The Master (ok, Freud) used the amoeba as a metaphor for illness and depression. In normal times, the amoeba moves by extending a part of itself; if everything is ok, the rest of the little fella catches up to the extension, called a pseudopod. And so it moves to get food, find a nice starter house, go to those peculiar amoeba family reunions.
But in bad times, if the amoeba is ill or injured, no pseudopods. Wait a while, regain strength, think about amoeba-type things, and then consider moving on.
When people get sick or hurt, same thing. No new risks, no new challenges; take care of the immediate, then hunker down to heal and rest. Not always the best strategy, but not so bad, either. Evolution and all.
Well, then. Back to 9/12/2001. We had just suffered a terrible injury. An amoeba would have hunkered down. The getting injured part was over, the damage to us was done. No more pseudopods for us, not for a while. The evolutionary wisdom of the amoeba, and just about any animal larger than an amoeba.
Instead, we went all over the world -- really ALL over the world -- and just killed a lot of people. And then, the very, very strange part: we barely noticed. It became the normal. The only question was where and when it would stop, and nobody cared very much. Of course we didn't. We threw a blanket over our injury, and did what was normalizing for us: just kill a lot of people.
During my lifetime, there has never been anything more normal. I was born in time for Hiroshima, spent early youth reading about the dead in Korea, put my head under the desk like everybody else. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia. Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon. Even Granada, but, hey, Granada was a real threat. Now I'm channeling Billy Joel.
I could go on. Nothing is more normal to our country than killing people, so that is what we did when we were injured. A very strange, disturbing idea, and I believe it completely: we kill people not for revenge, not for defense, not out of rage. We kill to be normal again. Yipes.
As they would say in mind-brain land, there was a physical injury -- the towers were our damaged organ. We made it all normal, and tidied up around it, and, when a little too much blood leaked out (torture, say, or mass murder), gave out more normalizing justifications: we had to do it, blah, blah. After all, this is what anyone would do. All mind-stuff, all about what us normal tribal people do. And what a country does, after an injury. Whew. We may be injured, but we act normal, and talk normal, and do normal things.
Me, too. After my brain was injured, it was left to the mind to coat it all with a nice chrome plating of normalcy. I acted as I had before, talked as I had before. When people noticed a small limp, I said I had a sore knee, and that was that.
Until about four years later. The onset of the dreaded TLE -- Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, to you civilians out there. Hallucinatory smells, short episodes of humiliating despair, the odd jerky movement, some humming in my ears. No loss of consciousness. Tiny little baby-step seizures.
But, woo-hoo, personality changes. Episodes of barely controlled rage; writing at great length about random stuff (heh!), moodiness, asceticism about food and drink and sleep. Grand theories about everything, from time travel to cat genetics. And, my heavens, pressure of speech. Oh, such pressure of speech.
I see it this way: my brain damage was turning into mind damage, and I couldn't control what about me was public. I began to be talked about: "Oh, how's he doing now?" when I wasn't present -- which, incidentally, is about as bad as it gets for the Irish. This whole blog is an effort to persuade myself, and everybody else, that, hey, I'm still a member in full standing of the tribe, just like I used to be. I want to control the flow of information. What I need is an Office of Public Communication.
I'm also starting to think that the whole enterprise is not going to work. The amount of brain pathology is simply too great, and too much of my social behavior is too strange; I'm on the edge of the tribe, and moving toward the outside.
And outside is not a place you want to be. Outside means all the connections are broken. Outside is true psychosis, deep Alzheimer's, a few other things that can just make it all crash. Really, really not a place you want to be. Injury to the brain becoming the terminal disease of the mind. Hey, we see it all the time: damaged brains chugging along for years; and really, truly dead minds. See? Mind and brain are categorically different. Maybe I'm right about all this stuff after all, you doubting weasels. I'll start getting my Nobel speech ready tomorrow. The children will know how to behave at the celebratory dinner, even if I can't pull it off.
Now, where was I about all these wars and stuff? Oh, yeah, random murder as a normalizing strategy. Well, I need a new normalizing strategy, better mind-stuff. Random murder might work for the good old USA, but probably not for me. Not even in the short run. And, Miles the Cat would surely disapprove, as he does with most human behavior.
I think a lot about music as mind-stuff that can normalize me, talking without words, being part of the world; I think less about technical stuff, working without words, and even less about craft stuff, building without words. Money stuff, accumulating without words, would be fine, but I just don't know how to make it go.
Losing trust in my own words has been a pretty nasty blow, and now I need something else for mind-stuff, so that I'm still a full tribal member.
Enough!!
Alert Reader will not be surprised that I'll still find enough insightful prattle to continue to blog.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sickening Humiliation
The day after 9/11, every airplane in the country was grounded but one, the one used to fly some Saudis home. The corruption of that single act enraged me more than the destruction of the towers. I suppose I can stand our being attacked, but being reduced to a groveling nation, humiliating ourselves when we needed to be strong.....no. I didn't hear a collective howl about our sniveling to the Saudis. None.
There is less plain old freedom here, of course; at their whim, the repressive forces of the state can make me disappear, just like the corrupt regimes in Guatemala and Salvadore and Argentina and all the others used to do. In 1970, there were trials for some of the more heroic and visible domestic reformers; now, maybe, there would just be rendition. Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, from Chicago, charged with no crime, was held for almost five years before he was allowed to see a lawyer; by that time, his mind had been destroyed. He was one of us, and I am ashamed at how we treated him.
But, so what? We've done a lot worse. This is what African Americans have lived with for centuries. The big difference, of course, is that their freedom was taken from them. The rest of us gave ours away.
We used to say, in the heyday of the changes around 1970, that someone we didn't like was a lapdog for the capitalist pigs. Well, now it has been reversed; now, we are all lapdogs for the non-capitalists pigs, the king of the Saudis and the communist regime in China. Funny how that worked out. We agree that they run the show; we tremble at the possibility that we might fall from their favor, we reassure ourselves that they need us as much as we need them, and so on. Just feeble attempts to get our dignity back. Too late; all but the most obtuse know who owns us.
Some groups have fewer constraints now. African Americans, in some important ways. Women, in some less important ways. Gay folks, but still pretty qualified. And against this we have the tremendous loss of economic freedom. Our economic best and brightest have given our enormous wealth to the Saudis and Chinese, for some oil and a bunch of plastic tchotchkes. Miles the Cat could have gotten a better bargain. It's not so much that we owe them a lot of money; debt we could just pay off, and be done with it. The problem is that we can't live without the stuff we get from them.
Pulling it partly together: Choice, freedom, and so on all describe the varying number of constraints on us. More constraints, less choice, less freedom.
What is the freedom of someone unable to move, say, two limbs, after a stroke. Not much. Pretty tough constraints, pretty great loss of freedom. What is the freedom of a country unable live without oil and Chinese economic slavery? Not much. We spend so much of our lives giving money to those people!! There is almost nothing left. Just a few toys, and some crappy houses and cars. We can't even take care of all our people! Dignity? In both the stroke person, and the crippled country, not much. Ah, the endless small humiliations of dependency, the endless wishing for what had been before. Now I know why the conservatives want to go backward; some stuff was pretty bad back then, but at least we could pretend that we ran the world. Now, all we see are constraints and failures.
I know it's a difficult case to make: How is debt to the Saudis the same kind of thing as damage to the brain? Sounds like some rejected SAT question.
Well, that's the point of the whole damn blog, as Alert Reader knows by now. Both the debt and the damage can pass under the radar, and most often do. When there is an autopsy, pretty severe brain disease is often found, in folks who acted perfectly well until the truck hit them. When there is an Enron, the disease of the economy is found in a company that had seemed perfectly well until the market hit it.
When things go wrong, when life is pushed out of being ordinary, we notice. When the price of gas hits $1o.00, we suddenly see economic pathology. When actions or speech get strange enough, we suddenly see mind pathology.
Damage can be to the economy, or to the brain, but it is only when the social fact, the social pathology, emerges that we know about the loss of freedom -- the price at the pump, the scrambled mind, or the scrambled limbs. We don't look at the brain, and say, wow, that brain is damaged. We look at how someone fits into the world, and only then look at the brain. We look at how a person can be ordinary, and then we decide about pathology.
The chorus, once more: brain is about wet stuff, mind is about how well we fit into the tribe.
Is there any way to be more obscure? I'm working on it, with the help of Miles the Cat. I've got a few ideas....and, BTW, I think this was a pretty good blog entry.
If you don't, tell me I'm a complete bozo -- c'mon, Alert Readers!!! Relieve me of the delusion that I am part of the fabric of ordinary life.
There is less plain old freedom here, of course; at their whim, the repressive forces of the state can make me disappear, just like the corrupt regimes in Guatemala and Salvadore and Argentina and all the others used to do. In 1970, there were trials for some of the more heroic and visible domestic reformers; now, maybe, there would just be rendition. Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, from Chicago, charged with no crime, was held for almost five years before he was allowed to see a lawyer; by that time, his mind had been destroyed. He was one of us, and I am ashamed at how we treated him.
But, so what? We've done a lot worse. This is what African Americans have lived with for centuries. The big difference, of course, is that their freedom was taken from them. The rest of us gave ours away.
We used to say, in the heyday of the changes around 1970, that someone we didn't like was a lapdog for the capitalist pigs. Well, now it has been reversed; now, we are all lapdogs for the non-capitalists pigs, the king of the Saudis and the communist regime in China. Funny how that worked out. We agree that they run the show; we tremble at the possibility that we might fall from their favor, we reassure ourselves that they need us as much as we need them, and so on. Just feeble attempts to get our dignity back. Too late; all but the most obtuse know who owns us.
Some groups have fewer constraints now. African Americans, in some important ways. Women, in some less important ways. Gay folks, but still pretty qualified. And against this we have the tremendous loss of economic freedom. Our economic best and brightest have given our enormous wealth to the Saudis and Chinese, for some oil and a bunch of plastic tchotchkes. Miles the Cat could have gotten a better bargain. It's not so much that we owe them a lot of money; debt we could just pay off, and be done with it. The problem is that we can't live without the stuff we get from them.
Pulling it partly together: Choice, freedom, and so on all describe the varying number of constraints on us. More constraints, less choice, less freedom.
What is the freedom of someone unable to move, say, two limbs, after a stroke. Not much. Pretty tough constraints, pretty great loss of freedom. What is the freedom of a country unable live without oil and Chinese economic slavery? Not much. We spend so much of our lives giving money to those people!! There is almost nothing left. Just a few toys, and some crappy houses and cars. We can't even take care of all our people! Dignity? In both the stroke person, and the crippled country, not much. Ah, the endless small humiliations of dependency, the endless wishing for what had been before. Now I know why the conservatives want to go backward; some stuff was pretty bad back then, but at least we could pretend that we ran the world. Now, all we see are constraints and failures.
I know it's a difficult case to make: How is debt to the Saudis the same kind of thing as damage to the brain? Sounds like some rejected SAT question.
Well, that's the point of the whole damn blog, as Alert Reader knows by now. Both the debt and the damage can pass under the radar, and most often do. When there is an autopsy, pretty severe brain disease is often found, in folks who acted perfectly well until the truck hit them. When there is an Enron, the disease of the economy is found in a company that had seemed perfectly well until the market hit it.
When things go wrong, when life is pushed out of being ordinary, we notice. When the price of gas hits $1o.00, we suddenly see economic pathology. When actions or speech get strange enough, we suddenly see mind pathology.
Damage can be to the economy, or to the brain, but it is only when the social fact, the social pathology, emerges that we know about the loss of freedom -- the price at the pump, the scrambled mind, or the scrambled limbs. We don't look at the brain, and say, wow, that brain is damaged. We look at how someone fits into the world, and only then look at the brain. We look at how a person can be ordinary, and then we decide about pathology.
The chorus, once more: brain is about wet stuff, mind is about how well we fit into the tribe.
Is there any way to be more obscure? I'm working on it, with the help of Miles the Cat. I've got a few ideas....and, BTW, I think this was a pretty good blog entry.
If you don't, tell me I'm a complete bozo -- c'mon, Alert Readers!!! Relieve me of the delusion that I am part of the fabric of ordinary life.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Crosses and Croissants Get Sticks in the Eye
It is apparent that putting a Muslim community center close to the 9/11 site is the equivalent of a stick in the eye to many non-Muslim Americans. Why be so inflammatory?
I don't know, since I haven't spoken to any Muslims about the situation. I do know that if I were an American Muslim whose family had been here for a long time, and who had been demonized, as middle-eastern folks were after 9/11, this would be an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Yipes -- I got to conditionals, like I promised before. And I got in a performative, by the way!!! A two-fer!!
We are a country, like most, with the political intelligence of Miles the Cat. The idea that Muslim folks who have lived down the street for the last 20 years should beg my forgiveness for 9/11 sounds like a bit much. Yet, that's just what we required. "I don't hear the moderate Muslims condemning the use of violence!!", went the refrain. We want them to satisfy our -- what? All this is about the ultimate function of so much of ordinary language: to determine who belongs, and who doesn't. In this instance, if you grovel, you make the cut. Our minds can be put to rest.
I was around when the JDL was causing quite a stir, and made violence very personal. There were constant, tiresome entreaties to mainstream Jewish organizations to disown the JDL. Well, the long-standing groups never owned them in the first place, and found themselves stuck between defending a bunch of pretty nasty folks, or else capitulating to the demands of a society that had never put out much effort to defend Jewish communities here or anywhere else. Nice choices. It was very hard for them to make up their minds how to respond.
I didn't hear the reactionaries condemning the use of violence after Oklahoma City, either. I do often hear holier-than-thou rants about the Taliban targeting police and village elders; then I hear about the American list of a thousand Taliban who have been singled out for assassination. No need to grovel here; this is pure American stuff, and doesn't move any of us outside.
It reminds me of the old SNCC days. SNCC was the most abrasive of African-American action groups in the 60s. Their leader was Stokely Carmichael, a very charismatic and smart man. He was hounded by the press, at literally every opportunity (how tired of it all he must have been!!): Would he renounce violence? He readily agreed that he would be glad to sit down with the white sheriffs of Alabama and Mississippi and they would all issue a joint statement renouncing violence. He had a little smile as he said this. For a century, the white sheriffs had terrorized African-Americans throughout the South, with a systematic brutality that murdered and maimed, and SNCC was supposed to renounce violence?? A stick in the eye indeed. The meeting never happened. The sheriffs wouldn't change their minds about their vision of race, and refused to grovel, as well they might. But, neither did Stokely Carmichael, and his sparkling mind enchanted millions.
To demand renunciation is to seek capitulation, and renunciation is a ritual of self-loathing. There is a complex relationship between power, capitulation, renunciation and sanctimony. It seems always to be the same. Why do we do this? Still, it all comes down to this: who is a truly one of us, and who not.
In the 1490s, the Jews of Spain were given a choice: find another place to live, convert to Christianity, or be killed. Many did leave, about 160,000, going primarily to the Netherlands and Turkey. About 20,000 died before getting to somewhere welcome. Some estimates double all these numbers. About 50,000 changed their minds about being Christians, going through ritual after ritual to prove that they were really converted. They were called "conversos". Their lives have been the subject of many books and movies; imagine the territory they present!! But they also a good object lesson in ordinary language.
The conversions were -- like I've been saying, all you folks who have been paying attention -- performative utterances. Saying "I hereby convert..." or some such thing, was the act that changed someone from an apostate to a Christian, from an enemy of Spain to a citizen of Spain.
And, the conversions? Surprise!! Many of them were false. Most conversos had no intention of converting, but they were willing to pretend. Torquemada, of the famed Inquisition, was a tad suspicious of them, as you can imagine, and tested them through torture. He was great at torture. But what did he want? The more he tortured, the more false declarations he heard. From the distance of five centuries, it sure looks like he just had fun torturing. Hmmm.
Even The Godfather got into the act: recall the scene of Michael Corleone reciting, at his nephew's baptism, "I renounce Satan and all his works", and at the same time murdering the baby's father. Renouncing becoming an art form.
So, conditionals. As ifs. Is the conversion an as if? Were the conversos acting as if they had converted? Would we say, knowing that their intention was to deceive, that they had actually converted? They were listed on church rolls, after all. And would we say that Michael Corleone meant what he said when he renounced Satan? Most people, I think, would say no. Only those with truly wishful thinking would believe otherwise. Torquemada was not a wishful thinker, but he ultimately accepted many of the conversos. Michael Corleone's sister was not naive, but she accepted his explanations. The pressure of the community sometimes triumphs.
The language of mind meets the language of persecution. No questions of brains here, just the conversions of minds, just rituals of humiliation and deceit, in which all participants go through the "as if" motions. And like all the rest of the performative utterances, talk is cheap, and talk is the most valuable tool of life -- for all these folks, to stay alive.
But, we have come around to it again. All this talk is about mind fact, social fact, not brain fact. It is about enforcing social norms, deciding who is a part of the tribe and who is to be an outcast. It is not about brain function; it is about mind function. Mind appears again this time, as so often, in the vestments of religion. The religious have been having their way with minds, language, and social compliance for a pretty long time. Sanctimony and humiliation do wonderful work.
And here I am. What if all the docs conclude that my mind is damaged, just as my brain is? How would they, and I, know? Well, if my behavior is so odd, so strange, so deviant that I cannot be discussed as a regular human, a full person, then I am expunged from the group. I can pretend, maybe, like a converso, but someone so damaged would have a hard time getting by. I can renounce my mind, like Michael Corleone did. But even that much groveling might not work; ultimately, it didn't work for him.
Hard to imagine the devastation. And is it a performative? Does the act of uttering become a promise? A prediction? A description? I've been around the mental health types for too long to think that those are all the same thing. Maybe the performative is a way of getting more money from insurance companies. It is hard to avoid thinking of diagnoses, in psychiatry always, and neurology often, as performatives. Saying it brings it into being, like a promise or a bet or a marriage.
This chapter is way too long, I think, but I feel in the grip of the TLE, and just can't stop. The message scrawled on the mirror, in the lipstick of the victim, who is lying on the floor in a pool of blood: "Stop me before I talk again". A command? A taunt? A statement of intent? A plea? We've come a long way. And I haven't even mentioned ambivalence!!!
Probably the one thing I haven't mentioned.
I don't know, since I haven't spoken to any Muslims about the situation. I do know that if I were an American Muslim whose family had been here for a long time, and who had been demonized, as middle-eastern folks were after 9/11, this would be an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Yipes -- I got to conditionals, like I promised before. And I got in a performative, by the way!!! A two-fer!!
We are a country, like most, with the political intelligence of Miles the Cat. The idea that Muslim folks who have lived down the street for the last 20 years should beg my forgiveness for 9/11 sounds like a bit much. Yet, that's just what we required. "I don't hear the moderate Muslims condemning the use of violence!!", went the refrain. We want them to satisfy our -- what? All this is about the ultimate function of so much of ordinary language: to determine who belongs, and who doesn't. In this instance, if you grovel, you make the cut. Our minds can be put to rest.
I was around when the JDL was causing quite a stir, and made violence very personal. There were constant, tiresome entreaties to mainstream Jewish organizations to disown the JDL. Well, the long-standing groups never owned them in the first place, and found themselves stuck between defending a bunch of pretty nasty folks, or else capitulating to the demands of a society that had never put out much effort to defend Jewish communities here or anywhere else. Nice choices. It was very hard for them to make up their minds how to respond.
I didn't hear the reactionaries condemning the use of violence after Oklahoma City, either. I do often hear holier-than-thou rants about the Taliban targeting police and village elders; then I hear about the American list of a thousand Taliban who have been singled out for assassination. No need to grovel here; this is pure American stuff, and doesn't move any of us outside.
It reminds me of the old SNCC days. SNCC was the most abrasive of African-American action groups in the 60s. Their leader was Stokely Carmichael, a very charismatic and smart man. He was hounded by the press, at literally every opportunity (how tired of it all he must have been!!): Would he renounce violence? He readily agreed that he would be glad to sit down with the white sheriffs of Alabama and Mississippi and they would all issue a joint statement renouncing violence. He had a little smile as he said this. For a century, the white sheriffs had terrorized African-Americans throughout the South, with a systematic brutality that murdered and maimed, and SNCC was supposed to renounce violence?? A stick in the eye indeed. The meeting never happened. The sheriffs wouldn't change their minds about their vision of race, and refused to grovel, as well they might. But, neither did Stokely Carmichael, and his sparkling mind enchanted millions.
To demand renunciation is to seek capitulation, and renunciation is a ritual of self-loathing. There is a complex relationship between power, capitulation, renunciation and sanctimony. It seems always to be the same. Why do we do this? Still, it all comes down to this: who is a truly one of us, and who not.
In the 1490s, the Jews of Spain were given a choice: find another place to live, convert to Christianity, or be killed. Many did leave, about 160,000, going primarily to the Netherlands and Turkey. About 20,000 died before getting to somewhere welcome. Some estimates double all these numbers. About 50,000 changed their minds about being Christians, going through ritual after ritual to prove that they were really converted. They were called "conversos". Their lives have been the subject of many books and movies; imagine the territory they present!! But they also a good object lesson in ordinary language.
The conversions were -- like I've been saying, all you folks who have been paying attention -- performative utterances. Saying "I hereby convert..." or some such thing, was the act that changed someone from an apostate to a Christian, from an enemy of Spain to a citizen of Spain.
And, the conversions? Surprise!! Many of them were false. Most conversos had no intention of converting, but they were willing to pretend. Torquemada, of the famed Inquisition, was a tad suspicious of them, as you can imagine, and tested them through torture. He was great at torture. But what did he want? The more he tortured, the more false declarations he heard. From the distance of five centuries, it sure looks like he just had fun torturing. Hmmm.
Even The Godfather got into the act: recall the scene of Michael Corleone reciting, at his nephew's baptism, "I renounce Satan and all his works", and at the same time murdering the baby's father. Renouncing becoming an art form.
So, conditionals. As ifs. Is the conversion an as if? Were the conversos acting as if they had converted? Would we say, knowing that their intention was to deceive, that they had actually converted? They were listed on church rolls, after all. And would we say that Michael Corleone meant what he said when he renounced Satan? Most people, I think, would say no. Only those with truly wishful thinking would believe otherwise. Torquemada was not a wishful thinker, but he ultimately accepted many of the conversos. Michael Corleone's sister was not naive, but she accepted his explanations. The pressure of the community sometimes triumphs.
The language of mind meets the language of persecution. No questions of brains here, just the conversions of minds, just rituals of humiliation and deceit, in which all participants go through the "as if" motions. And like all the rest of the performative utterances, talk is cheap, and talk is the most valuable tool of life -- for all these folks, to stay alive.
But, we have come around to it again. All this talk is about mind fact, social fact, not brain fact. It is about enforcing social norms, deciding who is a part of the tribe and who is to be an outcast. It is not about brain function; it is about mind function. Mind appears again this time, as so often, in the vestments of religion. The religious have been having their way with minds, language, and social compliance for a pretty long time. Sanctimony and humiliation do wonderful work.
And here I am. What if all the docs conclude that my mind is damaged, just as my brain is? How would they, and I, know? Well, if my behavior is so odd, so strange, so deviant that I cannot be discussed as a regular human, a full person, then I am expunged from the group. I can pretend, maybe, like a converso, but someone so damaged would have a hard time getting by. I can renounce my mind, like Michael Corleone did. But even that much groveling might not work; ultimately, it didn't work for him.
Hard to imagine the devastation. And is it a performative? Does the act of uttering become a promise? A prediction? A description? I've been around the mental health types for too long to think that those are all the same thing. Maybe the performative is a way of getting more money from insurance companies. It is hard to avoid thinking of diagnoses, in psychiatry always, and neurology often, as performatives. Saying it brings it into being, like a promise or a bet or a marriage.
This chapter is way too long, I think, but I feel in the grip of the TLE, and just can't stop. The message scrawled on the mirror, in the lipstick of the victim, who is lying on the floor in a pool of blood: "Stop me before I talk again". A command? A taunt? A statement of intent? A plea? We've come a long way. And I haven't even mentioned ambivalence!!!
Probably the one thing I haven't mentioned.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Crosses and Crescents. Or hot cross buns and croissants?
The current contretemps about the Islamic Community Center in lower Manhattan, hard by the WTC site, is pretty easy to get goofy about, and get goofy we have. I kept thinking it reminded me of something, and so it does:
The caption:
In 1998, Polish nationalists embarked upon a mission to put up 152 Christian crosses in honor of the Polish Catholic resistance fighters who were executed by the Nazis in a gravel pit behind Block 11 at the main Auschwitz concentration camp. This was their way of protesting Jewish demands, over the previous 10 years, that the 26-foot souvenir cross from a Mass, said by the Pope at Birkenau, be removed. The basic attitude of the Poles, openly expressed, was "This is our country. You have your country and we have ours. If we want to put up a Catholic Cross in our country, we'll put it."
The result:
Unimaginable without actually seeing the picture.
Not much of a testament to Polish carpentry skills. Ultimately, a compromise of sorts was reached, and the trash crosses came down. The original remained. The official Catholic Church justification for all this was that, after all, there had been some Catholics executed. In addition to what is in the photos, a convent has been established in the former administrative building.
What is there to be said?
How does this map on to the Islamic Center/WTC controversy? I don't know. I first felt a kind of "Yipes!", that the Islamic building was planned, a startle. But then, when I remembered the Auschwitz episode, it got a little more complicated. I guess my feeling now is that 9/11 is notable in modern times for the purity of its malevolence. There was certainly no attempt to spare any religion, class, ethnicity, origin, gender -- anybody, or any group. Not even a pretense. Just, make a hole in the earth. How strange, at a time in history in which most violent episodes pretend to be so selective. Previous terrorist episodes were aimed at particular groups, most frequently, in my lifetime, Israelis and African-Americans. Sometimes Europeans, sometimes Americans, but always members of a group. Pinpoint bombing, after all, has ended civilian casualties in....well, never mind.
9/11 was purely about geography. There is also the Hiroshima/Nagasaki (from here, H/N) anniversary this week. I have read much of the rationalizations people made at the time. Very few talk about killing lots of people. Most talk about the hole in the ground that they wanted to make. I must say, I still don't understand why we couldn't build a fence around the place, in 1945, and put a little doorbell in the fence, with a sign saying "Ring when you want to talk", and then sit back and drop a few bombs on factories and trains and food supply systems now and then, just to show them we were still hanging on. But there was some reason we couldn't. Didn't make a nice hole in the ground.
That's the glib response, and it contains a sliver of reality. What is the difference between killing a hundred thousand Japanese with one bomb, and a similar number of Jews, or Cambodians, or Rwandans, or Vietnamese, over time? There is a tremendous difference.
I suppose most of my response to it all is about collective guilt. I still feel like I did not do nearly enough, in my salad days, to end the Vietnam episode. We did a lot, but we never made the warmongers (!) pay for their misdeeds, and that failure has cost us dearly. Nixon, Johnson, and their lackeys (as we said then) should have died in prison, rather than being allowed to live out their lives in luxury. Perhaps Bush might have been just a little less impulsive with the spectre of a grim federal prison facing him. But perhaps not. In these cases, history was written by the losers.
So, do all the Germans of 1946 bear the responsibility for the Holocaust? Yup. Do all the Americans of 1973 bear the responsibility for the Vietnam invasion? Yup. Do all the Americans of 2002 bear the responsibility for the Iraq invasion? Yup. Cambodians for genocide? Yup. I can go on. But do Muslims bear the responsibility for 9/11? I'm not so sure.
I think both Hiroshima/Nagasaki and WTC have some things in common. For one, only a few people knew what was going to happen. Both were unique events, black swans, as they are now called. Americans couldn't have stopped H/N, and Muslims couldn't have stopped 9/11. And, so, no chance for collective guilt. No collective guilt for me over H/N, or for Muslims over 9/11.
I think I obsess about collective guilt too much, but I also think everybody else obsesses too little. As the moralists say, we should be "held accountable". I love that phrase. How to be accountable for a million dead? One dead? Oh, sure: Take full responsibility.
Well, I suppose, build the building in lower Manhattan. We didn't see Hiroshima/Nagasaki coming, and they didn't see 9/11 coming. No guilt involved, and this was decided by a grand connoisseur of collective guilt. And we need to be "held accountable" for the tens and hundreds of thousands we have killed in the last decade.
Thanks to scrapbookpages.com for the photos and caption.
The caption:
In 1998, Polish nationalists embarked upon a mission to put up 152 Christian crosses in honor of the Polish Catholic resistance fighters who were executed by the Nazis in a gravel pit behind Block 11 at the main Auschwitz concentration camp. This was their way of protesting Jewish demands, over the previous 10 years, that the 26-foot souvenir cross from a Mass, said by the Pope at Birkenau, be removed. The basic attitude of the Poles, openly expressed, was "This is our country. You have your country and we have ours. If we want to put up a Catholic Cross in our country, we'll put it."
The result:
Unimaginable without actually seeing the picture.
Not much of a testament to Polish carpentry skills. Ultimately, a compromise of sorts was reached, and the trash crosses came down. The original remained. The official Catholic Church justification for all this was that, after all, there had been some Catholics executed. In addition to what is in the photos, a convent has been established in the former administrative building.
What is there to be said?
How does this map on to the Islamic Center/WTC controversy? I don't know. I first felt a kind of "Yipes!", that the Islamic building was planned, a startle. But then, when I remembered the Auschwitz episode, it got a little more complicated. I guess my feeling now is that 9/11 is notable in modern times for the purity of its malevolence. There was certainly no attempt to spare any religion, class, ethnicity, origin, gender -- anybody, or any group. Not even a pretense. Just, make a hole in the earth. How strange, at a time in history in which most violent episodes pretend to be so selective. Previous terrorist episodes were aimed at particular groups, most frequently, in my lifetime, Israelis and African-Americans. Sometimes Europeans, sometimes Americans, but always members of a group. Pinpoint bombing, after all, has ended civilian casualties in....well, never mind.
9/11 was purely about geography. There is also the Hiroshima/Nagasaki (from here, H/N) anniversary this week. I have read much of the rationalizations people made at the time. Very few talk about killing lots of people. Most talk about the hole in the ground that they wanted to make. I must say, I still don't understand why we couldn't build a fence around the place, in 1945, and put a little doorbell in the fence, with a sign saying "Ring when you want to talk", and then sit back and drop a few bombs on factories and trains and food supply systems now and then, just to show them we were still hanging on. But there was some reason we couldn't. Didn't make a nice hole in the ground.
That's the glib response, and it contains a sliver of reality. What is the difference between killing a hundred thousand Japanese with one bomb, and a similar number of Jews, or Cambodians, or Rwandans, or Vietnamese, over time? There is a tremendous difference.
I suppose most of my response to it all is about collective guilt. I still feel like I did not do nearly enough, in my salad days, to end the Vietnam episode. We did a lot, but we never made the warmongers (!) pay for their misdeeds, and that failure has cost us dearly. Nixon, Johnson, and their lackeys (as we said then) should have died in prison, rather than being allowed to live out their lives in luxury. Perhaps Bush might have been just a little less impulsive with the spectre of a grim federal prison facing him. But perhaps not. In these cases, history was written by the losers.
So, do all the Germans of 1946 bear the responsibility for the Holocaust? Yup. Do all the Americans of 1973 bear the responsibility for the Vietnam invasion? Yup. Do all the Americans of 2002 bear the responsibility for the Iraq invasion? Yup. Cambodians for genocide? Yup. I can go on. But do Muslims bear the responsibility for 9/11? I'm not so sure.
I think both Hiroshima/Nagasaki and WTC have some things in common. For one, only a few people knew what was going to happen. Both were unique events, black swans, as they are now called. Americans couldn't have stopped H/N, and Muslims couldn't have stopped 9/11. And, so, no chance for collective guilt. No collective guilt for me over H/N, or for Muslims over 9/11.
I think I obsess about collective guilt too much, but I also think everybody else obsesses too little. As the moralists say, we should be "held accountable". I love that phrase. How to be accountable for a million dead? One dead? Oh, sure: Take full responsibility.
Well, I suppose, build the building in lower Manhattan. We didn't see Hiroshima/Nagasaki coming, and they didn't see 9/11 coming. No guilt involved, and this was decided by a grand connoisseur of collective guilt. And we need to be "held accountable" for the tens and hundreds of thousands we have killed in the last decade.
Thanks to scrapbookpages.com for the photos and caption.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Austin's Wisdom: Free will and Constraints and Canada
Reading again. About freedom. And free will.
Take Mr. Reasonable. A miscreant puts a gun to his head, and says, "Move your left foot." Mr. R., a sensible sort, moves his left foot.
Would we say that Mr. R. moved of his own free will? Well, no. We might say that the threat caused Mr. R. to wiggle the foot. We might say that he had to move the foot or get shot. We might say he moved the foot rather than get shot. We might say he was very highly motivated to move the foot rather than risk the bullet. Or a lot of other ways of saying pretty much -- but not exactly -- the same thing.
So, what of free will? Well, a lot of the talk of free will, or freedom, is based on the idea that neither is a "thing"; both are negatives, the absence of constraints. Mr. R., in this instance, certainly did not act freely. We would not talk about free will in this situation; it would make no sense. And all because of the gun to his head. The gun is the constraint. I think, in general, that this is the most sensible way to look at "freedom" talk; we talk about freedom only when we are not burdened by obligation or threat.
Who cares? In practical terms, losing freedom is, among other things, about health, economics, privacy, emotional state, relations with others, law -- we could all go on. There are an ocean of constraints on our freedoms. We take many of them for granted; there are a lot of constraints on robbing banks. Do I have the freedom to rob a bank? Sure. But we just don't talk that way.
If someone robs a bank, we don't say "Ah, free will at work". We say, "Yipes. He must have been desperate". The constraints on bank robbing are many and severe. It is not about free will. Bank robbery is an act of desperation, not an embrace of freedom.
Or, more difficult: A person with kidney failure, who has been on dialysis for years, abandons the treatment, facing imminent death. This is not uncommon for those who have suffered the rigors of dialysis over long term. What do we say? "How lovely is free will." More likely, we would say "He just couldn't take it any more". He has been constrained in truly awful ways.
Alert Reader (and there may be only one of you) will notice that once again I am talking about the way people really talk to each other, not the way we want them to talk, or the way we hallucinate that they do talk. My one source will be J.L. Austin, an old Brit -- well, long dead now -- who thought there was very strong wisdom in the ordinary language of ordinary people. He led us out of the dark ages by looking at that ordinary talk.
Talk of free will, and freedom, is rare outside of political contexts. Inside political contexts, the talk of freedom is ubiquitous and trivial. Dictators of the most repressive states boast of the freedom of their people.
My Canadian relatives experience less constraint -- hmm, maybe it should be fewer constraints -- in their lives than I do, for a lot of reasons, most of them related to governmental functions. They have more freedom. They also live longer, on average. Hard to imagine how freedom is related to life span, but there it is. Probably health care, maybe diet. They seem to think that they have a better standard of living in general. I don't know.
But I do know that I made a mistake that will probably cost me three years of life by not moving to Canada. But then, I had constraints, didn't I? Must have. Or I would have gone.
Next time: Woulda, coulda, shoulda. And, I guess, mighta, hadda, wanted to but -- well, we could (heh!) go on. Conditionals and their discontents.
Take Mr. Reasonable. A miscreant puts a gun to his head, and says, "Move your left foot." Mr. R., a sensible sort, moves his left foot.
Would we say that Mr. R. moved of his own free will? Well, no. We might say that the threat caused Mr. R. to wiggle the foot. We might say that he had to move the foot or get shot. We might say he moved the foot rather than get shot. We might say he was very highly motivated to move the foot rather than risk the bullet. Or a lot of other ways of saying pretty much -- but not exactly -- the same thing.
So, what of free will? Well, a lot of the talk of free will, or freedom, is based on the idea that neither is a "thing"; both are negatives, the absence of constraints. Mr. R., in this instance, certainly did not act freely. We would not talk about free will in this situation; it would make no sense. And all because of the gun to his head. The gun is the constraint. I think, in general, that this is the most sensible way to look at "freedom" talk; we talk about freedom only when we are not burdened by obligation or threat.
Who cares? In practical terms, losing freedom is, among other things, about health, economics, privacy, emotional state, relations with others, law -- we could all go on. There are an ocean of constraints on our freedoms. We take many of them for granted; there are a lot of constraints on robbing banks. Do I have the freedom to rob a bank? Sure. But we just don't talk that way.
If someone robs a bank, we don't say "Ah, free will at work". We say, "Yipes. He must have been desperate". The constraints on bank robbing are many and severe. It is not about free will. Bank robbery is an act of desperation, not an embrace of freedom.
Or, more difficult: A person with kidney failure, who has been on dialysis for years, abandons the treatment, facing imminent death. This is not uncommon for those who have suffered the rigors of dialysis over long term. What do we say? "How lovely is free will." More likely, we would say "He just couldn't take it any more". He has been constrained in truly awful ways.
Alert Reader (and there may be only one of you) will notice that once again I am talking about the way people really talk to each other, not the way we want them to talk, or the way we hallucinate that they do talk. My one source will be J.L. Austin, an old Brit -- well, long dead now -- who thought there was very strong wisdom in the ordinary language of ordinary people. He led us out of the dark ages by looking at that ordinary talk.
Talk of free will, and freedom, is rare outside of political contexts. Inside political contexts, the talk of freedom is ubiquitous and trivial. Dictators of the most repressive states boast of the freedom of their people.
My Canadian relatives experience less constraint -- hmm, maybe it should be fewer constraints -- in their lives than I do, for a lot of reasons, most of them related to governmental functions. They have more freedom. They also live longer, on average. Hard to imagine how freedom is related to life span, but there it is. Probably health care, maybe diet. They seem to think that they have a better standard of living in general. I don't know.
But I do know that I made a mistake that will probably cost me three years of life by not moving to Canada. But then, I had constraints, didn't I? Must have. Or I would have gone.
Next time: Woulda, coulda, shoulda. And, I guess, mighta, hadda, wanted to but -- well, we could (heh!) go on. Conditionals and their discontents.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Let be be finale of seem. I guess.
I was talking about bees over the weekend. We know really a lot about bees. The hive has a language, some of it chemical, that determines all sorts of things about bee behavior. If you take bees out of the hive, one by one, you reach a point at which there just aren't enough to communicate; they can't do bee stuff any more. There is a minimum number of bees that allows the survival of the hive.
I remember an old group facilitation exercise we did 40 years ago; six people sitting on the floor, forbidden to talk, each with an envelope containing cardboard shapes. The instruction was to make squares out of the shapes in our envelopes. We each started out trying to fit just the pieces in our own envelopes together to make the square. After a while, we noticed that it was impossible. We started trading pieces with the others. Impossible again. Finally, we understood: we threw all the pieces on the floor in the middle of the group, and were able to make the squares pretty quickly. I remember that after each square was completed we sat up straight and all smiled and clapped for ourselves for a few seconds. Very nice group dynamics lesson.
The group developed a language: gestures, odd grunts and that delightful clapping, which allowed useful cognition to exist. There was just no other way to get it done. We had all been "cogitating" unsuccessfully. I don't want to say that the problem solving was done in some weird groupthink. Not at all. What was done was the emergence of mind, an implementation of informal rules in which we guided ourselves toward useful problem-solving, out-of-the-box activities. "Mind" is not a place or a thing; "mind" is a set of utterance used to shape, define and control the behaviors that allow -- and require -- us to be human.
What of those who can't communicate -- the comatose, the demented, the brain dead? What of their minds? Do we say that they have minds, even though their brains are either dead or terribly compromised? I've never heard anyone talk about "minds" in that way. We do talk, ordinarily, in these cases, about brains and their dysfunctions. But, what of those who have seizures, or less extensive damage to the brain? Obviously different; those with seizure disorders still have language. Do we say that their minds are disordered? Or just their brains? I think brains. In all the discussions I've had with neurologists, nobody has said anything about my mind. Brain, sure. What is up with that? Don't they think that a mind can be damaged by a stroke? Maybe they're on to something. Ordinarily language seeps over into specialized language. Ack. I'm getting too abstract; how about some concrete examples?
The most confounding and interesting, for me, are the folks with the various language disabilities: the various aphasias, on the expressive end, and the decoding disorders on the receptive end. This is the arena in which the folks with the damaged brains often have some problems with mind, too. Stories of extensive brain injury with no apparent mind disorders are many, and, I'm sure, are sometimes apocryphal; still, the lesson is clear. An injury to the brain does not have to be an injury to the mind.
More: I once evaluated a young man who had shot himself in the head. He recovered all his physical abilities, but his cognitive functions were very strangely impaired. He could communicate only by telling jokes, or stories, or singing songs. His "talk", in that form, was precise and complex; however, it took a long time and a lot of patience and effort to listen in the right way. I also found it difficult, even with all my own capabilities, to help other people learn how to listen to him, and recognized after a while that my own problems mirrored his, at a much less severe level.
I also evaluated stroke patients, who were disabled and unable to function on their own physically, but whose thinking and language were just fine.
Well? Who is worse off? I think the first man; talking to him is so difficult that he was, ultimately, dismissed from the tribe, and banished to a unit in a chronic care facility. Brain and mind the same, in this instance, both damaged terribly. The stroke folks? Bad, but clear brain injury with no mind injury; rehabbed, back to work, back to family.
And what of my own brain and mind? I think it is not so much the physical changes that bother me since I had the stroke six years ago; those are pretty minor. Some loss of coordination, middling pain in the extremities. But the recent TLE stuff: yipes! It threatens my ability to be part of the tribe, and that is scary. The hallucinated smells, compusive talking, occasional misspeaking -- am I more like my first example, or the second? Hard to tell.
Right now, I don't have any way to pull it all together. The philosophers are off in Middle Earth, having fun arguing. No joy there. The neurologists are looking at scans. No joy there, either. I am between them somewhere. I still have a sense that there is something important that no one is exploring, something about minds and groups and tribes and social facts.
Contributions not just welcome, but demanded!!!! Maybe that will work. How about I up the ante just a little??? A $10 iTunes Store card for whoever recognizes the quote first. What quote? Part of the puzzle.
Miles the Cat is ineligible, but everybody else, relatives included, is welcome to guess.
Addendum: The prize has been claimed. It was claimed by a treacherous snake who used Google. Shame.
I remember an old group facilitation exercise we did 40 years ago; six people sitting on the floor, forbidden to talk, each with an envelope containing cardboard shapes. The instruction was to make squares out of the shapes in our envelopes. We each started out trying to fit just the pieces in our own envelopes together to make the square. After a while, we noticed that it was impossible. We started trading pieces with the others. Impossible again. Finally, we understood: we threw all the pieces on the floor in the middle of the group, and were able to make the squares pretty quickly. I remember that after each square was completed we sat up straight and all smiled and clapped for ourselves for a few seconds. Very nice group dynamics lesson.
The group developed a language: gestures, odd grunts and that delightful clapping, which allowed useful cognition to exist. There was just no other way to get it done. We had all been "cogitating" unsuccessfully. I don't want to say that the problem solving was done in some weird groupthink. Not at all. What was done was the emergence of mind, an implementation of informal rules in which we guided ourselves toward useful problem-solving, out-of-the-box activities. "Mind" is not a place or a thing; "mind" is a set of utterance used to shape, define and control the behaviors that allow -- and require -- us to be human.
What of those who can't communicate -- the comatose, the demented, the brain dead? What of their minds? Do we say that they have minds, even though their brains are either dead or terribly compromised? I've never heard anyone talk about "minds" in that way. We do talk, ordinarily, in these cases, about brains and their dysfunctions. But, what of those who have seizures, or less extensive damage to the brain? Obviously different; those with seizure disorders still have language. Do we say that their minds are disordered? Or just their brains? I think brains. In all the discussions I've had with neurologists, nobody has said anything about my mind. Brain, sure. What is up with that? Don't they think that a mind can be damaged by a stroke? Maybe they're on to something. Ordinarily language seeps over into specialized language. Ack. I'm getting too abstract; how about some concrete examples?
The most confounding and interesting, for me, are the folks with the various language disabilities: the various aphasias, on the expressive end, and the decoding disorders on the receptive end. This is the arena in which the folks with the damaged brains often have some problems with mind, too. Stories of extensive brain injury with no apparent mind disorders are many, and, I'm sure, are sometimes apocryphal; still, the lesson is clear. An injury to the brain does not have to be an injury to the mind.
More: I once evaluated a young man who had shot himself in the head. He recovered all his physical abilities, but his cognitive functions were very strangely impaired. He could communicate only by telling jokes, or stories, or singing songs. His "talk", in that form, was precise and complex; however, it took a long time and a lot of patience and effort to listen in the right way. I also found it difficult, even with all my own capabilities, to help other people learn how to listen to him, and recognized after a while that my own problems mirrored his, at a much less severe level.
I also evaluated stroke patients, who were disabled and unable to function on their own physically, but whose thinking and language were just fine.
Well? Who is worse off? I think the first man; talking to him is so difficult that he was, ultimately, dismissed from the tribe, and banished to a unit in a chronic care facility. Brain and mind the same, in this instance, both damaged terribly. The stroke folks? Bad, but clear brain injury with no mind injury; rehabbed, back to work, back to family.
And what of my own brain and mind? I think it is not so much the physical changes that bother me since I had the stroke six years ago; those are pretty minor. Some loss of coordination, middling pain in the extremities. But the recent TLE stuff: yipes! It threatens my ability to be part of the tribe, and that is scary. The hallucinated smells, compusive talking, occasional misspeaking -- am I more like my first example, or the second? Hard to tell.
Right now, I don't have any way to pull it all together. The philosophers are off in Middle Earth, having fun arguing. No joy there. The neurologists are looking at scans. No joy there, either. I am between them somewhere. I still have a sense that there is something important that no one is exploring, something about minds and groups and tribes and social facts.
Contributions not just welcome, but demanded!!!! Maybe that will work. How about I up the ante just a little??? A $10 iTunes Store card for whoever recognizes the quote first. What quote? Part of the puzzle.
Miles the Cat is ineligible, but everybody else, relatives included, is welcome to guess.
Addendum: The prize has been claimed. It was claimed by a treacherous snake who used Google. Shame.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Suicides....dogs and cats....hermits. Oh, my.
This one was really difficult to put together, so please struggle with it. I have let it ripen for a couple of weeks. That seems to help.
The number of suicides, in any country, is remarkably similar year-to-year. How can this possibly be??? If there are not enough suicides by December 15, is there a rush to the noose, or overdose, or Golden Gate Bridge? Suicide, in so many ways the ultimate act of self-centered individualism, turns out to be a form of social compliance. Who knew???
This is what Emile Durkheim, a 19th century French All-Star utility intellectual, called a "social fact". Alert Reader will have caught on already. But, surprise, I will somehow force myself to go on about it at great length.*
"Mind" is a social fact of the Durkheim sort. It exists outside the individual, just as suicide does. Mind-type stuff lives in language. We speak of people "making up their minds" about suicide. I just don't think it works this way. "Making up our minds" is a social fact, not an event located inside an individual. Someone may experience making a decision; however, like all mind-type facts, the net spreads far wider, and has to do with judgments by self and others, by the social reality of a person in a group. Removing oneself from the tribe is just that, and speaks to participating in the language of the group. Tricky stuff; we are not used to locating such things in a broad context.
Or, how about this: I don't rob banks. But, I have never decided not to rob a bank. Bank robbing is not part of my life, or my talk. Neither is suicide. And, if someone asked me why I don't rob banks, I would just shrug. I would probably say something about bank robbery being wrong. But, really,I don't know why I don't rob banks. Non-bank-robbery, for me is a social fact, not individual decision. Same way I don't kill myself. Social fact. I also never lived in a setting in which bank robber was discussed. But I have seen, as we all have, how something becomes a fad, even a dreadful fad. iPods were a benevolent fad. Drug overdoses, in some places, a malevolent fad. You can bet, though, that both iPods and drug overdoses started with one act, and the next step was talk. And so on.
There are certainly "group values" which live independent of any individual. In the US, typically we think of the first amendment rights as group values. Any particular person might disagree about any particular instance, but, this is what Durkheim would call social fact. I am always charmed by atomic individualists who apparently think that all social values begin and end with them...that there is no group life independent of each individual life. Just silly, but very American.
Where do social facts live? In my head? Nope -- if I am dead and gone, the social facts still exist.
Once again, we bump into a fundamental problem in thinking about "mind". We still want "mind" to be inside us, not part of social facts. I continue to think that social fact, and "my" mind, are located in our group utterances. I don't want to limit myself; any communication between entities is language. But let's limit ourselves to humans.
The minute we speak a language, say ma-ma or da-da, or, before that, howl or coo, we are declaring that we are a part of social fact. Language is where to find social fact; it exists only between people, in the same way that the first amendment does. And, so it is with mind.
But, let's backtrack. I'm thinking a lot about the suicide rate of dogs and cats. Suicide is apparently not part of the language between cats and dogs, not the way it is for us. Even terribly depressed dogs don't sit in the corner trying to decide whether to end it all. But, as any dog owner will attest, dogs often sit in the corner planning how to get the next meal. The meal is part of the language of the dog, then. Dog "minds" are severely limited; dog language, too. Odd coincidence.
I remember sitting at dinner with a group of friends. For some silly reason, I said that I would like the conversation to consist only of facts -- no judgments or opinions allowed. There was silence until someone told me to stuff it, and then the conversation went on, blissfully fact-free. They were right, I was wrong. And now, finally, I get it: people talk to hear and express judgments, not facts. They talk to place themselves in the tribe, in some place or other. When I requested a judgment free discussion, I was suggesting we dissolve the tribe. Not a good thing to do at a dinner party. I could have jumped up, denounced all their beliefs -- fine, I was just placing myself in a particular place in the tribe.
Not so easy to go out in the desert for 40 days.
Now, all we have to do is figure out how social fact relates to individual fact.
Probably the best way is to think of languages, and how some languages are shared by very, very small groups, and some very large groups. And how, when someone dies, what remains of them is the conversations they had with others. Social facts. We may live on, but we are not eternal.
But more later.....
*Durkheim also talked a lot about being alienated from social life, and the resulting state, which he called "anomie". This word was widely popular in the intellectual circles in the US in the 50s and 60s. And, also led to a very good joke:
"Remember, the last part of 'autonomy' is "anomie". Works better if read out loud. Well, I think it's funny. Really. Philosophy joke. Another one next time. Much funnier.
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