Literary Darwinism
Peter H.M. Brooks
mentioned a year or so ago:
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.philosophy.humanism/browse_frm/thread/eb2f5a2ddeb411cb/45687402c4c5a2cd?lnk=gst&q=%22evolutionary+literature%22&rnum=1&hl=en#45687402c4c5a2cd
Clearly the nonsense that has passed for teaching and rearch in some
English departments over the past several years had to go eventually,
this shows the way in which it is going.
Though this is clearly an important move towards rational analysis,
I'm not convinced that it is enough. Yes, once the centrality of the
author is restored (though the author/reader primacy debate is a
little like the old nature/nurture debate used to be), and it is again
understood that literature explores the essential nature of humanity,
a proper basis for discussion will, again, exist. However, more, I'm
sure, is required to restore proper discrimination to literary
criticism. Given a rational basis again, how can one recognise
excellence and how does Literary Darwinism help with this? How much is
the novel simply an entertainment, and how much is it pedagogic, in
fact, if not in intent - since we can, of course, still interpret what
is written, despite the primacy of the author?
Maybe, though, a useful doctorate could be produced that could
establish, from a Darwinian perspective, whether the story forms in
the Decamaron form, as some claim, an exhaustive collection of
possible plots.
I also wonder how productive analysis from the opposite perspective
can be. How much can literary analysis tell us about humanity as it
has evolved? How likely is it that an hypothesis, garnered from
literature, can provide a genuine, and testable, insight into our
evolutionary history and the value of certain evolved behaviour?
It would be nice to read good articles on how Jane Austin reveals the
particular importance of, say, class or manners or, indeed, irony in
human behaviour, and why it has evolved to be so.
"
Reading fiction with Darwin's eyes
* 03 March 2007
* From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free
issues.
* Jonathan Gottschall
MARXIST, radical feminist, Foucauldian, deconstructionist, post-
colonial and queer. It reads like the fight card for an ideological
battle royal. In fact, these are some of the major schools of thought
in literary criticism from the past 40 years - and they have much in
common. Central to these and all other approaches to understanding
literature that are influenced by post-structuralism is the idea that
there is no innate human nature. Nature is nurture, or, put another
way, our nature is simply to spoon up whatever culture happens to feed
us - and we are what we eat.
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human
mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the
craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their
heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure
out what makes them tick. Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have
ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our
understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary
biologists have irreparably shattered the blank slate, most students
of the humanities still insist that humans are born all but free of
any innate nature.
My fellow literary Darwinists and I hope to change their minds. By
applying evolution-based thinking to fiction, we believe we can
invigorate the study of literature, while at the same time mining an
untapped source of information for the scientific study of human
nature (see "Truth in fiction"). Darwinian thinking can help us better
understand why characters act and think as they do, why plots and
themes resonate within such very narrow bounds of variation, and the
ultimate reasons for the human animal's strange, ardent love affair
with stories. It may sound like an innocent endeavour, but this is
potentially revolutionary. If literary Darwinism is mainly right, then
much of what has been written and said in the realm of literary theory
and criticism in the second half of the 20th century is in need of
significant revision.
Literary Darwinism has emerged during a period of crisis in literary
studies. Enrolments and funding are in decline, books languish
unpublished as readerships dwindle, and prospects for new PhDs are
abysmal. Perhaps worst of all, literary scholars are at risk of being
presented as laughing stock by novelists and held up to ridicule by
satirical journalists. In short, there is a dreadful sense that the
whole reputation of the study of the humanities is in free fall. This
drop feels all the more vertiginous given the soaring stock of the
sciences. While many literary scholars have responded by trying to
knock science down a peg, literary Darwinists have taken the opposite
tack. We have posed two questions: what exactly is science doing right
that we are doing so wrong, and can we emulate it?
I began asking these questions in the mid-1990s while I was working
towards a PhD in English literature. At the time, I was sceptical of
much of what I was being told in my literary theory courses, but my
reasons were vague and disordered. These misgivings coalesced when I
chanced across a tattered copy of the zoologist Desmond Morris's book
The Naked Ape in a used-book store.
While the specifics of the 1960s best-seller were outdated by that
time, its general attitude toward human behaviour was not. Morris
argued that although humans have complicated culture and a stunning
capacity to learn, this does not change the fact that we are also
animals, vertebrates, mammals, primates and, ultimately, great apes.
Aspects of our culture and intelligence mean that we are different
from the other apes, but they do not emancipate us from biology or
lift us above other animals onto an exalted link of the chain of
being. What's more, it follows that the behavioural characteristics of
the human animal, just like the physical ones, should be understood as
the end products of a long evolutionary process. Morris did not claim
that this rendered all other perspectives on human behaviour obsolete,
just that an important fact had been neglected to the detriment of our
understanding: people are apes.
At exactly the same time I was reading The Naked Ape I was rereading
Homer's Iliad for a graduate seminar on the great epics. As always,
Homer made my bones flex and ache with the terror and beauty of the
human condition. But this time around I also experienced the Iliad as
a drama of naked apes - strutting, preening, fighting and bellowing
their power in fierce competition for social dominance, beautiful
women and material resources. Darwin's powerful lens brought sudden
coherence to my experience of the story, inspiring me to abandon my
half-drafted PhD dissertation and instead undertake a Darwinian
analysis of the Iliad.
"Darwin's powerful lens brought sudden coherence to my experience of
Homer's Iliad"
The study began with a simple observation. Intense competition between
great apes, as described both by Homer and by primatologists,
frequently boils down to precisely the same thing: access to females.
In Homer, conflicts over Helen, Penelope and the slave girl Briseis
are just the tip of the iceberg. The Trojan war is not only fought
over Helen, it is fought over Hector's Andromache and all the nameless
women of ordinary Trojan men. "Don't anyone hurry to return homeward
until after he has lain down alongside a wife of some Trojan," the old
counsellor Nestor exhorts the Greeks. Capturing women was not just a
perk of war, it was one of the important reasons for war. Achilles
conveys this in his soul-searching assessment of his life as warrior:
"I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle,
fighting men for their women."
The intense competition for women suggests they were scarce. Some
scholars have raised the possibility that Homeric peoples, including
the Greeks of the 8th century BC, practised female infanticide. I
argue that a potentially more important cultural practice has been
overlooked. Although Homeric men did not have multiple wives, most
leading men were polygynous: in addition to their wives they hoarded
slave women who they treated as their sexual property. For every extra
woman possessed by a high-status man, some less fortunate or less
formidable Greek lacked a wife. Comparative anthropology shows that
the results of such a situation are all but guaranteed. Wherever there
are "missing females" - from modern China and India to ancient Greece
- there will be strife over women and fierce competition among men for
the wealth and prestige needed to attract them.
My study of Homer is informed by insights from a range of sciences
including evolutionary biology, behavioural genetics, evolutionary and
developmental psychology and cognitive science - what Harvard
University psychologist Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human
nature". But while the theory driving the study is scientific, the
methods are not. Lately, however, my colleagues and I have been
seeking to apply scientific methods in our investigations of
literature.
These efforts crash up against the scepticism of our peers - against a
widespread feeling that any attempt to formulate a "literary science"
is risibly oxymoronic. Our critics argue that literary scholars -
Marxists, psychoanalysts, structuralists - have repeatedly tried to
make the discipline more scientific, and that these miserable
experiments in science-envy have always ended in farce. This is true,
but literary Darwinism is different. While these approaches imported
concepts, jargon and data from more scientific fields, they never
attempted to adopt the scientific method, developing competing
hypotheses and empirically testing them. To anyone who wonders how
there can be a science of literature that assigns numbers to the riot
of information conveyed in a text, we answer that it is not easy, but
it can be done.
"Any attempt to formulate a 'literary science' is widely seen as
laughably oxymoronic"
Victorian values
Take the study recently completed by the leading figure in literary
Darwinism, Joseph Carroll from the University of Missouri-St Louis, in
collaboration with myself and two psychologists, John Johnson from
Pennsylvania State University in DuBois and Daniel Kruger from the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This was a web-based survey of
more than 500 avid readers, designed to test specific hypotheses at
the nexus of literature and evolutionary science. Respondents answered
questions about the motives, mate-selection strategies and
personalities of 144 principal characters in a broad selection of
Victorian novels, and also rated their own emotional responses to the
characters.
What did we find? First, that readers' responses reflect an evolved
psychological tendency to envision human social relations as morally
polarised struggles between "us" and "them". Protagonists and their
allies form cooperative communities which readers empathise with and
participate vicariously in. By contrast, readers tend to view
antagonists and their allies as an "out-group" - a malign force,
motivated by a desire for social dominance as an end in itself, that
threatens the very principle of community.
In addition, the data also allowed us to weigh in on some old and
acrimonious literary debates. For instance, scholars have long argued
about whether authors tightly control literary meaning, or whether
readers create their own highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the
novels they read. In recent decades the most influential figures in
literary analysis have promoted the latter view, spawning the mantra
of "the death of the author". Our findings contradict this. While
readers do vary in their emotional and analytical responses, the
variation is contained within tight boundaries. At least as far as the
Victorian novel goes, the author is alive and well, expertly
orchestrating reader response.
To take one more example, feminist scholars have long maintained that
European fairy tales wantonly inflict psychic violence upon the
vulnerable minds of children, especially girls, by promoting
stereotypical gender roles. They maintain that images of swashbuckling
heroes and beautiful young maidens yearning for dashing princes are
not in any sense "natural", but instead reflect and perpetuate the
arbitrary gender arrangements of patriarchal western culture. To test
this assertion I convened a team of content analysts to gather
quantitative data on the depiction of folk-tale characters from all
around the world. What we found was that the feminist critique is both
right and wrong. European tales do portray males as more active and
more physically courageous, while females are much less likely to be
the main character, and have far more emphasis placed on their beauty.
But it also became clear that these stereotypes are not merely
constructed to reinforce male hegemony in western societies. We
encountered precisely the same gender descriptions wherever we moved
through the landscape of world folk tales - across continents,
cultures and centuries, and in all societies from hunter-gatherer to
pre-industrial. While cultural attitudes undeniably influence gender
identity, some differences between male and female folk-tale
characters are universal, perhaps because they have deep roots in
biological differences between the two sexes.
Without doubt literary Darwinism is still at a stage of adolescent
awkwardness. Nevertheless, we believe our approach has the potential
to breathe new life into a struggling field. In literary studies,
faulty theories of human nature have given rise to faulty theories of
literature, which have in turn generated faulty hypotheses. What's
more, because literary methods are exclusively non-quantitative and
often impressionistic, these hypotheses have rarely been
systematically tested. As a result, literary scholars have seldom
produced knowledge that can withstand the critiques of the next
generation. At least literary Darwinism offers hope of breaking out of
this cycle. At best we will start to build a literary understanding
that can progress in much the same way that science progresses. Sure,
it is a bold experiment that may not succeed, but what experiment
worth doing is risk free?
Jonathan Gottschall teaches English literature at Washington and
Jefferson College, Washington, Pennsylvania, and is co-editor with
David Sloan Wilson of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the nature of
narrative (Northwestern, 2005). His new book The Rape of Troy:
Evolution, violence, and the world of Homer will be published by
Cambridge University Press later this year
>From issue 2593 of New Scientist magazine, 03 March 2007, page 38-41
Truth in fiction
By seeing literature in the light of evolutionary biology, literary
Darwinism can give fresh insights into old narratives (see main story)
and a new repository of data with which scientific ideas about human
behaviour, psychology, cognition and culture can be tested.
THE BEAUTY MYTH: Writer Naomi Wolf asserts that the emphasis we put on
women's beauty is part of a socially constructed western "beauty
myth". Evolutionary psychologists suspect that it is a pan-human
evolutionary legacy. Who is correct? My colleagues and I addressed
this question using computer-aided content analyses of collections of
folk tales from across the globe. We found that female characters
across scores of traditional societies were between two and six times
more likely to be described with a reference to their attractiveness
than males. Wolf's notion of the "beauty myth" may itself be
mythological (Human Nature, in press).
The hourglass figure: In the same vein, Wolf and others maintain that
perceptions of attractiveness are subjective, culture-specific and
ever-changing. Evolutionary psychologists, however, see beauty as an
indicator of good health, fertility and genetic quality, so that
certain aspects of attractiveness should remain constant across
cultures and time. In particular, Devendra Singh from the University
of Texas at Austin has famously argued that a low waist to hip ratio
in women is a sign of youth and fertility, giving an evolutionary
explanation for why men find women with hourglass figures more
attractive. Early this year he and colleagues presented findings from
a search of literature from the UK, India and China, spanning the
16th, 17th and 18th centuries, which revealed that these stories
consistently portrayed women with a small waist as beautiful. This
cross-cultural and cross-historical consensus, formed before the
advent of mass media and without the benefit of modern scientific
knowledge, suggests that beauty does indeed have a biological basis
(Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 274, p 891).
ROMANTIC LOVE: Academics routinely claim that romantic love is not a
universal human emotion. Some have even specified the time and place
it was invented, claiming it was the creation of troubadours in 12th-
century France. Analysis of folk tales offers a way to test these
ideas. In a study published last year, Marcus Nordlund from Gothenburg
University, colleagues at St Lawrence University and I coordinated a
content analysis that found salient depictions of romantic love in
folk-tale traditions broadly scattered in space and time. Either
people everywhere have independently learned to respond to each other
in this way, or romantic love is an innate part of human nature
evolved by natural selection (Philosophy and Literature, vol 30, p
450).
"
Purl Gurl
> This rather good post from the New Scientist adds to the topic
> mentioned a year or so ago:
(snipped approximately three kilometers of text)
I have carefully read your article, twice. I have carefully
read your linked material, twice.
A sincere critique for you. Your writings are so dis-jointed,
so rambling, so scatter brained, so skittish, it is highly
unlikely, no, more than unlikely, it is a certainty even the most
seasoned of readers will not be able to make a cow lick of sense
of your writings.
Only notion you did not discuss, is the ageless kitchen sink.
Purl Gurl
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
> (snipped approximately three kilometers of text)
>
> I have carefully read your article, twice. I have carefully
> read your linked material, twice.
>
to find people fairly able readers. Most of the posting was, of
course, from a popular magazine, the New Scientist, which tries hard,
sometimes, I fear, too hard, to make its prose simple.
The author was also a Yank, but is a Professor of Literature, so it's
possible that that made it go over your head.
Just for fun, I've checked the readability statistics and they give a
Flesch-Kincade grade level of 12.0, and a Flesch reading ease of 30.2.
I think that this puts the finger on your problem. Simple text
normally has a reading ease of around 70, so this is about twice as
difficult to read. Things written for general publication (to the
'intelligent adult') assume a 'grade level' of 7-8, so 12 is assuming
a reasonably well educated and literate person.
I don't think that I'm going to try to rewrite the article nice and
simply for you, though, as the subject matter is only likely to
interest people who either have an interest in literary criticism or
in applied evolutionary theory - such people usually have a level of
education higher than the notional 'grade level' of 12.
Douglas Clark
posts.
--
Douglas Clark ..................... Bath, Somerset, UK ......
http://usergroup.plus.net .......... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <Peter.H....@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1174182923.0...@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
J Seymour MacNicely
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <Peter.H....@gmail.com> wrote in message news:
1174182923.0...@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> While the specifics of the 1960s best-seller were outdated by that
> time, its general attitude toward human behaviour was not. Morris
> argued that although humans have complicated culture and a stunning
> capacity to learn, this does not change the fact that we are also
> animals, vertebrates, mammals, primates and, ultimately, great apes.
> Aspects of our culture and intelligence mean that we are different
> from the other apes, but they do not emancipate us from biology or
> lift us above other animals onto an exalted link of the chain of
> being.
Desmond Morris *and* Robert Ardrey are both to be looked into as to
this theme of thought, and then compared with some of the thinking of
Camille Paglia who acknowledges the determinism of nature, and with
Freud posits the primacy of the 'drives' as the remnant of instinct in
human nature. BUT, even in spite of that, she sees the presence of
Free Will arising from human intelligence and culture in such a way
that war may be declared against Nature!
I don't know however, that she contemplates a psychological and social
toll of the casualties that must come of such a Promethean quest, as
she would hold forth a torch to be borne by feminism, grounded in a
sort of Social Darwinism that squarely and unflinchingly faces e.g.,
abortion for the brutal act of war that it is, that it can only be.
She sees Nature as a nemesis to womankind that will keep her under an
evolutionary thumb of submission--unless she recognizes that her Free
Will can rule to procure an emancipation which cannot be had except
blood be shed.
It's damned near religious according to the most ancient practice of
the thing. I would not argue with her that humankind can indeed set
itself at odds with human nature, as back during the Sixties, along
with others of my generation, I did a fair amount of that kind of
battle myself, felt and experienced the emancipation--or shall we say
the promise of a 'salvation'--that the Paglia sees for much less, as
merely the gendered liberation of such a quest.
But then, as the whole thing came crashing down to bury me and mine
under the crushing weight of an immense psychological, social and
political load of rubble, it was then that words from a silly pop-
culture TV jingle of the time began to ring oh, so too, too true, as
to how "It isn't nice to fool with Mother Nature."
Could it have been otherwise, had Kent State, Manson and Altamont
never happened? Even despite such a miserable defeat, could it be
ventured again and brought to success, the big flower-powered break-
through to the other side of those exploding Doors guarding the portal
of man's Natural human condition? I know this . . .
It all depends, as Marvin Gaye once said upon What's Goin' On. Let
them reinstitute the draft, render a sense into the souls of every boy
and girl that his own government has but one aim in mind, to send 'em
all to the Killing Fields--then just see what happens. But short of
something so apocalyptic as that, a better chance at human happiness
does depend upon the view that Mother Nature Rules.
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
Chapter XX: Night of the Dragons
"When you get to be the Devil."
Jack Campin - bogus address
> reads my posts.
I think I responded to it.
Glib neo-Victorian crap that only looks superficially plausible
because it ignores pretty much everything anthropologists have
discovered in the last hundred years.
============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557
Peter H.M. Brooks
<mac_the_n...@bigstring.com> wrote:
> "Peter H.M. Brooks" <Peter.H.M.Bro...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:
> 1174182923.023471.124...@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>
> > While the specifics of the 1960s best-seller were outdated by that
> > time, its general attitude toward human behaviour was not. Morris
> > argued that although humans have complicated culture and a stunning
> > capacity to learn, this does not change the fact that we are also
> > animals, vertebrates, mammals, primates and, ultimately, great apes.
> > Aspects of our culture and intelligence mean that we are different
> > from the other apes, but they do not emancipate us from biology or
> > lift us above other animals onto an exalted link of the chain of
> > being.
>
> Desmond Morris *and* Robert Ardrey are both to be looked into as to
> this theme of thought, and then compared with some of the thinking of
> Camille Paglia who acknowledges the determinism of nature, and with
> Freud posits the primacy of the 'drives' as the remnant of instinct in
> human nature. BUT, even in spite of that, she sees the presence of
> Free Will arising from human intelligence and culture in such a way
> that war may be declared against Nature!
>
rather out of date considering the massive explosion of knowledge in
the field since then!
As I tried to hint, the debate on the matter is closed, only
journalists believe that there are supporters of a 'nature only'
hypothesis at war with some 'nurture only' group. We, and our
behaviour, are the result of evolutionary processes, but these involve
both our genes and our upbringing, to deny either is simply foolish.
'Free Will' is more a matter of defining what you mean by the term
than anything else, but, clearly, if it exists in any sense, it is
part of nature, it couldn't be otherwise. If you fight with what you
imagine as nature, then that's because you have a natural inclination
for tilting at windmills, not because you're somehow outside the
natural world.
What's interesting, unless your an historian, in Literary Darwinism is
the implications of taking up what is known to be the case in
literature and approaching the sort of questions I suggested in my
first post. Discussing notions that Freud might have had isn't that
helpful, unless you think that Freud is best read as literature, which
might be another interesting angle.
J Seymour MacNicely
wrote:
I'll take this up with you again, tomorrow perhaps, when there's time,
to question a couple of your assumptions: a) that there is any new
knowledge worthy of the name on the subject, and b) that Freud is so
easily to be dismissed by dint of that alleged "new knowledge" and/or
whatever irrelevant ad hominem slander remains current against him,
coming from precisely the sort of neurotics who find it easier to burn
the books that define what their neurosis amounts to, than face up to
it, in what Nature will, in fact, insist upon, in the way of providing
for some modicum of authentic human well-being.
But before going on with it, there remains this . . .
--
Peter H.M. Brooks
<b...@purr.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > I posted this to rab on March 1st. Just demonstrates that nobody
> > reads my posts.
>
> I think I responded to it.
>
> Glib neo-Victorian crap that only looks superficially plausible
> because it ignores pretty much everything anthropologists have
> discovered in the last hundred years.
>
Just out of interest, though, what is it that you think
anthropologists have actually discovered - your aren't prehaps
thinking of Margeret Mead's inventions, are you?
Peter H.M. Brooks
you've got tons of exciting stuff to catch up on. You could try some
Stephen Pinker, he writes in a nicely accessible style about it.
I wasn't wishing to 'dismiss' Freud, he certainly was a pioneer and
had some interesting ideas, as I said, historically, there is a lot of
interest there. I didn't realise that anybody took him seriously as
far as human psychology was concerned though, not any more!
Lance
wrote:
> It would be nice to read good articles on how Jane Austin reveals the
> particular importance of, say, class or manners or, indeed, irony in
> human behaviour, and why it has evolved to be so.
Some years ago (quite a few actually) I read a book on the question of
why irony was so well developed in English but that present in other
European literatures. Indeed, English irony was seen as something of a
source of misunderstanding between the English and other people.
The answer proposed was essentially that most European countries had
killed their aristocrats and aristocratic ideals had been replaced by
more middle-class ones. But in England the middle-class was really
about emulating aristocratic ideals. This is present in Asten, for
example. Elizabeth's friend's father, in Pride and Prejudice, for
example was knighted and (although not wealthy) thereafter felt in
beneath his dignity to work.
One aspect of aristicratic ideals is the strict regulation of emotion.
An aristocrat can feel boredom, but not angry or joy. Even loud
laughter is seen as beneath his dignity. frank Muir wrote a book
making the same point - that at one time in English life, it was
really bad form to laugh out loud.
But aristocrats are human and do get angry and do want to laugh. So
the theory is the person who holds aristocratic ideals must look for
indirect means for expressing these emotions. Sarcasm and irony are
the way out since express these emotion indirectly.
Once this habit of indirect expression had taken hold it began to
shape all sorts of aspects of the English language and English
writing, and no doubt English life. This effect has persisted even
after England has become an middle-class society with few aristocratic
aspirations.
I don't know whether this a very Darwinian, but it seems plausible to
me.
Lance
Peter H.M.Brooks
>
>
> One aspect of aristicratic ideals is the strict regulation of emotion.
> An aristocrat can feel boredom, but not angry or joy. Even loud
> laughter is seen as beneath his dignity. frank Muir wrote a book
> making the same point - that at one time in English life, it was
> really bad form to laugh out loud.
>
> But aristocrats are human and do get angry and do want to laugh. So
> the theory is the person who holds aristocratic ideals must look for
> indirect means for expressing these emotions. Sarcasm and irony are
> the way out since express these emotion indirectly.
>
> Once this habit of indirect expression had taken hold it began to
> shape all sorts of aspects of the English language and English
> writing, and no doubt English life. This effect has persisted even
> after England has become an middle-class society with few aristocratic
> aspirations.
>
> I don't know whether this a very Darwinian, but it seems plausible to
> me.
>
part of the aristocracy - after all, originally, these were people who
had arrived at the top of the class structure, winning a war designed by
evolution to get them the best mates. How was it evolutionarily
advantageous to be aloof of base (and why so called?) emotions? If it
worked for aristocrats, then, presumably, it'd still work now. Do people
who act like that now do better?
There surely are some fairly strong vestiges of aristocratic ambition -
I can't really see any other reason why anybody paid any money for
peerages which are, on the face of it, quite worthless.
Lance
>
> - Show quoted text -
I think the idea is that an arisocrat is a sort of super person who
can't be damaged by the mundane doings of the peasants around him. It
is a way of being aloof and superior.
Lance
Peter H.M.Brooks
> can't be damaged by the mundane doings of the peasants around him. It
> is a way of being aloof and superior.
>
still work? If not, why not?
Lance
>
> - Show quoted text -
In evolutionary terms I suppose it is about status. Males of high
status supposedly get the beautiful girls. Sarcasm and snootiness go
with aloofness and a claim to be better than the company in which you
find yourself. So you, the superior aristocrat, put them down in an
indirect way that makes it difficult for them to retaliate and you can
walk away knowing that everyone has seen how superior you are.
Does that work?
Lance
Paul
> 'Free Will' is more a matter of defining what you mean by the term
> than anything else,
Nope, it's about understanding the actuality, or apparent actuality,
as you find it in consciousness. It's not just another exercise in
redundant linguistic philosophy.
> but, clearly, if it exists in any sense, it is
> part of nature, it couldn't be otherwise.
Maybe you like to think that, and I agree you might be correct (though
I doubt it). To say ' it couldn't be otherwise' is just dogma. Read
Kant, or anything by Bryan Magee, to find other, entirely consistent
options.
> Discussing notions that Freud might have had isn't that
> helpful, unless you think that Freud is best read as literature, which
> might be another interesting angle.
So the idea of the unconscious 'isn't that helpful'? Or the idea of a
talking therapy? What about the 'Freudian slip'? Isn't that intruiging
and worth discussing? Or the importance of dreams? Even if you think
Freud's notions are wrong surely he is important for having widened
the debate, and for providing ideas to argue against. And on a
philosophical level - not just as literature.
Purl Gurl
> Purl Gurl wrote:
(snipped approximately three kilometers of text)
(snipped ego masturbation - read thread for context)
> I'm sorry, I thought that I'd posted it to groups where you'd expect
> to find people fairly able readers. Most of the posting was, of
> The author was also a Yank, but is a Professor of Literature, so it's
> possible that that made it go over your head.
> Just for fun, I've checked the readability statistics and they give a
> I don't think that I'm going to try to rewrite the article nice and
> simply for you, though, as the subject matter is only likely to
Well gosh, aren't you the arrogant insulting ass. Quite clear
you are a devoted loving mouthpiece for your idolized professor
of gibberish. Such a coattail clinging mindless minion are you.
Rather noticeable you are another proud graduate of the,
"Sears, Roebuck & Co. Academy of Language Arts"
Dr. Kiralynne Schilitubi
Professor of English
University of California
Choctaw Interpreter
Choctaw Nation
Robert Lieblich
>
> I posted this to rab on March 1st. Just demonstrates that nobody reads my
> posts.
I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am to you for
re-posting the entire text of the article previously posted by PHMB,
probably in violation of the author's or publication's copyright.
Since I can't even begin, I won't do it.
--
Bob Lieblich
Who, unlike Purl Gurl, still feels no need to read the thing
Peter H.M. Brooks
> Quite clear you are a devoted loving mouthpiece for your idolized professor
>
I'm afraid that you didn't even understand that, sadly. It wasn't
clear because it wasn't true.
Had I been simply a loving mouthpiece, then I'd have perhaps made an
effort to render it simple enough for you to understand. As it is, I'm
perfectly happy, as I said, quite simply, for those that can't
understand it, not to - not much idolatry there.
It seems that now, having admitted your lack of comprehension, you're
unhappy about it. You needn't be, as I said 30 odd is about twice as
difficult as standard texts and my follow up was at least 70, and you
didn't grok that. You shouldn't be unhappy about things you can't
change or about the way you are, just learn to live with it.
Don Phillipson
news:1174219082.7...@l77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> Some years ago (quite a few actually) I read a book on the question of
> why irony was so well developed in English but that present in other
> European literatures. Indeed, English irony was seen as something of a
> source of misunderstanding between the English and other people.
>
> The answer proposed was essentially that most European countries had
> killed their aristocrats and aristocratic ideals had been replaced by
> more middle-class ones. But in England the middle-class was really
> about emulating aristocratic ideals. This is present in Asten, for
> example. Elizabeth's friend's father, in Pride and Prejudice, for
> example was knighted and (although not wealthy) thereafter felt in
> beneath his dignity to work.
1. The absolute increase of knowledge (doubling every seven
years i.e. multiplying tenfold every half-century) is an independent
and likely reason for the emergence of irony as the dominant
contemporary mode (cf. Northrop Frye.) Since Jane Austen's
day we have invented both sociology and Freudian psychology,
both at her period literally unthinkable.
2. The rise to power of the "middle classes" in the 19th
century was also unimagined by Jane Austen, even though
her subject-matter was the middle classes. The pioneer
was Napoleon, who rose largely by his own talents from
the lower middle class to the rank of emperor, bringing
colleagues (marshals etc.) up into the aristocracy (by
ancien regime standards): so that 50 years later you
had both a "bourgeois king" in France and later under
the emperor Louis-Napoleon a thoroughly bourgeois
public state. Britain evolved similarly but more subtly
(via the public schools and the Victorian concept of the
"gentleman," a norm of behavior and values, not blood)
and Prussia/Germany rather less because of the
continuation to 1918 of Junker i.e. aristocratic inflluence.
> One aspect of aristicratic ideals is the strict regulation of emotion.
> An aristocrat can feel boredom, but not angry or joy. Even loud
> laughter is seen as beneath his dignity. frank Muir wrote a book
> making the same point - that at one time in English life, it was
> really bad form to laugh out loud.
There appears to be no direct evidence whatsoever for
this argument (except in French literature, and there
only marginally.)
Aristocracy is privilege. The whole point about a
genetic aristocracy is that even if you lose your money you
can still assert your privilege -- and in some societies other
people will allow it.
> I don't know whether this a very Darwinian, but it seems plausible to
> me.
No, the essence of Darwinism is the emergence of wholly
new species, applicable here in only a metaphorical sense,
not a genetic one -- and genetics was for 1000 years the
theme of European aristocracy.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Peter H.M.Brooks
>> 'Free Will' is more a matter of defining what you mean by the term
>> than anything else,
>
> Nope, it's about understanding the actuality, or apparent actuality,
> as you find it in consciousness. It's not just another exercise in
> redundant linguistic philosophy.
>
'Free Will' is an interpretation of what you think you find in
consciousness and it depends on how you define it as to what your
interpretation might be.
Understanding consciousness is a quite different and much more
interesting, and complex subject.
>
>> but, clearly, if it exists in any sense, it is
>> part of nature, it couldn't be otherwise.
>
> Maybe you like to think that, and I agree you might be correct (though
> I doubt it). To say ' it couldn't be otherwise' is just dogma. Read
> Kant, or anything by Bryan Magee, to find other, entirely consistent
> options.
>
Not really. My comment is simply an alternative statement to there not
being anything supernatural.
>
>> Discussing notions that Freud might have had isn't that
>> helpful, unless you think that Freud is best read as literature, which
>> might be another interesting angle.
>
> So the idea of the unconscious 'isn't that helpful'? Or the idea of a
> talking therapy? What about the 'Freudian slip'? Isn't that intruiging
> and worth discussing? Or the importance of dreams? Even if you think
> Freud's notions are wrong surely he is important for having widened
> the debate, and for providing ideas to argue against. And on a
> philosophical level - not just as literature.
>
Yes, as I said, I agree that there is interesting historical angle to
Freud, and he was an important pioneer.
If you'd read the piece about Literary Darwinism, you'd have noted that
my remark on reading Freud as literature was directly relevant to that
article and was posited as an 'interesting angle' - which in no way
denies his contribution in the past.
Talking therapy doesn't work better than a placebo - or, if you prefer,
they all work as well as a placebo. Apart, that is, from cognitive
therapy, which does seem to work quite well, but isn't exactly Freudian.
What about the importance of dreams? We're learning what they seem to be
for, and that certainly isn't anything to do with cigars as symbols.
The idea of an 'unconscious' or 'unconscious mind' has, I think, been
rather unhelpful in creating, in the popular imagination, a second
homunculus that reinforces the notion of there being a first homunculus
as an internal observer. It's an understandable mistake, certainly, but
it wasn't helpful to reinforce that mistaken notion - particularly as it
tended to reinforce old ideas of souls and so forth.
Peter H.M.Brooks
> "Lance" <Lanc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1174219082.7...@l77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
>
>> Some years ago (quite a few actually) I read a book on the question of
>> why irony was so well developed in English but that present in other
>> European literatures. Indeed, English irony was seen as something of a
>> source of misunderstanding between the English and other people.
>>
>> The answer proposed was essentially that most European countries had
>> killed their aristocrats and aristocratic ideals had been replaced by
>> more middle-class ones. But in England the middle-class was really
>> about emulating aristocratic ideals. This is present in Asten, for
>> example. Elizabeth's friend's father, in Pride and Prejudice, for
>> example was knighted and (although not wealthy) thereafter felt in
>> beneath his dignity to work.
>
> 1. The absolute increase of knowledge (doubling every seven
> years i.e. multiplying tenfold every half-century) is an independent
> and likely reason for the emergence of irony as the dominant
> contemporary mode (cf. Northrop Frye.) Since Jane Austen's
> day we have invented both sociology and Freudian psychology,
> both at her period literally unthinkable.
>
of Austen (incidentally, I notice that my naughty spelling checker
wanted her to be 'Austin' - that's computer types for you, I suppose) is
much the same as the old Freudian psychology and sociology were -
reasonably good descriptions of how things are, and guesses as to why
they are so, given no sound theoretical basis. She was, of course, much
more readable.
>
> 2. The rise to power of the "middle classes" in the 19th
> century was also unimagined by Jane Austen, even though
> her subject-matter was the middle classes. The pioneer
> was Napoleon, who rose largely by his own talents from
> the lower middle class to the rank of emperor, bringing
> colleagues (marshals etc.) up into the aristocracy (by
> ancien regime standards): so that 50 years later you
> had both a "bourgeois king" in France and later under
> the emperor Louis-Napoleon a thoroughly bourgeois
> public state. Britain evolved similarly but more subtly
> (via the public schools and the Victorian concept of the
> "gentleman," a norm of behavior and values, not blood)
> and Prussia/Germany rather less because of the
> continuation to 1918 of Junker i.e. aristocratic inflluence.
>
If there were no class mobility (and that is a myth that members of the
class system find it useful to believe) then there'd be no need for the
behavioural characteristics of the aristocrats.
Paul Ilechko
Still the same pompous, self-important shit as always, I see. Gives one
a warm sense of the continuity and resilience of the human spirit.
Tony Cooper
wrote:
>Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>
>> Purl Gurl wrote:
>
>(snipped approximately three kilometers of text)
>
>(snipped ego masturbation - read thread for context)
>
>> I'm sorry, I thought that I'd posted it to groups where you'd expect
>> to find people fairly able readers. Most of the posting was, of
>
>> The author was also a Yank, but is a Professor of Literature, so it's
>> possible that that made it go over your head.
>
>> Just for fun, I've checked the readability statistics and they give a
>
>> I don't think that I'm going to try to rewrite the article nice and
>> simply for you, though, as the subject matter is only likely to
>
>Well gosh, aren't you the arrogant insulting ass. Quite clear
>you are a devoted loving mouthpiece for your idolized professor
>of gibberish. Such a coattail clinging mindless minion are you.
>
A courtship made in heaven. Chief Head-Up-His-Ass woos Princess
Falls-On-Her-Butt-When-Explaining-White-Eyes-Language.
--
Tony Cooper
Orlando, FL
Peter H.M.Brooks
I'll ignore any more nonsense from that quarter then.
Purl Gurl
> Purl Gurl wrote:
(snipped)
>> Quite clear you are a devoted loving mouthpiece for your idolized professor
> I'm afraid that you didn't even understand that, sadly. It wasn't
I do understand you are deliberately spamming multiple newsgroups
with your intellectually insulting gibberish. You do this for no
reason other than to masturbate your fragile masculine ego through
attempting to garner personal attention, at the expense of others.
You are spewing creamed corn upon our monitors while hollering, "Me! Me! Me!"
I might tolerate your sore lack of writing skills and might tolerate
your gibberish speaking professor's sore lack of writing skills, might
tolerate this ironically comical gibberish of yours, plural, if you did
not deliberately spam multiple newsgroups.
Rather rude of you to force your arrogant yet simpleton gibberish upon
others who have no interest in reading one-hundred monkeys typing on
one-hundred typewriters.
Confine your metaphorical oral copulation of your idolized gibberish
speaking professor to a newsgroup populated by those of same mind as
you; mindless minions.
Okpulot Taha
Choctaw Nation
*
By-the-way, "you are" is contracted to "you're" not "your" as you oft write
and mine is "by-the-way" rather than "by the way" because I, like many others,
have no interest in witnessing nor being subjected to your verbal diarrhea.
Peter H.M.Brooks
>
>
> Confine your metaphorical oral copulation of your idolized gibberish
> speaking professor to a newsgroup populated by those of same mind as
> you; mindless minions.
>
bit of a pose. Truly I did.
Sorry for presuming too much. 'Oral copulation', eh, no doubt you're
some sort of expert on that sort of thing, good for you, it's nice to
see somebody using what skill they have.
As for spam, if you think that a cross-posted thread is spam, then don't
post to it. You see, if you do that, then you are guilty of spam, as
judged by your own standards. I know you won't have thought of that, so
I'm just being helpful.
Martin Ambuhl
> On Mar 18, 3:38 pm, Purl Gurl <purlg...@purlgurl.net> wrote:
>
>> Quite clear you are a devoted loving mouthpiece for your idolized professor
>>
> I'm afraid that you didn't even understand that, sadly. It wasn't
> clear because it wasn't true.
>
> Had I been simply a loving mouthpiece, then I'd have perhaps made an
> effort to render it simple enough for you to understand.
What an arrogant piece of shit you are. Take your unintelligible crap
back to your deconstructionist foxhole. That someone writes crap at a
12th grade reading level does not make it worthy of consideration.
I remember well seeing Derrida throw a tantrum in Paris, denouncing his
audience as idiots who couldn't understand what he was saying. He never
reflected that on his own terms the moment that he uttered or wrote his
words, his intentions became irrelevant, the meaning of those words
properly belonging to his audience, not to him.
J Seymour MacNicely
"Paul" <pgr...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:
1174221441.5...@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>
>> 'Free Will' is more a matter of defining what you mean by the term
>> than anything else,
>
> Nope, it's about understanding the actuality, or apparent actuality,
> as you find it in consciousness. It's not just another exercise in
> redundant linguistic philosophy.
As it appears you are using the term 'actuality' in the way it was
defined in the Schools (as carried forward from the Greeks) to make
clear and decided, in metaphysics, a distinction between the 'actual'
and the 'possible'--your statement could not be more right on the
money. And when you say it is to be found in consciousness, one might
even go so far as to suggest it is at the very essence of that
consciousness, without which there would be no consciousness, of an
ego that knows "I am what I am, as opposed to everything and everyone
else--even to my own physical, natural being." See Camus, *The Rebel*.
That is unique to Man and it is the Human Dilemma--not only will you
never see an organically sound human being so shriven of ego awareness
(free will), that he can often be found in the act of chasing his own
tail, but in point of fact, he has no tail to chase. This is the
uniquely evolved human condition. No tail to chase--except it belong
to the other gender (or what is being confused--or preferred--for the
other gender). This is what makes Man free to be at war, not only
with his own human nature, but with these dreamers the like of Stephen
Pinker with all his junk 'neuro-science' of the pseudo-empirical 'new
knowledge'. Nothing is more central to the human condition, this
'jihad' warring on within the breast of man, nothing is more centered
in causes of all neurosis and psychosis, whether psychological,
social, religious or political.
It's not that one should come here thumping something so 'fundamental'
as the Wisdom of Solomon to hold with him that "there is nothing new
under the sun," but consider rather how very much is very, very old
under the moon and the stars, that remains yet to be studied by the
likes of Pinker--for example, Kant--first, in order that all this 'new
knowledge' of his can be distinguished from old error; the same old
errors that people have been forever dreaming up to appear under dress
of whatever the new fashion a contemporary technology of chi square
and correlation coefficient would *only seem* to 'prove'.
>
>> but, clearly, if it exists in any sense, it is
>> part of nature, it couldn't be otherwise.
>
> Maybe you like to think that, and I agree you might be correct (though
> I doubt it). To say ' it couldn't be otherwise' is just dogma. Read
> Kant, or anything by Bryan Magee, to find other, entirely consistent
> options.
The very essence of a 'free will' by definition must be that it is
indeed in every way *free*, especially of nature, and composed of a
*will* that will be directed toward some object that will not, like
the dog's own tail, be an object of frustrated will determined by the
subject's lack of freedom to distinguish a difference between himself
and Nature. In short, any being, cat, dog or man, may have a will,
but it is only man whose will is free, and strictly by virtue of an
ego that distinguishes subject from object. Man has no tail to serve
as the object of his own will. Man is ever so terribly, magnificently,
tail-less and free.
>
>> Discussing notions that Freud might have had isn't that
>> helpful, unless you think that Freud is best read as literature, which
>> might be another interesting angle.
>
> So the idea of the unconscious 'isn't that helpful'? Or the idea of a
> talking therapy? What about the 'Freudian slip'? Isn't that intruiging
> and worth discussing? Or the importance of dreams? Even if you think
> Freud's notions are wrong surely he is important for having widened
> the debate, and for providing ideas to argue against. And on a
> philosophical level - not just as literature.
Of course, I would argue that contrary to recent stunts of junk 'neuro-
science' to impossibly test by probabilistic pseudo-empirical
statistical methodologies (so easily skewed by the least bias) the
psychoanalysis of Freud, Adler, Jung, Horney, May, Maslow, Rogers,
Lang, Reich, Stack Sullivan, Szasz and all the many practitioners who
through the years have refined, sifted, winnowed, and further evolved
the pioneering discoveries of Freud into a metaphysical masterpiece of
therapeutic theory and method--yes, contrary to these wet-behind-the-
ears claims of this 'cognitive' pretender to the throne--for Freud,
the one thing they cannot by any trick of chi square deny is the
immense record of success to be found in an entire century's worth of
them as recounted in the volumes, nay, the libraries stacked full of
case histories showing the results, in the collection and publications
of the International Psychoanalytical Association. http://www.ipa.org.uk/
Needless to say, there is so very, very much more to Freud than is
dreamed by these who have been robbed of a proper respect by a
postmodern education replete with the idiotic slanders of his neurotic
enemies. Nothing has been more tragic than to see the shallow,
superficial result in later generations of intellectuals who persist
in knowing not the first, first-hand thing about him and the subtle
depths of human consciousness that have been revealed by him--but only
the slander and ill-founded condescension of a 'cognitive neuro-
science', a purely pitiful practice of neo-phrenology based on
premises that by Freud himself were rejected as barbaric, backward,
reprehensible misperceptions about the dignity of man.
Yes, and it damned well demands to be viewed as *sacred* this inner-
sanctum, this Holy of Holies of the heart, in the temple of a human
consciousness where for a first time in the evolution of the universe,
a magnificent capacity is born, of the human ego's will to rebel
against all that would define it, as it comes of an underlying essence
of mind that is at one with its will in an ability and responsibility
to be free. It is a fact not of nature but in spite of nature, except
for which, no possibility of change for an unhappy, unwell, free-will
hampered human personality shall have ever been possible--nothing's
been carved in stone of a genetic code when it comes to the capacities
for freedom from nature in a uniquely human consciousness.
Robert Bannister
> On Mar 18, 4:52 am, Purl Gurl <purlg...@purlgurl.net> wrote:
>
>>(snipped approximately three kilometers of text)
>>
>>I have carefully read your article, twice. I have carefully
>>read your linked material, twice.
>>
>
> I'm sorry, I thought that I'd posted it to groups where you'd expect
> to find people fairly able readers. Most of the posting was, of
> course, from a popular magazine, the New Scientist, which tries hard,
> sometimes, I fear, too hard, to make its prose simple.
Although I feel the word "hegemony" should have left with communist
writers, I didn't find the language difficult. I did, however, find the
content boring and rather lacking in any useful conclusion.
--
Rob Bannister
Philip
The impression I get from Austen is that the proper use of the sarcastic put
down is for making fun of your social equals rather than asserting yourself
over social inferiors.
Peter Moylan
exists.]
Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
> This rather good post from the New Scientist adds to the topic
> mentioned a year or so ago:
> http://groups.google.com/group/uk.philosophy.humanism/browse_frm/thread/eb2f5a2ddeb411cb/45687402c4c5a2cd?lnk=gst&q=%22evolutionary+literature%22&rnum=1&hl=en#45687402c4c5a2cd
>
>
> Clearly the nonsense that has passed for teaching and rearch in some
> English departments over the past several years had to go eventually,
> this shows the way in which it is going.
[Many details snipped - read the original if you missed it.]
I'm no expert in literary analysis, so maybe I'm missing something
obvious, but what I read here shocked me to the core. If Gottschall is
simply ignorant of what his colleagues are doing, then my worries are
allayed. But if there's any truth to his claims, it amounts to saying
that the "two cultures" phenomenon - something that I thought was
extinct by now - is not only alive and well, but has reached the Raving
Monster Loony stage.
A lot of the "scientific" information mentioned here looks out of date
to me. Science didn't come to a halt in the 1950s, and it has certainly
dumped a lot of naive 19th-century explanations of human behaviour.
Marxist economists no longer quote Marx, as far as I know, because he
published only the bare bones of a theory, something that needed a lot
of development. The early psychologists such as Freud and Jung had some
interesting ideas for their time, but they would probably be struggling
to understand modern developments in psychology. Darwin had
an interesting insight, but he had no access at all to what is now known
about genetics, therefore no way of guessing how natural selection
works. (Some of the details would surprise him, I think.) The geologists
and archaeologists of his time had done some good work - although they
were ignorant of most of what is now known in their fields - but the
biologists were still mostly stuck at the "classification" stage, and
unaware of the huge explosion of knowledge about biology that was about
to follow, especially after the discovery of DNA and plausible
inheritance mechanisms. Even today, most of what is known about
evolution is focused on individual survival. Experts are aware that one
also has to understand group survival and species survival, and they
know something about it, but they're still chasing down the details.
Work on the evolution mechanisms of "memes" - ideas and ideologies and
so on - has hardly started.
And most of this, mark you, is on the shelves of just about any
bookshop. If you want to know something about a science you don't go to
the pioneers, you look for more modern descriptions of what has been
learnt since the time of the pioneers. The "popular science" books and
magazines have, admittedly, been dumbed down for public consumption, but
they still give you a flavour of what is now known, and they'll tell you
a lot more about the motives behind human behaviour than any
19th-century theories.
"The Naked Ape" was pretty good for its time, and it's still worth
reading, but I think that even its author would concede that it's now
looking a little dated. Scientific research advances quickly, at least
in those areas where the funding is available.
I'm getting the impression that Gottschall has, at least implicitly,
accused most of his colleagues of being scientific illiterates. Please
tell me that that isn't so. Educated people should be aware of what's
going on in whole range of fields. We can't know a bit of everything, as
was (barely) possible in Renaissance times, but we should at least have
some understanding of a whole range of subjects. Narrow specialists need
to look out at the light at least occasionally.
I myself came to Homer late; it was probably after I had read "The Naked
Ape", because some of what Gottschall described as new insights was
unsurprising to me. If that gave him new understanding of Homer's
stories, imagine what he could have understand if he reread "The Iliad"
after reading something like "The Selfish Gene". The latter is, by the
way, highly recommended to those who favour feminist analyses, because
it gives new understanding into why males have male characteristics and
females have female characteristics. For a less technical explanation of
the male/female divide, try the very readable "Why Men Don't Listen and
Women Can't Read Maps".
--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer
receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet
address could disappear at any time.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> "Lance" <LanceG...@gmail.com> wrote in message
to be so oblique as the direct recipient isn't aware that it exists.
Mind you, I think, too, that the notion of there actually being
'social equals' is one that would be rather alien to some of Austen's
characters.
Peter H.M. Brooks
term 'hegemony' - it's remarkable, but clearly the case, that some
still think it clever.
If you're not interested in either literary theory or evolution, then
it is unlikely that it would be interesting.
I did find it quite bizarre that anybody would find the language
difficult - anybody that read one of the groups it was posted to,
anyway. I did think that it was somebody taking the piss at first,
but, I learned something about the level of literacy out there that I
hadn't known before.
I agee about the lack of useful conclusions. Since it is a newly
developing field, it is a long way from the conclusion stage. The
questions that I posed at the start are the sort of preliminary
investigations that will, no doubt, start producing some interesting
work over the next few years. I'm looking forward to it, it has been
very difficult to find any interesting academic literary criticism for
quite a long time, though, to be fair, it can still be found, the
field is not entirely occupied by lunatics as the TLS, for example,
where the death of post-modernism in, at least history, has been
documented.
So many fields have, over the past couple of decades, been re-
invigorated, even, re-born, if not actually born for the first time,
by the new practitioners understanding sociobiology, that it is clear
that it adds a powerful, and sound, theoretical basis to the
understanding of, inter alia, human behaviour. Literature has missed
this influence, and it will be an exciting time to see how it turns
out. Of course, as with the other fields, the old guard will never
understand it, or, if they do, never accept it - it's well established
that, for radical change, the only way forward is, ultimately, for the
old guard to die out. Not necessarily literally, they simply need to
retire or have become irrelevant.
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
I agree completely that obscuratist writing is no indication of value
- famously Sokal's magnificent Hoax has shown just how inarticulate
the postmodernist and deconstructionist crew are.
Lucidity is certainly the mark of somebody who understands the
subject. When I read the original article, it didn't occur to me that
anybody would find it difficult to read - it as a surprise to me that
it had a reading level of 12, actually, because it was pretty clear.
As I said in my original point, the author is a Yank, and also a
Professor of Literature, so I probably discounted these two, accepting
a certain level of waffle that I wouldn't in an English speaker or
scientific writer.
No, the reason the article is interesting is its subject matter only,
not its writing style. Somebody could re-write it in much better
prose, I agree, particularly, now that I see that some people
genuinely find the language difficult. The hallmark of postmodernist
or deconstructionist waffle is that it cannot be re-written in better
prose because it is bullshit and has no valid subject matter, as your
point about Derrida suggests.
There's a better written discussion on the subject from Nature to be
found at:
http://www.washjeff.edu/users/jgottschall/Media%20Attention/Nature%20review-Literary%20Animal.pdf
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
>
> I'm getting the impression that Gottschall has, at least implicitly,
> accused most of his colleagues of being scientific illiterates. Please
> tell me that that isn't so. Educated people should be aware of what's
> going on in whole range of fields. We can't know a bit of everything, as
> was (barely) possible in Renaissance times, but we should at least have
> some understanding of a whole range of subjects. Narrow specialists need
> to look out at the light at least occasionally.
>
> I myself came to Homer late; it was probably after I had read "The Naked
> Ape", because some of what Gottschall described as new insights was
> unsurprising to me. If that gave him new understanding of Homer's
> stories, imagine what he could have understand if he reread "The Iliad"
> after reading something like "The Selfish Gene". The latter is, by the
> way, highly recommended to those who favour feminist analyses, because
> it gives new understanding into why males have male characteristics and
> females have female characteristics. For a less technical explanation of
> the male/female divide, try the very readable "Why Men Don't Listen and
> Women Can't Read Maps".
>
to most literary critics - and it is shocking, I agree. It's also the
case that ancient pioneers, as you say, interesting historically, but
decades out of date and mostly superceded, like Marx, Jung, Freud and
co. still are invoked.
Physics envy transmogrified itself into a general envy of difficult
things, science and rationality itself that movement became known
eventually as post-modernism and has infected English Literature
departments very badly, world wide (and, as I remarked, for a time,
even History departments, many branches of the Humanities have been
afflicted).
All this has been known for quite some time. What has been missing is
any movement from people in the Humanities. That's why this move to
promote Literary Dawinism is encouraging. It's about thirty years
since the same move in psychology moved it from the doldrums into the
revived state that it is in now - even the term 'evolutionary
psychology' isn't really necessary as much of the field takes it as an
essential basis. In time the same, we hope, will happen with literary
criticism - these are the first faltering steps.
It is all pretty amazing and horrifying if you've just come upon it!
*Anarcissie*
wrote:
> On Mar 19, 4:02 am, Peter Moylan <p...@ozebelgDieSpammers.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I'm getting the impression that Gottschall has, at least implicitly,
> > accused most of his colleagues of being scientific illiterates. Please
> > tell me that that isn't so. Educated people should be aware of what's
> > going on in whole range of fields. We can't know a bit of everything, as
> > was (barely) possible in Renaissance times, but we should at least have
> > some understanding of a whole range of subjects. Narrow specialists need
> > to look out at the light at least occasionally.
>
> > I myself came to Homer late; it was probably after I had read "The Naked
> > Ape", because some of what Gottschall described as new insights was
> > unsurprising to me. If that gave him new understanding of Homer's
> > stories, imagine what he could have understand if he reread "The Iliad"
> > after reading something like "The Selfish Gene". The latter is, by the
> > way, highly recommended to those who favour feminist analyses, because
> > it gives new understanding into why males have male characteristics and
> > females have female characteristics. For a less technical explanation of
> > the male/female divide, try the very readable "Why Men Don't Listen and
> > Women Can't Read Maps".
>
> Yes, you're quite right, all these things are indeed terra incognita
> to most literary critics - and it is shocking, I agree. It's also the
> case that ancient pioneers, as you say, interesting historically, but
> decades out of date and mostly superceded, like Marx, Jung, Freud and
> co. still are invoked.
If you're doing science, or even appreciating it, for starters I'd
like to know how you know what "most literary critics" think.
In the pomo café or the academic cocktail party this phrase
means "some people I know about, maybe" but it science it
has a more precise meaning. It may seem like a small
point but we have to start somewhere if we're to emerge
from the terrible morass of "postmodernism" and the equally
terrible urge to whine and fret about "postmodernism".
> Physics envy transmogrified itself into a general envy of difficult
> things, science and rationality itself that movement became known
> eventually as post-modernism and has infected English Literature
> departments very badly, world wide (and, as I remarked, for a time,
> even History departments, many branches of the Humanities have been
> afflicted).
>
> All this has been known for quite some time. What has been missing is
> any movement from people in the Humanities. That's why this move to
> promote Literary Dawinism is encouraging. It's about thirty years
> since the same move in psychology moved it from the doldrums into the
> revived state that it is in now - even the term 'evolutionary
> psychology' isn't really necessary as much of the field takes it as an
> essential basis. In time the same, we hope, will happen with literary
> criticism - these are the first faltering steps.
>
> It is all pretty amazing and horrifying if you've just come upon it!
It does sound like scientism, and in my experience scientism
can offer many opportunities for humor. We need new dead
horses to beat.
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
> It does sound like scientism
>
What is 'scientism'??
athel...@yahoo
Scientist. From the title I thought it was going to be interesting,
but I found that it wasn't.
athel
*Anarcissie*
wrote:
> On Mar 19, 1:40 pm, "*Anarcissie*" <anarcis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > It does sound like scientism
>
> What is 'scientism'??
I used it to mean "the belief that most or all forms of thought
should follow the methods of the physical sciences". However,
there are some other meanings, as you can see from the
Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
Note that I said "sounds like". That wasn't a scientific
observation.
I liked some of the ideas in one of the article -- for instance,
asking the questions "What is literature? What is its purpose?"
and trying to answer them from the standpoint of evolutionary
biology. If nothing else, such an approach should be good for
some humor. However, I have to note there has been a lot of
flogging of that ghostly dead horse "postmodernism". That
ritual has gotten very, very old and I wish we could dispense
with it.
Peter H.M.Brooks
> On Mar 19, 7:49 am, "Peter H.M. Brooks" <Peter.H.M.Bro...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Mar 19, 1:40 pm, "*Anarcissie*" <anarcis...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It does sound like scientism
>> What is 'scientism'??
>
>
> I used it to mean "the belief that most or all forms of thought
> should follow the methods of the physical sciences". However,
> there are some other meanings, as you can see from the
> Wikipedia entry:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
>
> Note that I said "sounds like". That wasn't a scientific
> observation.
>
>
> I liked some of the ideas in one of the article -- for instance,
> asking the questions "What is literature? What is its purpose?"
> and trying to answer them from the standpoint of evolutionary
> biology.
>
how it works out.
>
> If nothing else, such an approach should be good for
> some humor. However, I have to note there has been a lot of
> flogging of that ghostly dead horse "postmodernism". That
> ritual has gotten very, very old and I wish we could dispense
> with it.
>
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 19th of March, 2007
Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
I hadn't heard of the belief and I haven't encountered anybody with it.
Hmm. I've maintained for years that much academic psychology,
sociology, political science, economics, and some versions of
history are scientism, not science. Oh, yeah, and Schools of
Education. Any place where correlative empirical study is used
to sketch some sort of (assumed) initial-value determinism,
without really having any such thing as "mechanism" pinned down.
I.e. people are not *like* particles, planets, or billiard balls.
Or, as Einstein put it, "The present fashion of applying the axioms of
physical science to human life is not only entirely a mistake but also
has something reprehensible in it."
Or, as Rutherford put it a different way, "All science is either
physics or stamp collecting." Astronomy, biology, and geology all
went from being stamp collecting to being physics in my lifetime.
The idea for me is not in any way to forbid the investigation of
human behaviour as an object of empirical study. It is rather
to recognize that gathering all the stamps in the world does not
make stamp collecting into physics. The scientism is in the pretending
that one is doing physics or something like physics when one isn't.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Pat Durkin
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
news:12vtf78...@corp.supernews.com...
>
> Monday, the 19th of March, 2007
>
> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
> I hadn't heard of the belief and I haven't encountered anybody with
> it.
That the swallows return, as in the song? Of course, they do.
http://www.thinkandask.com/2006/031106-sjc.html
>
Not only did O'Sullivan front the greatest effort to revitalized the
Mission grounds, during his 20 year stay, he observed a large number of
long-tailed swallows nesting under the Mission's archways and eaves,
beginning in March. While the swallows' return was well-known with local
bird watchers, O'Sullivan found that the swallows returned exactly on
the same day each year.
The birds possess an architectural ability that impressed many as well,
as the strength of each nest --which was often huddled side-by-side
under building eaves-- would last for years and house many generations
of swallows.
Going out on a limb, O'Sullivan convinced radio stations in Los Angeles
to broadcast the swallow's return on 19 March live. Radio producers were
skeptical and thought the migration was nothing more than public
relations hoax. But the birds did not let O'Sullivan down as they
flocked to the Mission in groves one 19 March...and the rest, as they
say, was history.
Do you like the Ink Spots? http://tinyurl.com/2owaf5
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Ink+Spots/_/When+the+Swallows+Come+Back+To+Capistrano
*Anarcissie*
> *Anarcissie* wrote:
> > On Mar 19, 7:49 am, "Peter H.M. Brooks" <Peter.H.M.Bro...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >> On Mar 19, 1:40 pm, "*Anarcissie*" <anarcis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> It does sound like scientism
> >> What is 'scientism'??
>
> > I used it to mean "the belief that most or all forms of thought
> > should follow the methods of the physical sciences". However,
> > there are some other meanings, as you can see from the
> > Wikipedia entry:
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
>
> > Note that I said "sounds like". That wasn't a scientific
> > observation.
>
> >
> I hadn't heard of the belief and I haven't encountered anybody with it.
Well, there it is in Wikipedia, and there are references to
follow if you like. There have been upsurges of scientism
in the past, most recently I think in the 1930s.
> > I liked some of the ideas in one of the article -- for instance,
> > asking the questions "What is literature? What is its purpose?"
> > and trying to answer them from the standpoint of evolutionary
> > biology.
> >
> Yes, these are interesting questions and it will be instructive to see
> how it works out.
> >> If nothing else, such an approach should be good for
> > some humor. However, I have to note there has been a lot of
> > flogging of that ghostly dead horse "postmodernism". That
> > ritual has gotten very, very old and I wish we could dispense
> > with it.
>
> It would be nice, but some dead horses just hang around.
Obviously it will hang around as long as you all keep
re-creating it. There is nothing new or postmodern about
people in the academic world constructing obscurantist
piffle, just as people in the corporate world construct
boosterist piffle. It's just business -- there is a certain
demand for piffle, and they fill it. It needn't concern us
unless you want to have a thread about fashions in piffle.
John W. Kennedy
> On Mar 18, 3:38 pm, Purl Gurl <purlg...@purlgurl.net> wrote:
"purlgurl" is a well-known troll in newsgroups devoted to the Perl
programming language. (I am surprised to find her here.)
--
John W. Kennedy
"Those in the seat of power oft forget their failings and seek only the
obeisance of others! Thus is bad government born! Hold in your heart
that you and the people are one, human beings all, and good government
shall arise of its own accord! Such is the path of virtue!"
-- Kazuo Koike. "Lone Wolf and Cub: Thirteen Strings" (tr. Dana Lewis)
* TagZilla 0.066 * http://tagzilla.mozdev.org
John W. Kennedy
> I agree completely that obscuratist writing is no indication of value
> - famously Sokal's magnificent Hoax has shown just how inarticulate
> the postmodernist and deconstructionist crew are.
While granting that I personally classify most of PM in the same mental
file as, say, Fomenkoism, or the more outré Gnostic sects, I do want to
remind everyone that, as often happens, it had at least a part of its
origin in what was a needful corrective at the time; see Lewis's "The
Personal Heresy".
--
John W. Kennedy
"Compact is becoming contract,
Man only earns and pays."
-- Charles Williams. "Bors to Elayne: On the King's Coins"
John W. Kennedy
> Although I feel the word "hegemony" should have left with communist
> writers,
It's used once, in what is clearly an implied indirect quotation.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have
always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Man Who Was Thursday"
John W. Kennedy
> I wasn't wishing to 'dismiss' Freud, he certainly was a pioneer and
> had some interesting ideas, as I said, historically, there is a lot of
> interest there. I didn't realise that anybody took him seriously as
> far as human psychology was concerned though, not any more!
In a world furnished with living bona-fide worshipers of Odin and (far
worse) Zeus, why ever would you suppose that?
--
John W. Kennedy
"Give up vows and dogmas, and fixed things, and you may grow like That.
...you may come to think a blow bad, because it hurts, and not because
it humiliates. You may come to think murder wrong, because it is
violent, and not because it is unjust."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Ball and the Cross"
John W. Kennedy
>> 'Free Will' is more a matter of defining what you mean by the term
>> than anything else,
>
> Nope, it's about understanding the actuality, or apparent actuality,
> as you find it in consciousness. It's not just another exercise in
> redundant linguistic philosophy.
>
>> part of nature, it couldn't be otherwise.
>
> Maybe you like to think that, and I agree you might be correct (though
> I doubt it). To say ' it couldn't be otherwise' is just dogma. Read
> Kant, or anything by Bryan Magee, to find other, entirely consistent
> options.
Before this goes entirely off the rails, both of you please read the
chapter on "nature" in Lewis's "Studies in Words". You're talking past
each other.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have
always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Man Who Was Thursday"
Purl Gurl
> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>> Purl Gurl wrote:
(previously snipped by Kennedy but not noted)
> "purlgurl" is a well-known troll in newsgroups devoted to the Perl
> programming language. (I am surprised to find her here.)
I am not surprised you so readily subscribe to idiocy,
nor am I surprised you so readily promote discontent
and hatred; you have a long history of promoting hatred.
However, I am surprised by this high number of borderline
functional illiterates participating in the literature
group and am especially surprised by this very high number
of borderline functional illiterates participating in
the uk humanism group.
Nonetheless, ignorance and hatred walk hand-in-hand,
this I know all too well, and this notion is more than
well exemplified by you and Brooks.
Rather amusing two words emerge, prove to be popular
in usage when referring to you two. Those two words,
as you know, are "arrogant" and "shit."
Purl Gurl
John W. Kennedy
> It would be interesting to understand how this came to be a defining
> part of the aristocracy - after all, originally, these were people who
> had arrived at the top of the class structure, winning a war designed by
> evolution to get them the best mates. How was it evolutionarily
> advantageous to be aloof of base (and why so called?) emotions?
That doesn't wash. The hereditary aristocracy of England mostly rose to
nobility centuries before the "stiff upper lip" attitude as we know it
arose, mostly through success in literal war.
I think it may have arisen through several generational cycles of:
emotional->womanly->unsoldierly->unnoble->(unladylike, too)
You can see the process at work in "Hamlet".
Who? What an Asse am I? I sure, this is most braue,
That I, the Sonne of the Deere murthered,
Prompted to my Reuenge by Heauen, and Hell,
Must (like a Whore) vnpacke my heart with words,
And fall a Cursing like a very Drab.
A Scullion? Fye vpon't: Foh.
At any rate, I think it came after the fall of heavy cavalry as the
dominant force in battle. No-one doubts the manliness of a knight who
fights as a cataphract. A knight who is an officer of infantry, however,
may feel more insecure.
Of course, there was also the old pagan tradition of (small-s) stoicism:
Mutius Scaevola and the Spartan boy, and all that, taught in every
public school.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light."
-- Tom Stoppard. "Night and Day"
John W. Kennedy
> (incidentally, I notice that my naughty spelling checker
> wanted her to be 'Austin' - that's computer types for you, I suppose)
Major city in Texas. As a Yank, I have to be quite insistent with the
spelling checker in my fingers, or they'll mistype Jane's family name as
the geography-quiz term they've known for far longer.
--
John W. Kennedy
"You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is
about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W.
W. Jacobs together as the 'sea-story' and then criticizing _that_."
-- C. S. Lewis. "An Experiment in Criticism"
Peter H.M.Brooks
> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>> I wasn't wishing to 'dismiss' Freud, he certainly was a pioneer and
>> had some interesting ideas, as I said, historically, there is a lot of
>> interest there. I didn't realise that anybody took him seriously as
>> far as human psychology was concerned though, not any more!
>
> In a world furnished with living bona-fide worshipers of Odin and (far
> worse) Zeus, why ever would you suppose that?
>
too, if they could.
Peter H.M.Brooks
> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
>> (incidentally, I notice that my naughty spelling checker
>> wanted her to be 'Austin' - that's computer types for you, I suppose)
>
> Major city in Texas. As a Yank, I have to be quite insistent with the
> spelling checker in my fingers, or they'll mistype Jane's family name as
> the geography-quiz term they've known for far longer.
>
thinking that I might have been mislead down some alley by the ghost of
Ford Prefect.
I was only using the spelling checker to be nice, as I'd had complaints
about misspelt posts - and then the checker itself caused the original
complainant more unpleasantness. There's probably a moral in there
somewhere.
My brother once said that he believed that he knew the capitals of all
50 states. I wickedly asked if he knew the capitals of North or South
Dakota.
Peter H.M.Brooks
> Paul wrote:
>>> 'Free Will' is more a matter of defining what you mean by the term
>>> than anything else,
>>
>> Nope, it's about understanding the actuality, or apparent actuality,
>> as you find it in consciousness. It's not just another exercise in
>> redundant linguistic philosophy.
>>
>>> but, clearly, if it exists in any sense, it is
>>> part of nature, it couldn't be otherwise.
>>
>> Maybe you like to think that, and I agree you might be correct (though
>> I doubt it). To say ' it couldn't be otherwise' is just dogma. Read
>> Kant, or anything by Bryan Magee, to find other, entirely consistent
>> options.
>
> Before this goes entirely off the rails, both of you please read the
> chapter on "nature" in Lewis's "Studies in Words". You're talking past
> each other.
>
cross-conversation. One that advertisers make great play of - claiming
that their products have entirely 'natural' ingredients, as if that, in
some way, makes them remarkable.
It's a pretty deep-seated confusion. From time to time, I've, as a joke,
said that I liked diet Coca-Cola because it was certain to have no
natural ingredients - it's saddened me that nobody has ever challenged
the statement (and it would, of course, be far too boring to point it
out), not even about the water and the aluminium. I'd always rather
hoped, for the, 'Ah, so you're a secret Space Cadet!' - maybe I'll have
to wait until my niece is old enough to rumble me.
John W. Kennedy
> I hadn't heard of [scientism] and I haven't encountered anybody with it.
Really? It's grown a shadow of its former self since the world-wide
shock of Hiroshima, but it left enough in the way of literary remains.
--
John W. Kennedy
Whan that hys prikke beeth a mans oon tool,
Than thenketh he ech theng a queynte, the fool.
-- Chaucer, "The Nilliade"j
John W. Kennedy
> John W. Kennedy wrote:
>> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>>> I wasn't wishing to 'dismiss' Freud, he certainly was a pioneer and
>>> had some interesting ideas, as I said, historically, there is a lot of
>>> interest there. I didn't realise that anybody took him seriously as
>>> far as human psychology was concerned though, not any more!
>>
>> In a world furnished with living bona-fide worshipers of Odin and (far
>> worse) Zeus, why ever would you suppose that?
>>
> Bona fide? I doubt it.
You can doubt it, but it's true. Google "Dodecatheon" or "Ásatrú" (and
neither one is alone of its kind).
We haven't even managed to kill no-real-theater-before-Ibsen-ism, though
it no longer possesses the stranglehold it once did.
I know someone who refuses to accept that the Shakespearean attribution
of the "Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter" has been exploded.
--
John W. Kennedy
A proud member of the reality-based community.
Richard Harter
<Peter.H....@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mar 18, 9:26 pm, Martin Ambuhl <mamb...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>> Take your unintelligible crap back to your deconstructionist foxhole. That someone writes crap at a 12th grade reading level does not make it worthy of consideration.
>>
>Lol! You couldn't be further off he mark.
>
>I agree completely that obscuratist writing is no indication of value
>- famously Sokal's magnificent Hoax has shown just how inarticulate
>the postmodernist and deconstructionist crew are.
If this is representative of the quality and accuracy of your opinions
then why should any one take anything that you say seriously?
Purl Gurl
> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>> Martin Ambuhl wrote:
>>> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>>> Take your unintelligible crap back to your deconstructionist foxhole.
>>> That someone writes crap at a 12th grade reading level does not make
>>> it worthy of consideration.
>> I agree completely that obscuratist writing is no indication of value
>> - famously Sokal's magnificent Hoax has shown just how inarticulate
>> the postmodernist and deconstructionist crew are.
> If this is representative of the quality and accuracy of your opinions
> then why should any one take anything that you say seriously?
Martin Ambuhl and I do not get along, not at all, so much so, I will
not respond to Ambuhl. Nonetheless, he is dead right on this topic.
I do not like Ambuhl but I treat his words with objective fairness.
Ambuhl is highly intelligent but is lacking in social skills.
Those writings provided by Brooks and those writings of Brooks, along
with many others around here, are pure obfuscated gibberish.
Here is a truth for you. I wrote a simple piece of software which,
using writings of my friend Noam Chomsky, randomly generates paragraphs
which are more coherent than writings of the many around these groups.
http://www.purlgurl.net/~callgirl/android/clarity.cgi
Explanation of how my software works and background information
is provided on my page.
Those writings generated, at random, by my software are significantly
more logical and significantly more coherent than much of these writings
I read in this "humanism" group.
For trivia, English is not my native tongue.
Purl Gurl
Robert Lieblich
[ ... ]
> Rather amusing two words emerge, prove to be popular
> in usage when referring to you two. Those two words,
> as you know, are "arrogant" and "shit."
Well, there's no denying that shit emerges. I'm not so sure about
"arrogant."
And I offer the first of the quoted sentences as further evidence in
support of my contention that PG is semi-literate
--
Barrister Bob
Jack Campin - bogus address
> value - famously Sokal's magnificent Hoax has shown just how
> inarticulate the postmodernist and deconstructionist crew are.
That isn't what Sokal himself said about it; he doesn't say his
subjects were *in*articulate, rather that they could be *more*
articulate. For example, he says he understands enough of what
Virilio was getting at to largely agree with him, he just found
Virilio's choice of metaphors seriously misguided.
============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557
Robert Bannister
> On Mar 18, 9:26 pm, Martin Ambuhl <mamb...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>>Take your unintelligible crap back to your deconstructionist foxhole. That someone writes crap at a 12th grade reading level does not make it worthy of consideration.
>>
>
> Lol! You couldn't be further off he mark.
>
> I agree completely that obscuratist writing is no indication of value
> - famously Sokal's magnificent Hoax has shown just how inarticulate
> the postmodernist and deconstructionist crew are.
>
> Lucidity is certainly the mark of somebody who understands the
> subject. When I read the original article, it didn't occur to me that
> anybody would find it difficult to read - it as a surprise to me that
> it had a reading level of 12, actually, because it was pretty clear.
> As I said in my original point, the author is a Yank, and also a
> Professor of Literature, so I probably discounted these two, accepting
> a certain level of waffle that I wouldn't in an English speaker or
> scientific writer.
>
> No, the reason the article is interesting is its subject matter only,
> not its writing style. Somebody could re-write it in much better
> prose, I agree, particularly, now that I see that some people
> genuinely find the language difficult. The hallmark of postmodernist
> or deconstructionist waffle is that it cannot be re-written in better
> prose because it is bullshit and has no valid subject matter, as your
> point about Derrida suggests.
>
> There's a better written discussion on the subject from Nature to be
> found at:
>
> http://www.washjeff.edu/users/jgottschall/Media%20Attention/Nature%20review-Literary%20Animal.pdf
>
>
>
That was certainly easier to read, but I still find it hard to see what
that has to do with literary analysis. The latter is certainly riddled
with hocus-pocus, but surely the aim is to attempt to describe why a
work labelled "literature" deserves the name, and that has to do with
the style of writing, not the content or various way of looking at the
content.
When I was at university, we were faced with a similar problem. Our
tutors wanted to show us that the medieval German texts we were studying
were worth studying because of their literary value, but, for the exam,
we also had to learn the "party line", because the professor who was in
charge of the marking saw them only as documents on medieval society.
--
Rob Bannister
Purl Gurl
> Purl Gurl wrote:
[ ... ]
* Ronald Reagan debating Jimmy Carter voice *
"There you go again."
Yes, there you go again with your "semi-literate" arrogant shit!
Make up your mind. Am I semi-literate or semi-illiterate?
I vote semiliterate just as I voted for butt number four.
I read many of these people and am reminded of a cartoony
like setting.
A man, typical White Trash, out on the dirt road in front of his
double wide trailer, seats the Burger King upon a throne made of a
beer keg, scraps of plywood, shop rags, chrome hubcaps, a grille
from a 1956 Chevy pickup, a dog pissed stained sofa cushion and
two stood on end rusty fence posts each topped with a work glove,
fingers stood straight up, then he declares,
"I done be an IM-PO-TANT MAN!"
Arrogant misuse of language is no different than this Burger King's
rather comical throne. I read these people slinging around big fancy
city slicker words, all pompous and full of false pride.
Just as comical as my Trailer Trash Throne, these people have not
a clue of how to use those big impressive city slicker words which
only serve to bray at their writers like a stupid head strong mule.
Big words have deep complex meanings. General rule is, "The bigger
the word, the bigger the brain needed."
I do not know if you, Bobby, visited my Chomsky Bot page, does not
matter. My software, which is completely mindless, can string together
randomly picked short phrases, using big city slicker words, to create
absolutely eloquent grammar perfect sentences and paragraphs which,
to a casual reader, are extremely impressive; very high language.
However, those eloquent and masterful randomly generated writings
are nothing more than arrogant shit. Nothing but strung together
words of Dr. Noam Chomsky, but mine is not to discredit Noam.
Nonetheless, my mindless software writes circles around the pointy
little heads of these arrogant shit boys around here.
Big words require big thinking. A writer cannot simply slop in
big words and get away with this, not around language talents.
Use of big city slicker words by Brooks and the likes, is nothing
more than coattail clinging dropping of famous names, and I notice
these boys around here very frequently drop famous names, like
dropping a claw hammer on their bare toes. Ouch.
Big Hat, No Cattle.
Purl Gurl
* I will write up an example for you, Bobby, to follow.
Jack Campin - bogus address
>> because it ignores pretty much everything anthropologists have
>> discovered in the last hundred years.
> Lovely! I can see that you're keener on the genuine Victrian crap.
We don't have much option but to take the delusions and bigotries of
more than 100 years ago on their own terms and try to pick out the good
stuff (I rather like some of the invective directed against universal
suffrage). When the same ideas are being recycled today, we have the
option of countering them.
> Just out of interest, though, what is it that you think
> anthropologists have actually discovered - your aren't prehaps
> thinking of Margeret Mead's inventions, are you?
Try fitting romantic love to an Australian kinship system. There
is a large anthology of relevant literature: a book "Love Songs of
Arnhem Land" or similar. (I've got it upstairs but it would be a
bugger to find). Not the only example, nor is most of what Mead had
to say about Polynesian society that far removed from what everybody
else has to say about it.
There are several different problems with this "literary Darwinism"
idea.
1. it tries to look new and scientific by ignoring most science
since the time of Herbert Spencer
2. it ignores most of what makes literature interesting: plot,
characterization, imaginative use of sound and syntax.
3. in most cases where it does vaguely connect with a literary issue,
it has much less to say about it than more conventional methods.
Take that "men prefer small waists" thing (in any case well and
truly refuted as a cultural universal by those West African
societies that put marriageable women into fattening houses).
Let's look at an example, a version of a bawdy song of the 17th
century as recorded by John Clare from his father's singing:
Now some likes a girl that is pretty in the face,
And others likes a girl that is slender in the waist
But give me the girl with a wriggle and twist
That is pleasant and good tempered with a cuckoo's nest.
It is pretty clear to conventional literary analysis how this
song works (in any of its many variants) - it's an extended
metaphor in which the female pubis is analogized to a cuckoo's
nest. So why is the waist important here? Mainly because the
word consonates and assonates with the other lines. There are
variants that don't mention it and have no parallel to that
verse - if it were such an important thing to remind people of,
why do they exist? You can make clear sense of the song by
tracing its original idea through *textual* evolutionary
processes - transient forms that were too complicated for oral
tradition to preserve, transformations due to bowdlerization,
modifications to fit slightly different tunes. Doing this
right requires genuine scholarship - identifying and dating
the variants, tracing routes of transmission, finding out
about contexts of performance. Why would you expect an under-
standing of Darwinian sexual selection to tell us anything
comparably illuminating about it? Or contribute any insight
at all?
Purl Gurl
> Robert Lieblich wrote:
>> Purl Gurl wrote:
(snipped - read my previous article for context)
> * I will write up an example for you, Bobby, to follow.
This is the quoted author's opening paragraph provided by Brooks,
"Clearly the nonsense that has passed for teaching and rearch in some
English departments over the past several years had to go eventually,
this shows the way in which it is going."
Before my discussion, all opening paragraphs, for this type of essay,
are to be an introductory paragraph. A major topic is to be briefly
introduced, followed by brief description of sub-topics, then closing
with a brief summary of writer rationale.
At times, writers will perform those requirements within the first
paragraph, or may spread this introduction out over two to three
short paragraphs but never more than three.
An introductory first paragraph is also to set the nature of an essay;
compare and contrast, argumentative, persuasion, whatever.
This requires some effort on the part of you readers. No effort, no
understanding. No effort, this is your shame, not mine.
Compare the author's opening introductory paragraph to subsequent
writings. The author, after this introductory paragraph, leaps right
into some wild unrelated tangent. Within the body of his essay, the
author never touches upon his introductory topics, again. This does
render his opening paragraph, gibberish. Easy to surmise the remaining
body of his essay, is gibberish; no cohesion of topic.
Within the main body of his essay, the author leaps from one wild
tangent to another wild tangent. There is no cohesion of topic
within his writings; a shotgun approach. Additionally, his logic
is as reasonable as a Mad Magazine.
Setting aside his misspelled word right off, a mark of a piss
poor writer, this author simply pukes up gibberish.
"Clearly the nonsense that has passed for teaching...."
What nonsense? What teaching? Where is his supporting evidence?
This author simply spews out arrogant shit and expects readers
to take his word as ultimate authority. All he does is bray
like a mule about who knows what, maybe the Burger King.
"...rearch[sic] in some English departments over the past
several years...."
What research? What research topic? Which English departments?
At which school or university? What has taken place in the
last several years? SHEEE-HAWWWW... SHEEE-HAWWWWW....
"...had to go eventually...."
Only one question is needed to highlight his idiocy, "why?"
"...this shows the way in which it is going."
This? What is this? The author's "this" references absolutely
nothing. Oh my, "it" is going. What is "it"? Again, the author
makes reference to nothing.
How many times have I warned you boys to never use "it" in
your language unless totally unavoidable, which is never.
This is a classic case of a bozo making use of "it" which
references, for all we know, the Burger King sitting upon
a White Trailer Trash throne.
Subsequent to his introductory paragraph, this author never
again mentions topics, or lack of topics, in his opening
paragraph. No, he leap frogs all over the frog pond and
beyond, until a reader elects to frog gig the author
being so damn annoyed trying to make sense of his
arrogrant shit mule braying.
Some comment his language, his words, are not difficult
to understand. This is true. His words are familiar to
the many, but his sentences and paragraphs make as much
sense as an overdosed speed freak high on LSD bouncing
around like a warp speed pogo stick while screaming
words randomly picked from his frying brain.
The author is a true scatter brain. He cannot maintain
a topic for more than one or two sentences, and if a
topic is established, he instantly embeds two more
topics with his topic then leaps off on another tangent.
Besides, his logic is as logical as teats on a man.
What this author writes is a big pile of arrogant shit,
nonsensical arrogant shit, at that.
Previously I write, in a select news group, I feel a
need to draw a data flow chart to discover if this author
ever makes a coherent point and I disclose my data flow
chart would be a Mobius Strip Pretzel.
Any readers out there find a single clear, concise and
cohesive point make by this scatter brained author?
Peter H.M.Brooks
>>> Glib neo-Victorian crap that only looks superficially plausible
>>> because it ignores pretty much everything anthropologists have
>>> discovered in the last hundred years.
>> Lovely! I can see that you're keener on the genuine Victrian crap.
>
> We don't have much option but to take the delusions and bigotries of
> more than 100 years ago on their own terms and try to pick out the good
> stuff (I rather like some of the invective directed against universal
> suffrage). When the same ideas are being recycled today, we have the
> option of countering them.
>
that delusions and bigotries had personifications that had their own
terms, but I'd agree that getting rid of them is a good idea, where
possible. I know some delusions are useful, but I can't think of many
that you'd really want to seek out to start enjoying.
>
>> Just out of interest, though, what is it that you think
>> anthropologists have actually discovered - your aren't prehaps
>> thinking of Margeret Mead's inventions, are you?
>
> Try fitting romantic love to an Australian kinship system. There
> is a large anthology of relevant literature: a book "Love Songs of
> Arnhem Land" or similar. (I've got it upstairs but it would be a
> bugger to find). Not the only example, nor is most of what Mead had
> to say about Polynesian society that far removed from what everybody
> else has to say about it.
>
romantic love into a kinship system, that'd be like fitting a propeller
to a bus. You'd see how the kinship system connects to relatedness.
You'd then see how romantic love works in Australia - or rather in the
particular group of Australians that you're interested in.
>
> There are several different problems with this "literary Darwinism"
> idea.
>
> 1. it tries to look new and scientific by ignoring most science
> since the time of Herbert Spencer
>
>
> 2. it ignores most of what makes literature interesting: plot,
> characterization, imaginative use of sound and syntax.
>
things that were easiest to work out first.
>
> 3. in most cases where it does vaguely connect with a literary issue,
> it has much less to say about it than more conventional methods.
> Take that "men prefer small waists" thing (in any case well and
> truly refuted as a cultural universal by those West African
> societies that put marriageable women into fattening houses).
> Let's look at an example, a version of a bawdy song of the 17th
> century as recorded by John Clare from his father's singing:
>
though, men prefer a particular waist to hip ratio, this can be achieved
both by narrowing the waist and by widening the hip - bustles, with
wasp-waists, do both.
>
> Now some likes a girl that is pretty in the face,
> And others likes a girl that is slender in the waist
> But give me the girl with a wriggle and twist
> That is pleasant and good tempered with a cuckoo's nest.
>
>
> It is pretty clear to conventional literary analysis how this
> song works (in any of its many variants) - it's an extended
> metaphor in which the female pubis is analogized to a cuckoo's
> nest. So why is the waist important here? Mainly because the
> word consonates and assonates with the other lines. There are
> variants that don't mention it and have no parallel to that
> verse - if it were such an important thing to remind people of,
> why do they exist? You can make clear sense of the song by
> tracing its original idea through *textual* evolutionary
> processes - transient forms that were too complicated for oral
> tradition to preserve, transformations due to bowdlerization,
> modifications to fit slightly different tunes. Doing this
> right requires genuine scholarship - identifying and dating
> the variants, tracing routes of transmission, finding out
> about contexts of performance. Why would you expect an under-
> standing of Darwinian sexual selection to tell us anything
> comparably illuminating about it? Or contribute any insight
> at all?
>
I'd expect genuine scholarship to be aware of many things apart from
those you mention above - the human reaction to cuckolding, being one.
Now the scholar in the past would say that that was simply human nature,
instinct, common knowledge or some such, but now would have a clearer
view. Just as the scholar would need to know some geography to
understand the phrase 'the sun is in the east, even though the day is
done' as well as some history.
This new field may simply add more arrows to the quiver, rather than
replacing the quiver.
Peter H.M.Brooks
> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
>> John W. Kennedy wrote:
>>> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>>>> I wasn't wishing to 'dismiss' Freud, he certainly was a pioneer and
>>>> had some interesting ideas, as I said, historically, there is a lot of
>>>> interest there. I didn't realise that anybody took him seriously as
>>>> far as human psychology was concerned though, not any more!
>>>
>>> In a world furnished with living bona-fide worshipers of Odin and
>>> (far worse) Zeus, why ever would you suppose that?
>>>
>> Bona fide? I doubt it.
>
> You can doubt it, but it's true. Google "Dodecatheon" or "Ásatrú" (and
> neither one is alone of its kind).
>
claim to have revived druidism, I doubt their bona fides, though.
>
> We haven't even managed to kill no-real-theater-before-Ibsen-ism, though
> it no longer possesses the stranglehold it once did.
>
> I know someone who refuses to accept that the Shakespearean attribution
> of the "Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter" has been exploded.
>
have to be prevented from being mainstream enough to ruin people's
education or to send a generation of literature into a waste land.
Peter H.M.Brooks
Peter H.M.Brooks
>> value - famously Sokal's magnificent Hoax has shown just how
>> inarticulate the postmodernist and deconstructionist crew are.
>
> That isn't what Sokal himself said about it; he doesn't say his
> subjects were *in*articulate, rather that they could be *more*
> articulate. For example, he says he understands enough of what
> Virilio was getting at to largely agree with him, he just found
> Virilio's choice of metaphors seriously misguided.
>
hoax worked because the editors were so used to bullshit that seemed to
have some seam of sense in it somewhere that they couldn't identify a
sample that didn't even have that.
Peter H.M.Brooks
>
>> There's a better written discussion on the subject from Nature to be
>> found at:
>>
>> http://www.washjeff.edu/users/jgottschall/Media%20Attention/Nature%20review-Literary%20Animal.pdf
>
> That was certainly easier to read, but I still find it hard to see what
> that has to do with literary analysis. The latter is certainly riddled
> with hocus-pocus, but surely the aim is to attempt to describe why a
> work labelled "literature" deserves the name, and that has to do with
> the style of writing, not the content or various way of looking at the
> content.
>
Yes, the style is of major importance, of course, but it would be absurd
to exclude content altogether as well as context.
>
> When I was at university, we were faced with a similar problem. Our
> tutors wanted to show us that the medieval German texts we were studying
> were worth studying because of their literary value, but, for the exam,
> we also had to learn the "party line", because the professor who was in
> charge of the marking saw them only as documents on medieval society.
>
KJV, a work of literature, it is also a self-help guide, or an
anthropological record of a semi-nomadic tribe or a genuine
autobiography. All may be useful descriptions of the book and contribute
towards understanding its literary value. Treating it exclusively as any
one of these would be missing part of the point. I'd see that as the
more cogent criticism of Literary Darwinism, not that it is irrelevant,
but that it seeks to make itself the sole basis for judgement - not that
I think that that is actually the intent, even though articles pleading
its case might well give that impression.
Robert Lieblich
Wouldn't want to hurt her feelings.
Peter H.M.Brooks
Purl Gurl
> Wouldn't want to hurt her feelings.
ehhhh... your sister blows bubblegum.
Purl Gurl
Robert Lieblich
I'm very kind to Purl Gurl. She resents it fiercely.
--
Mr. Kindness Himself
Purl Gurl
> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
>> Robert Lieblich wrote:
>>> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
>>>> Robert Lieblich wrote:
>>>>> Purl Gurl wrote:
>>>>>[ ... ]
>>>>>> Rather amusing two words emerge, prove to be popular
>>>>>> in usage when referring to you two. Those two words,
>>>>>> as you know, are "arrogant" and "shit."
>>>>> Well, there's no denying that shit emerges. I'm not so sure about
>>>>> "arrogant."
>>>>> And I offer the first of the quoted sentences as further evidence in
>>>>> support of my contention that PG is semi-literate
>>> Wouldn't want to hurt her feelings.
> I'm very kind to Purl Gurl. She resents it fiercely.
...and your wife wears combat boots.
Purl Gurl
Robert Lieblich
>
> Robert Lieblich wrote:
>
> > I'm very kind to Purl Gurl. She resents it fiercely.
>
> ...and your wife wears combat boots.
Only when repairing the car.
Peter H.M.Brooks
A bad wife causes trouble for her husband.
He will feel as if his bones are weak,
And his chariot his responsibility.
John W. Kennedy
> John W. Kennedy wrote:
>> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
>>> John W. Kennedy wrote:
>>>> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>>>>> I wasn't wishing to 'dismiss' Freud, he certainly was a pioneer and
>>>>> had some interesting ideas, as I said, historically, there is a lot of
>>>>> interest there. I didn't realise that anybody took him seriously as
>>>>> far as human psychology was concerned though, not any more!
>>>>
>>>> In a world furnished with living bona-fide worshipers of Odin and
>>>> (far worse) Zeus, why ever would you suppose that?
>>>>
>>> Bona fide? I doubt it.
>>
>> You can doubt it, but it's true. Google "Dodecatheon" or "Ásatrú" (and
>> neither one is alone of its kind).
> >
> I don't doubt that people exist who make such claims, just as people
> claim to have revived druidism, I doubt their bona fides, though.
/They've/ been around for centuries. But the neo-Olympians have been a
serious politico-legal problem in Greece (where the Orthodox Church is
estabished) for the last few years. I'm pretty damn sure they aren't joking.
>> We haven't even managed to kill no-real-theater-before-Ibsen-ism,
>> though it no longer possesses the stranglehold it once did.
>>
>> I know someone who refuses to accept that the Shakespearean
>> attribution of the "Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter" has been
>> exploded.
>>
> I'm not sure that all bizarre positions need to be killed. They just
> have to be prevented from being mainstream enough to ruin people's
> education or to send a generation of literature into a waste land.
I don't know about "need to be". I'm just saying they aren't. And that,
therefore, your expectation that Freud should have made a noise like a
hoop and rolled away by now was rather ingenuous.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne
of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts"
-- J. Michael Straczynski. "Babylon 5", "Ceremonies of Light and Dark"
Purl Gurl
> [ ... ]
...and you wear a pink tutu around the house while
singing Old McDonald's Farm.
http://www.purlgurl.net/aue/tutu.jpg
E I E I Ohhhhhh! Oh my!
Purl Gurl
Purl Gurl
>> [ ... ]
Least you could do is quote Proverbs correctly,
even if a good Taliban notion.
Purl Gurl
sirb...@hotmail.com
> Monday, the 19th of March, 2007
>
> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
>
> I hadn't heard of the belief and I haven't encountered anybody with it.
>
> Hmm. I've maintained for years that much academic psychology,
> sociology, political science, economics, and some versions of
> history are scientism, not science. Oh, yeah, and Schools of
> Education. Any place where correlative empirical study is used
> to sketch some sort of (assumed) initial-value determinism,
> without really having any such thing as "mechanism" pinned down.
> I.e. people are not *like* particles, planets, or billiard balls.
> Or, as Einstein put it, "The present fashion of applying the axioms of
> physical science to human life is not only entirely a mistake but also
> has something reprehensible in it."
>
> Or, as Rutherford put it a different way, "All science is either
> physics or stamp collecting." Astronomy, biology, and geology all
> went from being stamp collecting to being physics in my lifetime.
> The idea for me is not in any way to forbid the investigation of
> human behaviour as an object of empirical study. It is rather
> to recognize that gathering all the stamps in the world does not
> make stamp collecting into physics. The scientism is in the pretending
> that one is doing physics or something like physics when one isn't.
>
> Mike Morris
> (msmor...@netdirect.net)
physics is not a science, it is just proficiency in a certain
utilitarian paradigm. there is no aspiration to be like physics in the
humanities and, to the dismay of many, there's really no need.
sirb...@hotmail.com
> On Mar 19, 7:49 am, "Peter H.M. Brooks" <Peter.H.M.Bro...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Mar 19, 1:40 pm, "*Anarcissie*" <anarcis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > It does sound like scientism
>
> > What is 'scientism'??
>
> I used it to mean "the belief that most or all forms of thought
> should follow the methods of the physical sciences". However,
> there are some other meanings, as you can see from the
> Wikipedia entry:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
>
> Note that I said "sounds like". That wasn't a scientific
> observation.
>
> I liked some of the ideas in one of the article -- for instance,
> asking the questions "What is literature? What is its purpose?"
> and trying to answer them from the standpoint of evolutionary
> biology. If nothing else, such an approach should be good for
> some humor. However, I have to note there has been a lot of
> flogging of that ghostly dead horse "postmodernism". That
> ritual has gotten very, very old and I wish we could dispense
> with it.
what is economics?
a paradigm placed in after the invention of copyright.
what is postmodernism?
a paradigm placed in after the destruction of copyright.
(for example)
postmodernism is alive and well.
sirb...@hotmail.com
LOL! well that would be, my dear incoherent dribbling dishonest brook,
because postmodernism is rich and complex, unlike your new criterion
national review crap which nobody could ever infiltrate because even a
monkey would understand the party line. hence an editor can know
little about everything in your simple magazines, but not likewise in
pomo, which you're only whining about cuz your neocons were left out
of the game.
is that all you have to offer, a rightard noise machine from the mid
90s? fuck you, brook, and all the mediocre boring unfinished modernity
crap you represent.
mind you, im sure you wouldnt mind it if i imitated jurgen habermas
with a few mistakes here n there if you promise me a fiver, right?
sirb...@hotmail.com
in empirical fact, all we seem to be seeing is physics desperately
trying to be humanist... or anthropocentric... and as of late the only
prestige project they've managed to come up with has been a series of
hilarious NASA flights--- that, and richard branson's perpetual
wanking...
Peter Moylan
it exists.]
John W. Kennedy wrote:
> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>> On Mar 18, 3:38 pm, Purl Gurl <purlg...@purlgurl.net> wrote:
>
> "purlgurl" is a well-known troll in newsgroups devoted to the Perl
> programming language. (I am surprised to find her here.)
>
Do you have any hints on how to make her go away?
--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer
receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet
address could disappear at any time.
Purl Gurl
> John W. Kennedy wrote:
>> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
>>> Purl Gurl wrote:
>> "purlgurl" is a well-known troll in newsgroups devoted to the Perl
>> programming language. (I am surprised to find her here.)
> Do you have any hints on how to make her go away?
Have Anthony wish her into a cornfield?
Have Dorothy toss a bucket of water upon her?
Throw yourselves upon the floor, pound your fists, flail
your legs, whine and cry while pitching a temper tantrum,
as you boys so often do?
Purl Gurl
Bob Cunningham
You forgot "Hold your breath till you turn blue"?
*Anarcissie*
Sokal's primary hoax proved only that the editors of _Social_
_Text_ were inattentive. There was a secondary hoax, in which
perhaps Dr. Sokal hoaxed himself, to the effect that the primary
hoax was broadly significant. For the primary hoax to be
significant, it would have had to gain some currency, as the
more famous literary and scientific hoaxes of the past have
done. But it did not -- Dr. Sokal exposed it before it had
any chance of gaining broad acceptance (along the lines,
say, of Piltdown Man). Hence, while amusing, the hoax was
in itself a tempest in a very small teapot.
The broad acceptance of Dr. Sokal's hoax as some kind
of proof of the badness or silliness of "postmodernism",
however, _is_ interesting. It looks to me like evidence of
further deterioration of intellectual standards in academia
and the public in general. After all, if Derrida and so forth
wrote piffle, it shouldn't be to difficult to show it using
standard critical tools. But it would be necessary to do
the reading, to do the work. Another strategy would be
to ignore it. But instead we observe a tremendous
_ressentiment_ which could only arise from a mix of
incompetence and laziness.
James Whitehead
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
news:12vtf78...@corp.supernews.com...
>
> Monday, the 19th of March, 2007
>
> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
> I hadn't heard of the belief and I haven't encountered anybody with
it.
>
> Hmm. I've maintained for years that much academic psychology,
> sociology, political science, economics, and some versions of
> history are scientism, not science. Oh, yeah, and Schools of
> Education. Any place where correlative empirical study is used
> to sketch some sort of (assumed) initial-value determinism,
> without really having any such thing as "mechanism" pinned down.
> I.e. people are not *like* particles, planets, or billiard balls.
> Or, as Einstein put it, "The present fashion of applying the axioms of
> physical science to human life is not only entirely a mistake but also
> has something reprehensible in it."
>
> Or, as Rutherford put it a different way, "All science is either
> physics or stamp collecting." Astronomy, biology, and geology all
> went from being stamp collecting to being physics in my lifetime.
> The idea for me is not in any way to forbid the investigation of
> human behaviour as an object of empirical study. It is rather
> to recognize that gathering all the stamps in the world does not
> make stamp collecting into physics. The scientism is in the pretending
> that one is doing physics or something like physics when one isn't.
>
theories - zillions - particles - with no evidence
'dark matter' - 'quiet energy ICBIAFP (i cant believe its a fundamental
particle - particle)
Anonyma
Not likely
Purl Gurl
> Purl Gurl wrote:
>> Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
>>> Robert Lieblich wrote:
>>>> Purl Gurl wrote:
>>>>> Robert Lieblich wrote:
(snipped)
>>>>>> I'm very kind to Purl Gurl. She resents it fiercely.
>>>>> ...and your wife wears combat boots.
>>>> Only when repairing the car.
>>> A good wife is like a crown for her husband,
>>> A bad wife causes trouble for her husband.
>>> He will feel as if his bones are weak,
>>> And his chariot his responsibility.
>> Least you could do is quote Proverbs correctly,
>> even if a good Taliban notion.
> Not likely
Well stated! Informative and to the point!
What is not likely?
Not likely any will have a clue about what is your topic?
Purl Gurl
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
> Really? It's grown a shadow of its former self since the world-wide
> shock of Hiroshima, but it left enough in the way of literary remains.
>
It's a lovely metaphor, 'grown a shadow'. I imagine that you mean
(what a liberty) that you see the metaphorical 'former self' of
'scientism', growing a self. Now, sadly, it's former ''self'' growing
a shadow.
So, what might the shadow of a former self be? Sweet fuck all comes to
mind.
So, having established that, what are these 'literary remains' of SFA
(Sweet fuck alll - or those very slow followers of this discussion -
Hi, bub, bubbette, why are you here?)
So now we must see WTF (what the fuck) Hiroshima has to do with it. At
this stage, it's pretty easy. All other options are dealt with, so the
mention of Hirosima was simply otiose. Or, morally, despicable, nasty
unnecessary, or, to be kind, simply bullshit.
sirblob
wrote:
your favourite neoclassical director would also disapprove of
sokurov's days of the eclipse.
sirblob
wrote:> > > On Mar 18, 4:52 am, Purl Gurl <purlg...@purlgurl.net> wrote:
>
> > >>(snipped approximately three kilometers of text)
>
> > >>I have carefully read your article, twice. I have carefully
> > >>read your linked material, twice.
>
> > > I'm sorry, I thought that I'd posted it to groups where you'd expect
> > > to find people fairly able readers. Most of the posting was, of
> > > course, from a popular magazine, the New Scientist, which tries hard,
> > > sometimes, I fear, too hard, to make its prose simple.
>
> > Although I feel the word "hegemony" should have left with communist
> > writers, I didn't find the language difficult. I did, however, find the
> > content boring and rather lacking in any useful conclusion.
>
> I love it when people label themselves so conveniently by using the
> term 'hegemony' - it's remarkable, but clearly the case, that some
> still think it clever.
>
> If you're not interested in either literary theory or evolution, then
> it is unlikely that it would be interesting.
>
> I did find it quite bizarre that anybody would find the language
> difficult - anybody that read one of the groups it was posted to,
> anyway. I did think that it was somebody taking the piss at first,
> but, I learned something about the level of literacy out there that I
> hadn't known before.
it's just so hilarious to see another harold bloom fanboy get
ridiculed with the same tools he used to ridicule derrida.
>
> I agee about the lack of useful conclusions. Since it is a newly
> developing field, it is a long way from the conclusion stage. The
> questions that I posed at the start are the sort of preliminary
> investigations that will, no doubt, start producing some interesting
> work over the next few years. I'm looking forward to it, it has been
> very difficult to find any interesting academic literary criticism for
> quite a long time, though, to be fair, it can still be found, the
> field is not entirely occupied by lunatics as the TLS, for example,
> where the death of post-modernism in, at least history, has been
> documented.
>
> So many fields have, over the past couple of decades, been re-
> invigorated, even, re-born, if not actually born for the first time,
> by the new practitioners understanding sociobiology, that it is clear
> that it adds a powerful, and sound, theoretical basis to the
> understanding of, inter alia, human behaviour. Literature has missed
> this influence, and it will be an exciting time to see how it turns
> out. Of course, as with the other fields, the old guard will never
> understand it, or, if they do, never accept it - it's well established
> that, for radical change, the only way forward is, ultimately, for the
> old guard to die out. Not necessarily literally, they simply need to
> retire or have become irrelevant.
bla bla bla, more phony crap w/ an agenda.
Mounard le Fuogueux
Robert Bannister
> Robert Bannister wrote:
>
>>
>>> There's a better written discussion on the subject from Nature to be
>>> found at:
>>>
>>> http://www.washjeff.edu/users/jgottschall/Media%20Attention/Nature%20review-Literary%20Animal.pdf
>>
>>
>>
>> That was certainly easier to read, but I still find it hard to see
>> what that has to do with literary analysis. The latter is certainly
>> riddled with hocus-pocus, but surely the aim is to attempt to describe
>> why a work labelled "literature" deserves the name, and that has to do
>> with the style of writing, not the content or various way of looking
>> at the content.
>
> >
> I think that that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> Yes, the style is of major importance, of course, but it would be absurd
> to exclude content altogether as well as context.
>
>>
>> When I was at university, we were faced with a similar problem. Our
>> tutors wanted to show us that the medieval German texts we were
>> studying were worth studying because of their literary value, but, for
>> the exam, we also had to learn the "party line", because the professor
>> who was in charge of the marking saw them only as documents on
>> medieval society.
>>
> Aren't they, in fact, both? Just as a biblical book can be, if in the
> KJV, a work of literature, it is also a self-help guide, or an
> anthropological record of a semi-nomadic tribe or a genuine
> autobiography. All may be useful descriptions of the book and contribute
> towards understanding its literary value. Treating it exclusively as any
> one of these would be missing part of the point. I'd see that as the
> more cogent criticism of Literary Darwinism, not that it is irrelevant,
> but that it seeks to make itself the sole basis for judgement - not that
> I think that that is actually the intent, even though articles pleading
> its case might well give that impression.
>
Conceded. I agree with you; especially with the last sentence.
--
Rob Bannister
*Anarcissie*
I found Hagen dishonest and Desilet huffy.
A good, solid attack on the work of a writer, nominally a
"philosopher", requires that one go to considerable trouble
not to propagandize, not to misrepresent, not to
misunderstand. Hagen fails, he is apparently overcome
by his desire to promote his ideology and win -- one can
tell this without knowing a thing about Derrida's work. In a
way, Desilet does more damage to Derrida's repute than
Hagen by huffing in Derrida's defense. Still, the articles
were interesting and Desilet takes nice photographs.
John W. Kennedy
> After all, if Derrida and so forth
> wrote piffle, it shouldn't be to difficult to show it using
> standard critical tools.
But that would entail the use of facts and logic, which the pomos have
pronounced to constitute "fascism".
--
John W. Kennedy
"The pathetic hope that the White House will turn a Caligula into a
Marcus Aurelius is as naīve as the fear that ultimate power inevitably
corrupts."
-- James D. Barber (1930-2004)
Philip
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <Peter.H....@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1174270721.9...@e65g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
> On Mar 19, 3:46 am, "Philip" <p...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>> "Lance" <LanceG...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>>
>> news:1174220380.6...@y80g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Mar 18, 2:14 pm, "Peter H.M.Brooks" <p...@news.co.za> wrote:
>> >> Lance wrote:
>> >> > On Mar 18, 2:05 pm, "Peter H.M.Brooks" <p...@news.co.za> wrote:
>> >> >> Lance wrote:
>>
>> >> >>> One aspect of aristicratic ideals is the strict regulation of
>> >> >>> emotion.
>> >> >>> An aristocrat can feel boredom, but not angry or joy. Even loud
>> >> >>> laughter is seen as beneath his dignity. frank Muir wrote a book
>> >> >>> making the same point - that at one time in English life, it was
>> >> >>> really bad form to laugh out loud.
>> >> >>> But aristocrats are human and do get angry and do want to laugh.
>> >> >>> So
>> >> >>> the theory is the person who holds aristocratic ideals must look
>> >> >>> for
>> >> >>> indirect means for expressing these emotions. Sarcasm and irony
>> >> >>> are
>> >> >>> the way out since express these emotion indirectly.
>> >> >>> Once this habit of indirect expression had taken hold it began to
>> >> >>> shape all sorts of aspects of the English language and English
>> >> >>> writing, and no doubt English life. This effect has persisted even
>> >> >>> after England has become an middle-class society with few
>> >> >>> aristocratic
>> >> >>> aspirations.
>> >> >>> I don't know whether this a very Darwinian, but it seems plausible
>> >> >>> to
>> >> >>> me.
>> >> >> It would be interesting to understand how this came to be a
>> >> >> defining
>> >> >> part of the aristocracy - after all, originally, these were people
>> >> >> who
>> >> >> had arrived at the top of the class structure, winning a war
>> >> >> designed
>> >> >> by
>> >> >> evolution to get them the best mates. How was it evolutionarily
>> >> >> advantageous to be aloof of base (and why so called?) emotions? If
>> >> >> it
>> >> >> worked for aristocrats, then, presumably, it'd still work now. Do
>> >> >> people
>> >> >> who act like that now do better?
>>
>> >> >> There surely are some fairly strong vestiges of aristocratic
>> >> >> ambition -
>> >> >> I can't really see any other reason why anybody paid any money for
>> >> >> peerages which are, on the face of it, quite worthless.- Hide
>> >> >> quoted
>> >> >> text -
>>
>> >> > I think the idea is that an arisocrat is a sort of super person who
>> >> > can't be damaged by the mundane doings of the peasants around him.
>> >> > It
>> >> > is a way of being aloof and superior.
>>
>> >> So, if this is a soundly evolutionarily successful strategy, does it
>> >> still work? If not, why not?- Hide quoted text -
>>
>> >> - Show quoted text -
>>
>> > In evolutionary terms I suppose it is about status. Males of high
>> > status supposedly get the beautiful girls. Sarcasm and snootiness go
>> > with aloofness and a claim to be better than the company in which you
>> > find yourself. So you, the superior aristocrat, put them down in an
>> > indirect way that makes it difficult for them to retaliate and you can
>> > walk away knowing that everyone has seen how superior you are.
>>
>> > Does that work?
>>
>> The impression I get from Austen is that the proper use of the sarcastic
>> put
>> down is for making fun of your social equals rather than asserting
>> yourself
>> over social inferiors.
>>
> That's a good point. Not only that, but much of the irony is intended
> to be so oblique as the direct recipient isn't aware that it exists.
>
> Mind you, I think, too, that the notion of there actually being
> 'social equals' is one that would be rather alien to some of Austen's
> characters.
When the eponymous Emma tries to excuse her mocking of Miss Bates on grounds
of the insult not being understood, the idea is firmly dismissed, and Mr
Knightley (who, with such a name, can surely be relied on to steer us right)
makes the point about equality explicitly: " ... were she prosperous, I
could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the
good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity
to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of
manner. Were she your equal in situation--but, Emma, consider how far this
is from being the case."