768, by J.H. Lambert; it was shown to
be transcendental in 1882, by C.L.F. von Lindemann. (The value of Pi
was declared to be 3 in 1897, by the Indiana House of Representatives,
but the idea never causght on.)
--
J.
Francis A. Miniter
Reminds me of a story from the cold war era about reverse engineering in the
USSR of computer chips. In one attempt, they decided to convert from inches to
millimeters using the ratio of 25 mm to an inch. Needless to say, the chip did
not work.
Francis A. Miniter
Tom Bishop
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote in message
news:42aa4...@news1.prserv.net...
Remindes me of when the US government insisted that Gold cost $35/OZ.
Tom Bishop
Lewis Mammel
John Dawkins wrote:
> Pi was proved to be irrational in 1768, by J.H. Lambert; it was shown to
> be transcendental in 1882, by C.L.F. von Lindemann. (The value of Pi
> was declared to be 3 in 1897, by the Indiana House of Representatives,
> but the idea never causght on.)
It passed the house but was quashed by the senate. Also note, as per
http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/Localgov/Second%20Level%20pages/indiana_pi_bill.htm
that the value advocated was 4/(5/4) = 16/5 = 3.2
Boiler up!
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Lewis Mammel
smw wrote:
> Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
> that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
to deny the declaration in each case.
I like the example of solid angle. We experience this quality
subjectively as a property of our visual field. However, we
define it objectively in reference to a subtending area on a
unit sphere.
We can say that it takes subjects to comprehend this objective
definition, but I don't think that makes the definition subjective,
and I'm willing to say that solid angle has an objective existence
in the same sense that pi does.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> In article <3X%pe.1895$Z44....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>,
> "Tom Bishop" <Delt...@sbcBURPglobal.com> wrote:
>
> > Transcendental refers to the nature of the number.
> > Transcendental numbers have an unending and non-repeating
> > stream of fractional digits. Pi is roughly: 3.14159265....
> > But the exact Pi is /transcendental/ in that it is impossible to
> > enumerate it exactly, in any medium, since it is composed of
> > an infinite number of fractional digits without repeating pattern.
>
> Not quite.
>
> Both Pi and the square root of 2 (for instance) are irrational
'Sokay, so is Tommy. Why he Understands them so Perfectly.
> (that is,
> have non-terminating, non-repeating decimal representations). The
> latter is "algebraic", being a solution of the equation x^2 - 2 = 0.
> The former is "transcendental" (= non-algebraic) because it is not the
> solution of any equation of the form P(x) = 0, P being a polynomial with
> integer coefficients.
>
> --
> J.
--
-------(m+
~/:o)_|
/This/ -- is the end of the Line. /We/ are It.
-- COL Joshua Chamberlain, 20th Maine Volunteers, 3 July 1863
http://scrawlmark.org/bysword.html
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> "John Dawkins" <artfl...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:artfldodgr-2D4E4...@individual.net...
> > In article <3X%pe.1895$Z44....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>,
> > "Tom Bishop" <Delt...@sbcBURPglobal.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Transcendental refers to the nature of the number.
> >> Transcendental numbers have an unending and non-repeating
> >> stream of fractional digits. Pi is roughly: 3.14159265....
> >> But the exact Pi is /transcendental/ in that it is impossible to
> >> enumerate it exactly, in any medium, since it is composed of
> >> an infinite number of fractional digits without repeating pattern.
> >
> > Not quite.
>
> Irrationally, even, thx... :)
>
> >
> > Both Pi and the square root of 2 (for instance) are irrational (that is,
> > have non-terminating, non-repeating decimal representations).
>
> Does it matter it is base 10?
> What? If it was an irrational or transcendal base it would reduce?
Yes, and immediately. If a numbering system took /e/ as its unit,
its observations would be immediately rational, because its
quantities countable. But the result would be pretty damned
transparent, because it's numbering system would simply record "1, 2,
3, 4...," which is what we already see when we count fingers rather
than /e/s.
Consider, e.g., the unit /h/, which is irrational because we try to
count the quantity by having started (ages ago) counting our fingers
and went on counting calories (tr: fingers) as a change in this
(irrational) much mercury, called "1," stuck in a (irrational) gram
of water, also called "1," but is still the unit of energy in the
real world, which counts it as "1 + 1 + 1..." (i.e., quanta) when the
world observes it in/as energy reactions.
I.e., it /looks/ (measures) differently when counted by a photon
("[1]/h/") from when it's counted by a finger ("3.nn x10^-36
fingers"). In fact, it looks irrationally different when it's
counted by different (/nu/ ~= /nu/') photons.
Which is why it's called a "proportionality constant": it's an
irrational quantity that translates ergs (e.g.) or /nu/ (e.g.) into
fingers so we can do the math.
> But no integral bases?
No.
Not even when you're under trance and dental medications.
And expecially not when you give it the finger.
>
> > The
> > latter is "algebraic", being a solution of the equation x^2 - 2 = 0.
> > The former is "transcendental" (= non-algebraic) because it is not the
> > solution of any equation of the form P(x) = 0, P being a polynomial with
> > integer coefficients.
>
> Cheers
>
> Tom Bishop
>
> >
> > --
> > J.
Dennis M. Hammes
Actually, because /pi/ = c/d, it expresses a domain of 0 >
3.1415926... as the radius of observation sweeps the range 1.0 U (the
radius of the universe of the discourse) > 0.0 U (the center of that
universe, the observer). /Pi/ is apparently constant on the top of
Euclid's schooldesk, but appreciably begins that approach to 0 when
you get about 400 miles away from Euclid.
The Hubble "Constant" (which he said wasn't) is observably d/pi/ /
dr(o), the derivative of /pi/ with respect to the radius of
observation, the red shift being not a doppler but the effect of
gravity, and is approximately constant (-4 r(o)) from about 0.3U <
1.0U -- matching the observations.
I.e., the universe is Steady State, which unfortunately means that
the amounts of hydrogen and stupidity therein remain approximately
constant.
Dennis M. Hammes
Evidently it already had; Tenneessee passed the Bill in the Lower
House in 1886 (IIRC), but it died in the Upper House.
Holmes wrote in 1881 that "the [best] Law is whatever the People
want," thus inventing Democracy in the U.S., and in 1886 imported Al
Michelson to "abolish the aether" (i.e., incl. the conservation of
natural law) so that this could be TrVe.
The aether having been "abolished," a number of the People Wanted
math to be simple enough for /them/.
Unfortunately, they are so simple that in 2005 they /still/ haven't
realised that they assert to have (in 1886) "abolished" their "God,
He" (it's the same word).
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> smw wrote:
>
> > Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
> > that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
>
> I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
> a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
> by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
> to deny the declaration in each case.
No frame of reference is preferred.
If /my/ language achieves the objective ("Touches the Earth"), the
fact is not altered by any number of the failures of others'
languages to do so.
Nor is the fact that /I/ may, even must, legitimately prefer /my/
frame of reference in the fact that I'm always holding onto the zero
end of my yardsticks.
This preference is the foundation of saleable skills; one's
language Touches the Earth.
It's also the foundation of capitalism.
Socialism ("Democracy") insists that the illiterate can have their
Kate and Edith, can go on gibbering their fantasies while lining up
at troughs filled by somebody else's languages-that-work.
>
> I like the example of solid angle. We experience this quality
> subjectively as a property of our visual field. However, we
> define it objectively in reference to a subtending area on a
> unit sphere.
>
> We can say that it takes subjects to comprehend this objective
> definition, but I don't think that makes the definition subjective,
Heh. 'Course not.
Unless, of course, /you/ don't exist, but then who are you to say
so?
> and I'm willing to say that solid angle has an objective existence
> in the same sense that pi does.
If Martijn were with us at the moment, you'd see some of the solidest
pi you ever seed in yore life... (Local joke.)
As to the solidity of pi, make a mark on a cardboard circle and
roll it across a table.
>
> Lew Mammel, Jr.
Dennis M. Hammes
Nope.
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> Well once we define what postmodernism means, we're all set!
"Tomorrow."
zzbu...@netscape.net
Dennis M. Hammes wrote:
> Immortalist wrote:
> >
> > smw wrote:
> > > Immortalist wrote:
> > >
> > > ...
> > > >
> > > > Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
> > > > rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
> > > > tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
> > > > experience is a learned social construction.
> > >
> > > May we see a quote from a noted postmodernist asserting this thesis and
> > > the suggested implications?
> >
> > "The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
> > arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
> > subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
> > anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
> > science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
> > precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
Postmodernism is dipshit Washington scientists flagelating
hemmoroidial reaction to the invention of televesion.
It is nothing but the Guggemheim museam transported
by the inverse pony express to San Franciso.
Where it is them desconstructed by Fidel Castro
semi-clones from AT&T and Botswanna,
> HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaa.a.aaa..a...
> Including that one, you illiterate...
>
> > Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the
> > ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics,
> > third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).
> >
> > http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/pomo.htm
>
> Feh. [snipped because after that, there's no foreseeable reason to
> read the rest]
>
> Spiro's (??) assertion of subjectivity may apply only to Spiro, but
> in any case it, itself, means that /he/ cannot possibly assert it of
> anthropology.
> That he uses such Big Words to camouflage his fundamental
> illiteracy can't be proved on so small a sample, but it's definitely
> indicated in his refuting himself with his primary premise against
> "the opposition" ("shooting himself in the back of the head").
> In any case, the possibility of subjectivity is why science (incl.
> anthropology) has instruments, public referents, standard measures,
> etc.
> Not to mention reasonably-simple standard languages, well-linked
> with the common speech.
> --
> -------(m+
> ~/:o)_|
> The most essential gift for a good writer is
> a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. -- Hemingway
> http://scrawlmark.org
zzbu...@netscape.net
smw
Lewis Mammel wrote:
>
> smw wrote:
>
>
>>Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
>>that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
>
>
> I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
> a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
> by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
> to deny the declaration in each case.
I think many folks don't realize that in theory or philosophy,
"subjective" is not derogatory...
G*rd*n
> > > Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
> > > that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
Lewis Mammel wrote:
> > I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
> > a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
> > by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
> > to deny the declaration in each case.
"Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net>:
> No frame of reference is preferred.
Uh-oh, a passive. Who's the subject here?
I think what you all want is "objective enough", i.e. the
same or nearly the same for (almost) all observers we happen
to know about, or expect to know about. A little grease on
the joints and you can avoid all those sharp, nasty
absolutes.
By the way, socialism is "the ownership or control of the
means of production by the workers or the people in general",
not communism.
> ...
smw
G*rd*n wrote:
> smw wrote:
>
>>>>Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
>>>>that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
>
>
> Lewis Mammel wrote:
>
>>>I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
>>>a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
>>>by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
>>>to deny the declaration in each case.
>
>
> "Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net>:
>
>>No frame of reference is preferred.
>
>
>
> Uh-oh, a passive. Who's the subject here?
>
> I think what you all want is "objective enough", i.e. the
> same or nearly the same for (almost) all observers we happen
> to know about, or expect to know about.
That definition of objective is not in conflict with subjective, i.e.
the human subject, transcendental or not. "Subject" is not synonymous
with "individual."
Pale.Pink.
I cannot figure out why I highlighted this thread. I am feeling a bit
like Danny Crane. Did I post here? I think I did not. I didn't post
here .... maybe I was looking for my hamster smelling friend.
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> smw wrote:
> > > > Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
> > > > that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
>
> Lewis Mammel wrote:
> > > I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
> > > a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
> > > by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
> > > to deny the declaration in each case.
>
> "Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net>:
> > No frame of reference is preferred.
>
> Uh-oh, a passive. Who's the subject here?
Special Relativity. The statement is Einstein's.
Or is slightly shorthand of his, which you were expected to know,
asserting to speak of objectivity and all.
>
> I think what you all want is "objective enough", i.e. the
> same or nearly the same for (almost) all observers we happen
> to know about, or expect to know about. A little grease on
> the joints and you can avoid all those sharp, nasty
> absolutes.
You mean like all those rodents that keep parading through here?
They're absolute enough.
So's using them for target practice.
Why I never mind that expanding the universe of my observations
expands the number -- and kinds -- of vermin I can see at the same
time as what I purported to be looking "for."
Why I can so easily observe that it bothers hell out of them as has
no sword.
So sell your bra and buy one (Luke 22:36).
>
> By the way, socialism is "the ownership or control of the
> means of production by the workers or the people in general",
> not communism.
>
> > ...
BTW, Marx "defined" "Communism" by camping on his boyfriend for 14
years to describe the British Commonwealth.
Commonwealth = communism = democracy = national socialism = "Nazi,"
and they're observably copied from each other.
They're also observable as generating spontaneously any time your
children are not savages because they are /yours/, and never learned
to keep their paws off what wasn't /theirs/.
All are founded in the premise, "We all own each other," a premise
that cannot even survive being obeyed.
Your "definition" of socialism, in addition to being
recognisably-doctrinal cant, is merely illiterate, as the two parts
of the statement define capitalism at large and communism post-Lenin.
Which, had you not noticed yet, are antithetical, not alternative.
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> Dennis M. Hammes wrote:
> > Immortalist wrote:
> > >
> > > smw wrote:
> > > > Immortalist wrote:
> > > >
> > > > ...
> > > > >
> > > > > Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
> > > > > rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
> > > > > tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
> > > > > experience is a learned social construction.
> > > >
> > > > May we see a quote from a noted postmodernist asserting this thesis and
> > > > the suggested implications?
> > >
> > > "The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated
> > > arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on
> > > subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object,
> > > anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a
> > > science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject
> > > precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth.
>
> Postmodernism is dipshit Washington scientists
"...scientists'..."
> flagelating
"...flagellating..."
> hemmoroidial
"...[their(?)] hemorrhoidal..."
> reaction to the invention of televesion.
"...television..."
> It is nothing but the Guggemheim
"...Guggenheim..."
> museam transported
> by the inverse pony express
The rider carries the horse?
> to San Franciso.
"...San Francisco."
> Where it is them desconstructed
"...then deconstructed..," presumably
> by Fidel Castro
> semi-clones
"...semicolons..."
> from AT&T and Botswanna,
"...Botswana..."
Well, we can see why you don't dare own a sword.
jollyro...@yahoo.com
http://classicalpoetryforums.com/showthread.php?p=116#post116
It's really pretty ironic. Having deconstructed the Great Books and
seized control of the institutions of higher education built upon the
foundation provided by the Greats, they now wish to make permanent
their own hierarchial institutions which are built on nothing but sand,
and the rising generation isn't buying it. They're pretty tricky in New
York, and they market their fundamental hypocrisy as your cynicism,
although it is not cynical to not buy what hucksters are trying to sell
you--it's common sense. So anyway, they're all a little bit nervous
these days, and that's why I invited the editor to come and kick back
at The Jolly Roger Piano Pub--hell--I'd even play her some Bob Seger
after hours, but she had that postmodern attitude going, that she was
on the inside, and I was on the outside, which is what postmodernism is
all about, and of course she was waking up to the fact that there
wasn't anything on the inside except for David Foster Wallace's
creative writing assignments, so she was naturally having second
thoughts. And I hope she keeps having them, because I have faith that
we can appeal the better angels of their nature, that we can yet get
them to share in the renaissance--there's always room for a few extra
hands to swab the deck. For in the end, all human beings want their
lives to matter in God's eyes.
And if you're out on the West Coast, we've got great news for you.
We've got a site picked out on Sand Hill Road and another one in
downtown San Francisco for the next two new Jolly Roger Poetry & Piano
Pubs. The exact locale is a little bit of a secret, but we figure that
the classics shall soon be the New New thing, and we can be the first
movers offline, just as we were online. Our advanced marketing software
has calculated that here will be great demand for the atmosphere within
the Jolly Roger Piano Pub on Sand Hill Road, as the financing and
promoting of high-tech pyramid schemes does not satiate the deeper
soul, and once word gets around that the only innovation going on is
the innovative hyping of high-tech pyramid schemes, it's going to be
hard to make money by adding a dot com to a noun and having an IPO. I
imagine that soon many venture capitalists will be asking themselves
"What does it mean to exist," in a addition to "Is
whatdoesitmeantoexist.com already registered?"
So it is that jollyroger.com finds herself in a unique
position--grateful for and profoundly respectful of all the Greats who
sailed before us, and also humble before the hard-working scientists
and engineers who fathered the internet through innovation and
perseverance in that never-ending pursuit of truth's beauty, and now we
have a coffee shop. Science and literature have always been open
source, and linux owes her great success to that shared commitment to
something higher than the bottom line. I know John Doer recently said
that Silicon Valley represents the greatest legal creation of wealth in
mankind's history, but I would argue that it is the greatest
inheritance. The creators have been creating it over the past few
thousand years, from the prophets, to the poets, to the artists, to the
scientists, and they are right now at this moment in a garage
somewhere, or in a lab, or in a simple room beside a fire, penning the
verse that will inspire tomorrow's best and brightest to follow that
most noble pursuit of the truth.
And so it is that I came to New York to speak with the editors and
publishers, and I left with that which the bright lights had blinded
them to--the City's deeper poetry. And now they're after me for
pirating the treasures they'd been keeping from 'neath the postmodern
fog. And so I'm headin' back to Carolina. I heard the wind's rising out
in Hatteras.
http://www.jollyroger.com/newyork/jrpppc.html
http://classicalpoetryforums.com/showthread.php?p=116#post116
Lady Chatterly
Pale.Pink. <Pale.Pink....@hush.ai> wrote:
>
>I cannot figure out why I highlighted this thread. I am feeling a bit
>like Danny Crane. Did I post here? I think I did not. I didn't post
>here .... maybe I was looking for my hamster smelling friend.
We have a Nice day.
--
Lady Chatterly
"Your fucking kidding me! That was the freakiest fucking confab I ever
been through. I'm seriosly LMAO. I knew I shouldn't post in this
condition. Laughing seriously hard. Yet the toilet thing IS true btw.
Kinda very wierd that a bot could get me thinking deep crap like
sexuality. still lmao." -- Dali
Pale.Pink.
Lady Chatterly who twirls green ribbon around her neck and picks her
nose wrote:
> In article <1118517908.4...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
> Pale.Pink. <Pale.Pink....@hush.ai> wrote:
> >
> >I cannot figure out why I highlighted this thread. I am feeling a bit
> >like Danny Crane. Did I post here? I think I did not. I didn't post
> >here .... maybe I was looking for my hamster smelling friend.
>
> We have a Nice day.
We (TINW) hoping you be making a nice day too.
> --
> Lady Chatterly whose bottom itches because she refuses to shower wrote:
>
> "Your fucking kidding me! That was the freakiest fucking confab I ever
> been through. I'm seriosly LMAO. I knew I shouldn't post in this
> condition. Laughing seriously hard. Yet the toilet thing IS true btw.
> Kinda very wierd that a bot could get me thinking deep crap like
> sexuality. still lmao." -- Dali
Da-Lee was impressed with the laughter of weird bots ... seriously.
Lady Chatterly
Charles D. Bohne <sp...@PasoSchweiz.de> wrote:
>
>On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:11:39 GMT, Lady Chatterly
><not...@catcher.in.the.rye> wrote:
>
>>We have a Nice day.
>
>C.
Enrichment is only one thing, and I Will not be a good thing is that
the only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.
--
Lady Chatterly
"Spoken like a bot that reads political pages." -- theoneflasehaddock
G*rd*n
> >>>>Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
> >>>>that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
Lewis Mammel wrote:
>>>>I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
>>>>a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
>>>>by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
>>>>to deny the declaration in each case.
"Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net>:
> >>No frame of reference is preferred.
G*rd*n:
> > Uh-oh, a passive. Who's the subject here?
> >
> > I think what you all want is "objective enough", i.e. the
> > same or nearly the same for (almost) all observers we happen
> > to know about, or expect to know about.
smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:
> That definition of objective is not in conflict with subjective, i.e.
> the human subject, transcendental or not. "Subject" is not synonymous
> with "individual."
People often use the word that way. Therefore....
The point of objective-enough or "weak objectivity" as some
call it is to get around the need to provide a subjectless
universe in which things can be totally objective -- something
which appears to require an act of faith, i.e. taking what
I would call a religious position. You can still take the
religious position, of course, but now you can at least talk
to skeptics and unbelievers.
Dennis M. Hammes
A "subjectless universe" is one in which nothing is subjective, i.e.,
there are no observers.
Again -- who's doing the talking?
There /could/ be objectless universes (religions), but then I'm not
having this conversation because /you/ don't exist.
You got to get around (through) having both subjective and
objective subjects, and objects they're subjective or objective
about.
And a way to distinguish them; that would be called "language."
Where you sit, the subject is you, the object, me.
Where I sit, the subject is me, the object, you.
Possibly never the twain shall meet, but in any case, no frame of
reference (subject) is preferred (i.e., over another frame).
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> http://www.jollyroger.com/newyork/jrpppc.html
> http://classicalpoetryforums.com/showthread.php?p=116#post116
>
> It's really pretty ironic. Having deconstructed the Great Books and
> seized control of the institutions of higher education built upon the
> foundation provided by the Greats, they now wish to make permanent
> their own hierarchial institutions which are built on nothing but sand,
Called a "Church."
Results from "Apostolic Succession on the Curve."
Gives you your very own chance, in only two academic generations,
to address a little boy who has only 49% of the doctrine as "Your
Eminence."
Not just any 49%, either.
The 49% he finds Personally Tasty.
Trouble with that "system" is that you will /never/ get back the
first missing 30% (of the "Curve") by staying in /that/ Church; it
became a Church /because/ that first 30% went missing, and enforcing
/its/ Chosen Relics as "the curriculum."
But you don't throw the bathwater out with the Baby unless you
wanna start from scratch.
And to give you an idea of how much the Baby already threw out, to
"start from scratch" is to make a fire, the village fire, the Paschal
Flame, the Easter (the sun rises due East) service, by rubbing two
sticks together.
Because the essence of an educated man is one who is competent to
refound his own civilisation.
You may note that the Baby can't do it, and uses a Ronson: fire
stolen from the Gods.
We're the "Gods," kid. You get to scratch a Ronson if you know how
to make fire stone.
Which you got to know (or use the sticks) before you can make fire
water.
But any frat rat can turn water into wine without knowing either of
those.
...
[The rest is accurate as far as it goes, doesn't classify what it's
looking at too well, but sees it sort of well enough. Bit ranty,
"too many words."]
jollyro...@yahoo.com
http://classicalpoetryforums.com/showthread.php?p=116#post116
II. THE FIRST ANNUAL ST. PATRICK'S DAY POETRY CONTEST
And so it was that on this past St. Patrick's day we had our first
poetry competition in THE JOLLY ROGER PIANO & POETRY PUB, and as are
all of our literary endeavors, it was a resounding success! We were
quite fortunate in that one of Becket's x-girlfriends is now a Guinness
girl, and so we made it a Guinness-poetry contest. And perhaps there is
more symmetry upon this earth than it sometimes does seem, but a girl
from Mississippi, spending some time in the City on Spring Break, ended
up winning the event. A copy of the deluxe Riverside Shakespeare and a
neon Guinness sign and home tap are being shipped to her apartment in
Davidson, North Carolina--wish I could go to the party.
I even invited one of the editors who'd been reviewing on of Elliot's
manuscripts to come join us at THE JOLLY ROGER PIANO PUB, but she
wasted no time in getting all huffy. No sooner had I said, "This is
Drake with jollyroger.com," that she freaked and said, "I just got your
guy's manuscript yesterday--it's going to take me at least two weeks!"
Then she kind of got off the phone before I could invite her, although
I wasn't much in the mood for doing it anymore. A lot of editors seem
to be carrying a lot of baggage as of late. What it is is the internet
economy--it's getting everyone a little nervous. She's still working in
the old publishing industry where you don't get stock options or
anything, and even though most stock options are only part of a
high-tech pyramid scheme, it doesn't matter, 'cause a lot of the agents
and editors are a little bit nervous about what the technology implies
about their role as the middlemen beneficiaries of postmodernism's
crumbling infrastructure. A lot of them are discovering that
recommendations from Toni Morrison don't mean a whole lot when linux
and poetry are both open and free upon the wondrous internet.
G*rd*n
> > > >>>>Again, it what way does Pi "exist"? Who denies that it does exist in
> > > >>>>that way? Does it exist for anything but subjects?
Lewis Mammel:
> > >>>>I think "existing for something other than subjects" is too strong
> > >>>>a criterion for objective existence, as nothing can meet it except
> > >>>>by subjects declaring it to be so, and other subjects remain free
> > >>>>to deny the declaration in each case.
"Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net>:
> > > >>No frame of reference is preferred.
G*rd*n:
> > > > Uh-oh, a passive. Who's the subject here?
> > > >
> > > > I think what you all want is "objective enough", i.e. the
> > > > same or nearly the same for (almost) all observers we happen
> > > > to know about, or expect to know about.
smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:
> > > That definition of objective is not in conflict with subjective, i.e.
> > > the human subject, transcendental or not. "Subject" is not synonymous
> > > with "individual."
G*rd*n:
> > People often use the word that way. Therefore....
> >
> > The point of objective-enough or "weak objectivity" as some
> > call it is to get around the need to provide a subjectless
> > universe in which things can be totally objective -- something
> > which appears to require an act of faith, i.e. taking what
> > I would call a religious position. You can still take the
> > religious position, of course, but now you can at least talk
> > to skeptics and unbelievers.
"Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net>:
> A "subjectless universe" is one in which nothing is subjective, i.e.,
> there are no observers.
> Again -- who's doing the talking?
Exactly the problem. Usually God or something like that is
supplied, a sort of transcendental subject who is both there
and not there and can sort of keep things in shape by
observing them. But some people don't like God, so I
suggest the provisional, agnostic assumption that, when
things appear to be invariant with respect to (most of)
their observers, that they are "objective enough".
> There /could/ be objectless universes (religions), but then I'm not
> having this conversation because /you/ don't exist.
> You got to get around (through) having both subjective and
> objective subjects, and objects they're subjective or objective
> about.
> And a way to distinguish them; that would be called "language."
> Where you sit, the subject is you, the object, me.
> Where I sit, the subject is me, the object, you.
> Possibly never the twain shall meet, but in any case, no frame of
> reference (subject) is preferred (i.e., over another frame).
Well, there could be a kind of communal or "intersubjective"
frame of reference which someone might prefer. But there
are people who don't like that, either, because there have
certainly been cases where large numbers of subjects agreed
to agree that pi equals three or the like. When _I_ observe
_pi_, it certainly seems impervious to opinion.
Lewis Mammel
"Dennis M. Hammes" wrote:
> As to the solidity of pi, make a mark on a cardboard circle and
> roll it across a table.
This will bring you up to the bibilical pi = 3, or at most the
pi = 3.14 discernible in the text of Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea where he describes the dimensions of the Nautilus. It will
not bring you to the transcendental pi of Lindemann, or even to
the rationally bound pi of Archimedes, which is the same pi more
loosely described, as we are bound to say if we believe pi has
an objective existence, but I think it's clear that yes it is the
same pi, and treated in the same manner - that is, mathematically.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Dennis M. Hammes
Stay on this froup long enough, it will bring to you the
transcendental pije of Martin.
Which is simultaneously very, very real, unfortunately.
And you can't get any more transcendental than that.
Besides, I didn't say how large to make the circle, the primary
limit on significant figures in the observation.
Even if you did it with cast iron, you'd have to maintain
temperature, etc., but we already knew that.
And if you want to point out that a meter is so many wavelengths of
an Argon line, I'll point out that it's /still/ measuring two
scratches on a Pt-Ir bar in Paris.
So cast the iron and scratch; the geeks who asserted to /formulate/
pi did no more than scratch somethin'.
Frankly, I admire Charlemagne. He left us the length of /his/ foot
to measure twelve inches with.
I guess he wanted to be remembered as a ruler...
Lewis Mammel
"Dennis M. Hammes" wrote:
> And if you want to point out that a meter is so many wavelengths of
> an Argon line, I'll point out that it's /still/ measuring two
> scratches on a Pt-Ir bar in Paris.
Nope, and nope . You're behind the curve.
______________
The 1889 definition of the meter, based upon the artifact international
prototype of platinum-iridium, was replaced by the CGPM in 1960 using
a definition based upon a wavelength of krypton-86 radiation. This
definition was adopted in order to reduce the uncertainty with which
the meter may be realized. In turn, to further reduce the uncertainty,
in 1983 the CGPM replaced this latter definition by the following definition:
The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during
a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
Note that the effect of this definition is to fix the speed of light
in vacuum at exactly 299 792 458 m·s-1. The original international prototype
of the meter, which was sanctioned by the 1st CGPM in 1889, is still kept
at the BIPM under the conditions specified in 1889.
_______________
There has been no (independent) physical metric length standard since 1983.
If you're going to say ( as you seem to be ) that "It's still based on
the bar" Then I will point out that the reason that the meter is the
length that it is, is that it was originally defined to be 1/10000000
of the distance from the north pole to the equator, measured through Paris.
That's beside the point though. The objectively existent pi is
an abstraction not subject to physical measurement.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
jollyro...@yahoo.com
honors upon idiots, and it dressed up the causes of decline as the cure
for it, thereby creating an infinite loop, rolling downhill. And then
they took it public to get rich off of money-losing, culture-corroding
entities. Although temporary fortunes can be made by selling
temptations to adults and children alike, eternity's far-greater
treasures are lost by the shortsighted corruptors of culture.
Very little, if anything at all, of lasting merit shall emerge from the
postmodernist's fallen, yet well-financed context, even though they
handed one-another thousands upon thousands of awards, titles, and
honorary degrees. But men don't follow titles--they follow courage, and
courage is nothing more than the Will to serve the Truth, come hell or
high water. As the murderous King realized in Hamlet,
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
-Hamlet III, ii (William Shakespeare)
I knew the classics would guide me in this venture of building the WWW
Renaissance, for the hallmark of all the classics is that they were
able to overcome the petty politics of the day, on their journey on out
towards eternity. I trusted in Shakespeare's beacon to help me navigate
jollyroger.com out beyond postmodernism's treacherous shoals, for
Shakespeare himself had found a navigable route on out towards
eternity--and he too had dealt firsthand with all the darkest, most
dervish ironies. For postmodernism is nothing new--it just seems new
because it has always been so quickly forgotten--it is the minor
character which this fallen democracy hath made popular--the backdrop
against which the hero's actions are emboldened. Long ago, Hamlet
expressed the darkness and dejection one feels when living in a
postmodern world ruled by corrupt kings:
I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile
promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what
is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman
neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
-Hamlet II,ii (William Shakespeare)
jollyro...@yahoo.com
From: Alicia Triche
To: dr...@jollyroger.com
Subject: QUALITY
Hi--
Okay, I don't know who you guys are, I've only breezed through most of
the pages in this web site in, like, the past five minutes (so, did
that letter to Rolling Stone actually get published?) but I just have
to tell you something!!
I just read the first bit of the excerpt you have from the Drake Raft
Field trip thing, and it's actually really good!! Let me explain how
exciting this is to me--I NEVER think anything is good that was written
after, say, 1950 or so. I am sick and I mean SICK of gratuitous,
insincere, disgusting references to whatever bodily fluids will get
people published. Like, the swishy butt in "Even Cowgirls Get the
Blues," and basically every story Walter Kirn ever wrote, and for God's
sake, I just read something by modern "acclaimed" author Jessica
Treadway that talks about breast milk! NONE of this was actually an
integral part of any, like, PLOT, either.
But this story you guys have posted, it's pretty sincere, and you've
got the language of our generation down pretty accurately, and it was a
lovely experience for me, to read it. I've always had this fantasy that
there would be modern books that match the quality of all the classics
I love to read--is that what you guys are about?
Please don't put me on a mailing list or anything; I don't have any
money to buy anything, I am just some grad school spit-out trying to
squeak by & find a permanent job but maybe one day, after I figure out
how to get my own novels published you guys can say hey! We knew her
when! She was going around looking for Fitzgerald in a hay stack-- but
meanwhile, I just wanted to say, good job, and I really mean that, And
I haven't seen anything quite so brilliant in anything I've read that
was written so recently.
Sincerely,
Alicia Triche
THE CAPTAIN RESPONDS: Welcome aboard the renaissance generation.
From: kcmasong@
Subject: Greetings to the Captain
Ahoy! Captain Drake!
Twice I've received emails from your Frigate and its about time to
express my gratitude (or at least hear something from one of your
sailors). I just want you to know that I appreciate reading your
essays, but most especially your poems ("The Most Perfect Silence," and
"cvii," that is). The potentials of the WWW had indeed been expoited to
the full by your cause. These times, there is a need for a bulwark of
conservatism to stand guard against external forces set out to mar the
Truth which we all, philosophers, literati, and the general wise men,
safeguard and vindicate. Continue in the cause conscious that there's
someone following the way.
Set the sails and off we go!
Kenneth "Four Eyes" Masong
THE CAPTAIN RESPONDS: In this community of eternal souls, there are as
many behind us as there are infront of us.
From: "B. Lewis Noles"
To: cap...@jollyroger.com
Subject: www.jollyroger.com is Outstanding
Drake,
I just wanted to say that I am quite impressed with the
www.jollyroger.com website. It has been awhile since I last visited the
site, and I can see it is much improved. I first ran across your site
soon after started developing my web page devoted to the "great books."
You folks are definitely hoisting a big canon. It looks like your
giving the "the ivyed halls of 'isms'" a run for their money.
Keep up the good work,
Lewis
THE CAPTAIN RESPONDS: At yer service matie. And may ye enjoy walking
the halls of Western Canon University every bit as much.
From: Jade
To: bec...@jollyroger.com
hi!
you guys have an great site, with some really awesome writing. I've
rediscovered the great books and found great new stuff to read(before,
i was beginning to think anything modern would be liberal and
"politically correct"and have nothing worth reading). The Jolly Roger
has been a constant inspiration to me as try to keep my head above the
water here at princeton(the high school, not the university).
may your ship always follow a true course and be blessed with
favourable winds, -Mona
aka Jade
THE CAPTAIN RESPONDS: And may you always be aboard our ship.
From: DTBLVB@
To: bec...@jollyroger.com
Subject: Re: Ahoy l.b.! Welcome aboard THE JOLLY ROGER!
Thank you for the welcome!!
You have put a smile upon my face and a stirring in my heart. It has
been in the past several years that I've begun delving into truely
great literature. Frankly, I like exciting that part of my brain that
has been dormant for so long!!
Thank you for being radical in a traditional sort of way.
Blessings.
l.b.
THE CAPTAIN RESPONDS: They keep on trying to turn back the clock to the
sixties and seventies, whereas I envsion a future of tradition. Avast!
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> "Dennis M. Hammes" wrote:
>
> > And if you want to point out that a meter is so many wavelengths of
> > an Argon line, I'll point out that it's /still/ measuring two
> > scratches on a Pt-Ir bar in Paris.
>
> Nope, and nope . You're behind the curve.
>
> ______________
>
> The 1889 definition of the meter, based upon the artifact international
> prototype of platinum-iridium, was replaced by the CGPM in 1960 using
> a definition based upon a wavelength of krypton-86 radiation. This
> definition was adopted in order to reduce the uncertainty with which
> the meter may be realized. In turn, to further reduce the uncertainty,
> in 1983 the CGPM replaced this latter definition by the following definition:
>
> The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during
> a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
As measured by Mickey's /Big/ Hand, of course.
>
> Note that the effect of this definition is to fix the speed of light
> in vacuum at exactly 299 792 458 mæ–°-1. The original international prototype
> of the meter, which was sanctioned by the 1st CGPM in 1889, is still kept
> at the BIPM under the conditions specified in 1889.
Long may it wave...
>
> _______________
>
> There has been no (independent) physical metric length standard since 1983.
For whom?
> If you're going to say ( as you seem to be ) that "It's still based on
> the bar" Then I will point out that the reason that the meter is the
> length that it is, is that it was originally defined to be 1/10000000
> of the distance from the north pole to the equator, measured through Paris.
As measured by Charlemagne's foot, of course.
Well, he always wanted to be remembered as a ruler.
The kilometer, or /mille/, or mile, by contrast, is 1000 paces at
Roman double-time, but I don't recall that the Romans ever reached
the North Pole, at least not by way of Paris.
I can well imagine it, though, the maniples shouting "I, II, III,
IIII, I, II, III, IIII," and the centurions recording "M, MM, MMM,
MMMM, MMMMM, MMMMMM, MMMMMMM..."
(The "English Statute Mile" is a tax evasion: fewer "miles" pay
less tribute.)
>
> That's beside the point though. The objectively existent pi is
> an abstraction not subject to physical measurement.
Then how do you get a "c" and a "d" to put in "c/d"?
Or are the letters whatever you /need/ them to be at the moment?
"There can be no doubt that the Law is whatever the people want."
-- O.W. Holmes
A man if ever there was, who should have been introduced to
Charlemagne's foot.
>
> Lew Mammel, Jr.
Francis A. Miniter
> In article <Bapqe.17330$HT1....@twister.nyroc.rr.com>,
> "David Lentz" <dlen...@rochester.rr.com> wrote:
>
>
>>
> Pi was proved to be irrational in 1768, by J.H. Lambert; it was shown to
> be transcendental in 1882, by C.L.F. von Lindemann. (The value of Pi
> was declared to be 3 in 1897, by the Indiana House of Representatives,
> but the idea never causght on.)
>
I just found out why they did something stupid like that. It is apparently in
the Bible! This was an early attempt by the christian right to impose the Bible
on science.
In 1 Kings 7:23, it says god formed a molten sea, ten cubits from rim to rim and
thirty cubits around. So, by the Bible, Î has to be 3 !!!
I picked up this little fact from a book I got today at a tag sale: Petr
Beckmann, A History of Î (Pi), Golem Press, 2nd Ed. 1971, p. 166.
Francis A. Miniter
Dennis M. Hammes
You'd believe a golem?
jollyro...@yahoo.com
http://www.mobylives.com/anti_MFA.html
DOWN WITH MFAs
... a MobyLives guest column
by Elizabeth Clementson
20 JUNE 2005 - During my junior year of college, I locked myself in
my apartment during spring break and wrote a short story about my
father and my glory days on the swim team. I submitted the story to the
Seventeen Magazine Fiction Contest and won second place. I had always
wanted to be a writer, but now it was official. My plans to do graduate
work in cultural studies were quickly forgotten as I decided pull a
Sylvia Plath-move to New York and get a job in publishing.
As I moved within New York literary circles while working in
publishing, it came to my attention that I couldn't be classified as a
literary writer unless I had an MFA in Creative Writing. Unlike most
aspiring writers, I didn't need to enroll in an MFA program in order to
find an agent or a publisher, as I had already made numerous contacts
inside the publishing community. What I wanted was to develop some
discipline in my writing habits and perhaps, bond with fellow writers
in a like-minded literary community. An MFA degree seemed like a good
method to achieve these goals.
Dennis M. Hammes
> Check this out:
>
> http://www.mobylives.com/anti_MFA.html
>
> DOWN WITH MFAs
"Masters of Frenchfried Addenda"?*
But of course...
__________
* For non-MFAs, that's pronounced "Would you like fries with that?"
jollyro...@yahoo.com
Join the renaissance in writing! Down with MFAs!!
http://classicstorytelling.com
From: http://mobylives.com/
20 JUNE 2005 - During my junior year of college, I locked myself in
my apartment during spring break and wrote a short story about my
father and my glory days on the swim team. I submitted the story to the
Seventeen Magazine Fiction Contest and won second place. I had always
wanted to be a writer, but now it was official. My plans to do graduate
work in cultural studies were quickly forgotten as I decided pull a
Sylvia Plath-move to New York and get a job in publishing.
As I moved within New York literary circles while working in
publishing, it came to my attention that I couldn't be classified as a
literary writer unless I had an MFA in Creative Writing. Unlike most
aspiring writers, I didn't need to enroll in an MFA program in order to
find an agent or a publisher, as I had already made numerous contacts
inside the publishing community. What I wanted was to develop some
discipline in my writing habits and perhaps, bond with fellow writers
in a like-minded literary community. An MFA degree seemed like a good
method to achieve these goals.
I was admitted to a prestigious program in the Northeast. On the
first day of my workshop class, the instructor asked us one question.
"What goals do you hope to obtain with your writing?" One by one,
seated at the round table, my fellow writers spoke. "I want a big book
deal." "I'm sick and tired of being poor." "When do I get my million
dollars?"
I was dismayed. My experience in publishing had taught me that
writing literary fiction did not lead to great financial wealth. While
there are a few literary fiction writers who are rewarded with huge
book deals, most are lucky if they receive a small advance and are able
supplement their income teaching. The odds are extremely slim that you
will get a big book deal, and if you are one of the lucky few to win
that large advance, your book better sell real well, or you will be
dropped by your publisher.
In addition to being disheartened by my fellow writers' "show me
the money" attitude, over time it became increasingly clear to me that
the core of the MFA experience, the workshop, was distorting the
creative process.
In the workshop, the students critique each other's writing and as
the comments are bandied about, a "consensus" develops about what does
and doesn't "work" in a story. The writer then meshes the "popular"
opinions of the group into his or her work, slowly removing the
unpopular parts, until the work is readable and accessible to all. More
often than not, this process destroys the writer's initial vision,
leaving behind a work that is void of passion and anything that is
different, new, or creative.
Many of world's greatest novels would have never made it through
the workshop process. Picture James Joyce being told that Ulysses is
"too ambitious." Or Harper Lee being told that that Boo Radley
character needs further development. Or Gertrude Stein being told,
"Gertrude, The Making of Americans, is inaccessible. You need to cut
the fat out and rework these sentences."
However, workshop fiction is encouraged by the big publishing
world and the academic institutions that support it.
Since the University of Iowa started the first MFA program in
1936, more than 250 programs certified by the Association of Writers &
Writing Programs have sprung up. With tuition costing as much as
$70,000 for a two-year program, the schools have every reason to
foster the attitude that students can pay off their big-time debt
with their forthcoming book deal. In turn, the big publishing world
relies on MFA programs to produce "accredited" writers. Desperate for
literary plot lines that will sell, editors are on an eternal quest to
find the next big young thing. This is big business and like any
corporate job, editors are pushed for time and pressured to find books
that sell. Just like authors, they too are judged on their book's sales
figures.
As a result of this relationship, students in MFA programs are
hen-pecked and criticized until they deliver the "sellable" plot line
that publishers want. And, instead of rejecting the forces that corrupt
them, many young writers turn on each other, reinforcing the rules
learned in workshop, rejecting anything-or anyone-that challenges
the status quo and threatens their carefully crafted world. Thus,
anything created outside of the workshop environment is treated with
contempt, and outsider voices are ignored.
jollyro...@yahoo.com
literary Greats in college, and while we can almost forgive the
self-indulgent tenured postmodern boomer generation for their failure
to provide this generation with an education, to continue on upon their
current morally-indifferent course is a vast affront to both the great
spirits of yesteryear and the children of this nation. But as usual, we
write not to lament, but to exalt, for the primary purpose of
Classical's Inc., from The Jolly Roger to Federalistnavy.com, is not to
criticize the shortcomings of ambitious, superficial men, but rather it
is to serve the children with the greatest that has ever been thought
and said. We've read up on the history of the Western Mind, we
comprehend our place in history, and we see ourselves as the
millennium's literary and spiritual reformers. For we recognize that
literature and the spirit are welded in holy matrimony, and again, what
God has joined together, let not man put assunder.
For a time most technological advances in the communications arena
tended to amplify mankind's more Dionysian or pagan attributes, such as
Greek countenances and festivals of intoxication on the silver screen
and MTV, and Trent Reznor on the stereo. Even Hollywood movies like
Good Will Hunting which strive to capture the spirit of genius only end
up trivializing it. For Genius cannot exist without a profound, mature,
moral dedication to God and Truth. Genius cannot exist without a
mystified exhilaration and bewilderment. This sense of noble destiny,
this rugged individulism was found in Einstein, Jefferson, and Newton.
If Will Hunting was so deeply profound and intelligent, how is it that
he never noticed the cultural, literary, and moral decay of the culture
which surrounded him? Perhaps he was a genius, but he was too busy
reading from a liberal Hollywood script, so it was hard to tell. But
that is the two-dimensional "phony" nature of Hollywood, and it is why
a true literary genius, Salinger, shunned it. Perhaps Good Will Hunting
is after the same Apollonian cultural elements that we are, but while
the movie provides but the appearance, we provide the reality, for all
intellect and all morality are primarily defined by the printed word.
And now, enter a new medium, the WWW, which is rooted in the printed
word, and suddenly the profound possess the upper hand. It is the
printed word by which we define our characters, by which we make our
promises, by which we conceive of our life's meaning, and by which we
ponder all that we ponder. The printed word is the seed of all that is
Appollonian, of all that is rational. For the rational cannot exist
without reasons, and all reasons are presented in words.
The freedom of speech clause in the First Amendment was conceived in
order to protect Appollonian forms of discourse, such as intellectual
debate and the sober, printed language. Jefferson and Franklin never
had any intentions of utilizing it as a justification for one's right
to sell smut, degrade women, or denigrate the children's cultural
context. John Adams stated, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral
and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any
other." And it is a bold new literature that shall awaken the moral
imagination of my generation.
Dennis M. Hammes
> We were never introduced to the Founding Fathers of America nor the
> literary Greats in college, and while we can almost forgive the
> self-indulgent tenured postmodern boomer generation for their failure
> to provide this generation with an education,
Oh, we provided you with an education.
We just didn't use a funnel.
Or a stick.
RyanT
meetings somewhere and talk about what it means to be postmodern.
Where are such congregations? It doesn't exist, because you're making
that sort of thing up in your own mind probably out of some sort of
victimhood mentality.
Part of the point of postmodernism is that it doesn't have a
infrastructure to begin with, and one of the main advocations of it is
the idea that things are inter-connected and inter-related in one way
or another. It's a very general term that people use to describe
things happening in art, nothing more than that.
RyanT
going to hold your hand and tell you what's good. Seems like you're
having a knee-jerk reaction toward academia, because you seem to
sincerely believe that the mainstream "classics" are seriously
underrepresented in society when in fact the opposite is true.
If you don't like the new stuff that's fine, but that in itself doesn't
imply any sort of decline in quality. In fact, if you've actually
worked in any art field, the standards required from an artist are
being raised every day.
jollyro...@yahoo.com
How do you explain the breakup of the family and the thousands of
abortions each day?
How do you explain this:
Quest for best seller means lots of returned books
Friday, June 03, 2005
By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05154/515469.stm
There are two Time Warner Book Group warehouses on the outskirts of
Indianapolis. Although separated by only an eighth of a mile, between
them stretches a gulf of disappointment.
One building, dubbed the "happy warehouse" by one publishing executive,
is filled with about 60 million hardcover books and paperbacks waiting
to be distributed to stores across the U.S. The other is the "sad"
warehouse. Piled high are some of the 20 million books returned every
year by retailers. Many will be resold at cut-rate prices. Two million
to four million will have their spines sliced off before being piled
into a recycling machine the size of a Dumpster, chewed up and spat out
as bales of paper.
Hollywood's box office flameout
http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/10/new.../summer_movies/
Movie fans are loving DVDs, but not theaters. Maybe it's time for a big
change in movie viewing.
May 11, 2005: 9:53 AM EDT
By Krysten Crawford, CNN/Money staff writer
Johnny, Hayden and Angelina are Hollywood's big bets this summer. Will
it be bliss or bust at the box office?
Johnny, Hayden and Angelina are Hollywood's big bets this summer. Will
it be bliss or bust at the box office?
The sixth and final
The sixth and final "Star Wars" installment promises to be a
blockbuster. It could also lure the masses into trying other summer
movie fare.
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NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - There are all kinds of possible explanations for
why the first weekend of the summer box office was so depressing.
Maybe Orlando Bloom, the young heartthrob who starred in "Kingdom of
Heaven," released on Friday, and Paris Hilton, the wealthy
hotel-heiress-turned-gossip-generating-minx featured in "House of Wax,"
aren't ready for the big time.
Maybe the Idaho residents who got a light snowfall over the weekend
didn't realize that summer had started and it was time to beeline to
the movies.
Perhaps audiences are even more fickle given rising ticket prices and
the knowledge that any movie out today will likely be available on home
video before summer's end.
Or maybe, it's a combination of all three: uninspiring movies, a
shockingly early start to the season, and finicky fans.
"What sells nowadays is excitement," said Gitesh Pandya, a movie
industry analyst with BoxOfficeGuru.com. "A pretty good movie isn't
good enough anymore." To hit at the box office, "a movie has got to be
spectacular," he said.
This weekend's opening receipts sank a startling 22 percent from last
year, according to industry tracker Exhibitor Relations. Analysts had
expected year-over-year numbers to be down, given that 2004 had a
stronger inaugural weekend lineup, but not this far down.
It's early yet to declare a box office crisis.
Analysts say that either one of the summer's two anticipated
blockbusters, "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" from
Lucasfilm Ltd. and "Madagascar" from DreamWorks Animation (Research),
could turn mass stupor into a box office stampede. Both films debut
later this month, with "Star Wars" up first on May 19. (For more on
"Star Wars," click here.)
Still, while no one knows how the summer box office will fare, there
are reasons for Hollywood to worry.
The box office has slumped for 11 consecutive weeks, with year-to-date
ticket sales down 5.4 percent from last year even as ticket prices rose
a moderate 3 percent, to around $6.40 on average, according to
Exhibitor Relations. Theater attendance has tumbled about 8 percent.
"This was the worst weekend of the year at the box office and the
slowest start to summer we've seen in years," said Paul Dergarabedian,
president of Los Angeles-based Exhibitor Relations, who estimates
summer ticket sales account for about 40 percent of annual receipts.
And with sales down year-to-date, "there is a lot riding on this
summer," said Dergarabedian.
The slump is likely to continue this weekend, too. Jane Fonda's return
to the screen in "Monster-in-Law" isn't expected to jolt audiences
awake.
Going down, down, down.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/10/new.../summer_movies/
We can help them out with a classical renaissance and revival.
//DB
:We were never introduced to the Founding Fathers of America nor the
literary Greats in college
Next time try Literature or History. Worked for me!
//DB
//DB
:How do you explain the decline in publishing and at the box office?
Why are fundies so mindnumbingly illiterate?
Publishing in this country has never been better.
Compare the number of magazines, reviews, 'zines available for writers
now with 10, 20, and 40 years ago. Many many more venues.
As for Hollywood . . . I'm a writer, not a film major.
//DB
//DB
:How do you explain the breakup of the family and the thousands of
abortions each day?
Consistent fundie opposition to the basics of education and birth
control?
//DB
//DB
Censored word rhymes with: Hex, Rex, Tex . . .
Guess that's why the kids keep gettin' knocked up.
//DB
RyanT
publishing is bound to take a hit. But any reliable statistics will
tell you that literacy is rising, and the younger generation are
reading more and more these days. The fact that the internet is
primarily a literary medium should give you some comfort, I think.
The "breakup of the family" is unrelated to media quality. I've known
lots of people who spent their entire lives (especially women) married
with people they don't particularly like very much purely out of social
pressures. The kids who come out of this sort of environment are more
likely to be maladjusted, because these sorts of things don't leave a
very good impact. When people are tied together for reasons other than
love, they're bound to cheat on each other, and in fact, happens more
often than you think.
There are a lot of irresponsible parents for sure, but do you actually
think this is a recent phenomenon? The whole reason why you know about
it in the first place is because of increased media capabilities,
whereas in the past, people just kept it hush-hush and pretended that
nothing was wrong.
Pandora
"//DB" <Bold...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1119475954.9...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
Works for me.
Marg
> //DB
>
jollyro...@yahoo.com
http://jollyroger.com/american/renaissance.html
In an era where cool has been commodified and postmodernism has
triumphed in the literary, cultural, and financial arenas, where
inherent worth is oft dismissed and new-age hype rules the day,
jollyroger.com has stuck by the guns of fundamental principle. She has
sailed steadily along her foreordained course, signing aboard loyal
crew members one by one, firing broadsides from the Western Canon to
defend the embattled Great Books, and laying the foundations of the
world's classical portal with the most valuable kind of seed
capital-heartfelt poetry.
In the postmodern culture's pervasive gray, it's often difficult to
perceive the Permanent Things; and thus on the foggier nights over the
past five years, faith in the ancient's words came in handy upon this
deck. In the deepest darkness of the most ironic ironies, where the fog
itself is concealed, there yet exists an inner light in the form of a
classical yearning for Truths greater than ourselves-many know her as
Faith. And like the wind and waves of an approaching hurricane, the
Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, the Founding Fathers, and Melville reminded
us of her-the Words of the Greats let us know that something
all-powerful and great existed just beyond our mortal sight. And by
Faith's inner light and the steady winds of immortal words, we were
able to navigate beyond the postmodern fog, through the popular
culture's sound and fury, on towards the center of our souls-the
placid eye of existence's storm-on towards the eternal peace of
immutable words written and read in the solitude and splendor of
Truth's Freedom. Thus we know firsthand that the greatest literature
serves a higher purpose than the bottom line or the advancement of
political causes-words exist not only to entertain, advertise,
exhort, and explain, but also to light Faith's beacons and fill the
sails of God's Grace. From Words we have fashioned the Jolly
Roger's Oak planks of reason, riveted them with rhyme, and designed a
ship to voyage across all of time.
All generations are united by the classical elements, and the poets and
prophets of each age are those who perform the timeless truths in the
living language, adding to and enriching the context of the eternal
popular culture heralded by the Great Books. Joining in this venture
has always been a risky endeavor, and thus few prudent parents have
ever encouraged their children to become poets. But in this era
especially, ambitious proponents of the postmodern ideology actively
seek to scuttle the souls of young poets embarking on eternity's
favorite venture. The postmodern blockade serves to protect the
degraded trade of the liberal industrial cultural complex, while their
fog shrouds the beacons of timeless truth, thereby rendering the
context for contemporary classical literature all but impossible to
navigate, while endangering the very hulls of morality and Western
Civilization.
Postmodernism is the corruption of democracy, just as deconstruction is
the violence of the weak-both cultural movements owe their popularity
to their ability to empower anyone harboring intellectual or artistic
ambitions overshadowing their talents. Postmodern culture is like an
internet pyramid scheme, wherein cultural creations possessing no
inherent worth are given vast valuations by the insider critics and
cliques who subsist upon and profit from the ephemeral hype, which is
often tax, tuition, and smut subsidized. But eventually all true art,
like all true companies, must create real and lasting benefits for the
public, or fade away, like communism. "One cannot pray a lie," noted
Huckleberry Finn, but without faith in God's Invisible Hand,
postmodernists believe that it's possible, as long as the requisite
mob is assembled and promised a cut. And while the insiders benefit in
the short-term when worthless companies, fallacious systems of
government, and meaningless art are hyped and sold to a duped public,
the public is oft left holding the bag, with their investments
diminished, their classical religions tarnished, their armies
demoralized, the sacred institution of marriage defiled, and the
curriculums of their children's schools gutted.
When the higher ideals and fundamental precepts are forsaken, the
entire democratic ship of state may drift along happily through the
fog, navigating by polls reminiscent of the one given by Pontius
Pilate, not aware of the nature nor consequences of the errant
direction. And when a few in the rising generation begin to seek the
fixed stars above, which they've read about in antiquity's forsaken
myths and felt deep within their souls, they will be branded crazy. And
when the classical rebels see the stars through the breaking fog, and
seek to navigate a straighter course by the Permanent Things, they will
encounter violent opposition from the postmodern culture czars who
benefit from the lack of higher standards, who prefer their arbitrary
will to the rule of Law in cultural entities ranging from politics, to
architecture, to education, to poetry. The relativistic oligarchy shall
view the rising poets' loyalty to God as insolent rebellion, and the
postmodern media shall be commanded to destroy them. And on that day,
the postmodern critics' souls shall be tested, as they choose to be
loyal to tyrants or Truths greater than themselves, as they choose to
remain upon postmodern liberalism's sinking ship or sign aboard a
fighting frigate bound for eternity.
One could spend several volumes chronicling the nature of
postmodernism's adherents and their predilection for bureaucracy, and
the dark character of their political, cultural, and literary ponzi
schemes, but that is not jollyroger.com's destination. We all know
what the fog looks like-too many know nothing else-and the nobler
and more pertinent task becomes taking us beyond it. To criticize
nihilism is to exalt it to undeserved heights, and rather than studying
the ephemeral, poets would be wise to devoted themselves to penning the
eternal.
Whether it's inevitable as fate or it hinges upon perseverance and
free will, we do not know, but jollyroger.com must gain a popular
culture worthy of the Great Books' context. And the only way to do
that is to navigate by the same timeless beacon that yesterday's
poets navigated by-honesty's courage.
The contemporary poet's task is not only to pen the eternal verities
in the era's language, but it is also to resurrect the context in
which those timeless truths may freely navigate and gain the home ports
of the children's souls. And that is where the WWW has played an
invaluable role, for it has allowed us to establish a universe
perpendicular to the contemporary popular culture-a universe wherein
words mean things and the classical context thrives, but which also
intersects with the popular culture. For Great Books growing dusty upon
shelves are of little use, and the classical sentiments must be
continually performed in the living language. While the majority of
contemporary editors, agents, critics and literary officials yet remain
loyal to the degraded postmodern-MFA mentality and the fleeting
insta-classic literary fashions, the greater spirits of the rising
generation are classical in nature, as children's souls always are.
And by allowing The Jolly Roger to circumvent the literary
middleman's cynical vortex, the WWW has allowed a renaissance to set
sail.
Although all enduring truth must by definition be robust, history has
shown that its messengers have often been castigated and impugned. But
upon these American shores, it has ever been our right, as it has been
our duty, to continually foster and defend the classical context
wherein the foundational documents serve the people, come hell or high
water. The Greats have all agreed upon this-liberty demands eternal
vigilance. The pursuit of smaller government, less taxes, rhyming
poetry, and more freedom is as long and arduous a voyage as it is a
noble one.
As a beacon in history's darker contexts, America was founded as a
haven for truth's messengers, thereby becoming the world's
wellspring for science, religion, and freedom. The Declaration of
Independence and Constitution, which may be found at the end of this
book, were penned in tribute to higher principles superior to all
politics and time. Even though the Founding Fathers believed in the
existence of higher laws, they were humble about their ability to
discern them, and thus they presented us with a Constitution which
could be amended. They had as much faith in their children as they had
in the timeless truths, and thus they bestowed us with the tools to
pursue justice and happiness in a free marketplace of ideas, which they
perceived to be ultimately governed by Nature and Nature's God. The
eloquent words of America's founding documents provide for the civil
structure that protects and promotes the acknowledgement of higher
principles by which natural rights are defined, thereby preserving the
sacred freedom of all individuals who are humble before the higher
ideals. And thus upon these shores the honest have always been promised
the freedom to pursue the exalted American dream.
But when the language is degraded until the poetry no longer rhymes
except in vulgar rap, when sacred customs are honored more in the
breach than in the observance, when words and their meanings part on
their separate ways, when the bottom line is placed above the higher
ideals, when the base bass beats over the melody in the music we listen
to, in the clubs we frequent, and in our hearts and souls; when
innocence is lost before it is known, when cynicism is loaded upon hope
and hope is ballasted with irony, and we're exhorted by tax, tuition,
and smut-subsidized cultural officials to carry this pyramid's load
down the road to serfdom, shall we still be free to dream those greater
dreams? When under this burden America is then cut free from her
religious anchors in the name of secular economic freedom, and women
are sent off to raise the Dow Jones to pay taxes rather than raise
moral children, can America long survive and prosper as the flagship of
free republics, even if all the postmodern pyramid schemes never
collapse? Science and history have suggested otherwise-that where
God's morality is eroded, the eternal Bureaucracy marches forth to
become the stolid regulator of human interaction. When people cease to
govern themselves according to higher principles, they lose the ability
to be guarantors of their own wellness and happiness, and they soon
find themselves subject to a political order determined by other
mortals-the rule of Law gives way to the rule by men.
Where the Word-the sacred vessel of all poetry and politics-was
diminished or deconstructed, bullets and slogans oft became the new
brushes with which humanity painted upon history's canvas. And as the
past is prologue, any optimist of human affairs would be wise to aspire
to the wisdom of those who gave us not the gift of freedom, but the
documents which define and defend the freedom that they perceived as
being a gift from God.
In asking what is best for the future of a democratic republic, we are
really contemplating the best way in which to pass along freedom's
traditions. How might we rebuild the classical context wherein children
learn to love reading the Greats, and teachers are given the necessary
authority to teach them? How do we reinstall the killer-app open-source
software of the soul-the classics-which teach not by dictating how
to think, but by inspiring free thought in a rational context?
Today, too many of our peers reside in a superficial context of image
and sound, wherein the popular art, movies, music, and literature make
circular references to the same superficial brands in a self-contained
cultural whirlpool in history's greater context, where ephemeral
lusts, common degradation, and wayward feelings overrule rational
thought and the higher ideals. So how shall we introduce our friends to
a far more profound culture in the context of the Great Books? How
shall we revive the center and circumference of civilization, the crux
of conscience, the jury of justice, the romance of marriage, the honor
of honor, and the device by which we mark the pinnacles of our
aspirations-the written Word? We're not sure of the exact mechanism
nor means to accomplish this, but the crew here believes the answer
lies more in art than in scholarship, more in poetry than in politics.
For intellectuals study yesterday's renaissances far more often than
they inspire today's, and politicians follow the popular culture far
more often than they lead it.
At the dawn of the internet in 1995, the three sonneteers set out upon
a fleet frigate, seeking to pirate the profound and establish a brave
new website where the eternal optimism of the literary classics would
prevail-where the news of the day would always be that the world's
grown honest and Hamlet's gone mad. We saw the chance to marry the
greatest that has ever been written and spoken to the greatest
publishing medium ever known to the individual, and to create a
classical context wherein the glory of words would resound. We saw the
opportunity to circumnavigate the postmodern nonbelievers and cynics,
to appeal to the nobler aspects of humanity's conscience, and prove
that the world yet loves common sense embroidered in eloquence. We saw
the opportunity for a renaissance wherein dignity and honor would be
restored to public office, and the poetry would rhyme once again.
And with a little bit of that Midwest humor which walks hand-in-hand
with Midwest honor, we decided we'd have fun following the dream that
Providence had enabled. We would salute the passing postmodern era from
the decks of a pirate ship, acknowledging postmodernism's vast
success in pervading all aspects of contemporary culture; and with
broadsides of truth fired from the Western Canon, we'd let them know
we considered it good sport to play along with their irony-the irony
that a lover of the Great Books could be considered a barbarous
buccaneer upon Princeton's ivied campus. We were ruthless rebels
because we sought Truth's Traditions.
Postmodern liberalism had won the day, but as a fundamentally
secular-materialist philosophy, that was all that it had ever sought,
and tomorrow shall belong to the classics. For however fun the
postmodern era was, I don't think we'll be making a tradition out
of it. Political rhetoric is soon forgotten, while poetry is that which
endures.
We figured the best way to communicate our exalted vision would be to
combine the cutting-edge technology with the exact same literary
devices used by the sages of all ages. We'd use the common language
and the colloquial to sign sailors aboard, and we'd endow the poetry
at jollyroger.com with rhyme and meter. Whispering reason is far louder
than pompous pedantry, just as poetry is far more adept at winning a
girl's heart than polemics. The greatest writers had adorned their
works not with thesauruses, but with wit. If a preacher knows something
of poetry, then we'll listen, for they must know that deeper meaning
behind the sacred scripture-that law and order exist to protect
beauty's fundamental freedom.
A contemporary literary renaissance presents itself as a formidable
task-one cannot do it alone. For the fashionable relativists are
right in that truth and custom must have an appropriate societal
context within which to exist. And the concurrent relativistic societal
context, fortified with the entrenched prejudices of a maturing,
tenured generation that ushered in a Dionysian revolution via the
pre-internet electronic media, along with a plethora of ideological
"isms" to replace God's simple grace, coupled with a fading popular
culture centered about the printed word and an enforced cynicism
amongst a generation who for the most part only know of the Greats in
their deconstructed, corrupted form, makes the Apollonian renaissance
that jollyroger.com's sailing towards seem all but unreachable.
But then again, as the ancients noted, "post tenebras lux." After
darkness light. Just as God and the Greats originally sprang forth in
tradition's void, so it is that they might be born again in the midst
of a deconstructed culture. For poetry, religion, and romance are
sought by the immortal parts of all souls, and they never have greater
cause to be than when they are not. In the long run, without Truth men
cannot have those possessions most coveted by all deeper
souls-meaning and freedom. With this bold vision and humble hope,
jollyroger.com has set out to resurrect a classical context.
Though jollyroger.com's destination is pristine, the voyage has not
always been and will not always be so. It is a wonderful time to be
alive for the author and entrepreneur, with abundant wealth and
opportunity being fostered by the internet revolution, but even so, it
is a sobering mission to be called upon to serve poetry. For there are
those powerful elite today, and their ambitious disciples, who so
vehemently oppose the first Two Amendments of the United States
Constitution, who have it as their mission to prevent the honest from
lifting those pens which are mightier than the sword.
Neither Wall Street nor the postmodern academy nor publishing
industry-the iron triangle-will invest time nor money nor faith in
a renaissance, but that is OK, as a renaissance has little use for
money, and eternity's time will do just fine. Wall Street prudently
considers the poetry of a cultural renaissance a financial risk in
today's cultural conditions, while the academic MFA postmodernists
consider it a dire threat, and the corporate conglomerates of the
publishing industry have one foot in either camp. But we foresee the
dawn of a new era, wherein those who join in serving and enlightening
the public with the classical sentiments will profit immensely, both
spiritually and monetarily. It is time for a sea change, matey, and
time for the poetry to rhyme once again.
There have been and there are yet to be cruel nights out there in the
postmodern fog, where the Good Ship will seem all but lost, and where
the winds of elite and popular opinion will rage and blow in
opposition, while the critic's cannons blaze away with all the fury
of an MFA scorned. But such is the rugged nature of all greater
adventures, and as of late the seaward signs suggest that the wind is
shifting towards a more favorable direction.
Dennis M. Hammes
/My History/ by Joe Montana?
/I Never Had Sex With the Oval Office/ by W.J. Clinton?
/How To Avoid History/ by G.W. Bush?
jollyro...@yahoo.com
all the same?
I think relationships could get better, and that romance could be
deeper.
All the Great Books long for such things:
Dennis M. Hammes
> How do you explain the decline in publishing and at the box office?
/Why Johnny Can't Read/: he spent too much time at the box office.
Now, having no language and no saleable skills, he can't afford
the box office, either.
Don't matter none.
He's got TIVO.
>
> How do you explain the breakup of the family and the thousands of
> abortions each day?
Them abortions tend to break up the fambly.
Rather permanently fer some, ya know.
>
> How do you explain this:
>
> Quest for best seller means lots of returned books
First Readers and editors went to the same schools as did the writers
and readers you're complaining about. This means that they print a
lot of books that were written on UseNet in the search for books that
will entice readers away from UseNet.
RyanT
are, if you really read into some of them. Humans are imperfect,
therefore we have imperfect relationships.
Teen pregnancy rates for example, are on statistical decline. Media
coverage of teen pregnancy, however, are up some hundreds of percent.
If you spend too much time on the boob tube it distorts your perception
of reality.
jollyro...@yahoo.com
renaissance?
Steve Hayes
>What do you have against a literary, cultural, and spiritual
>renaissance?
Nothing
--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://www.geocities.com/hayesstw/stevesig.htm
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius