But this ENERGY which is flowing into the public space is one of spiteful evangelism. It is, I now realize, what I described in my poem about Change. Accomplishing actual aims is not the intent. The intent is to move away from an enormous nervous tension which has to find an outlet somewhere. There is not actual thinking going on behind all this–other than as a thin, dull patina which can easily be characterized as imbecilic–but rather a rationalization of energies which make no sense.
No sanity is possible where high tension is present. This is a simple biological fact, in my view, and the further fact is that most of the people willing to do the work to become professionals in nearly any field are animated by tension. If you do nothing more profound than weaken the philosophical underpinnings of their work and lives, they will spin out of control in all sorts of directions. Our system worked when it made sense to everyone. The tension was contained.
But now, most of our best universities are teaching that life has no purpose and that we are merely seemingly clever but random agglomerations of various chemicals which mean nothing, and will all soon pass away. Unless we become machines. But those are the options. And I would ask: does the question of the meaning and purpose of life become less relevant even if some means can be found to embody consciousness in something more durable than a human body?
I would submit that machines can be engineered to accomplish nearly any How, but Why will always remains a human question, one which is not in need of vast reams of data. It is answered in the heart. It is, in important respects, fundamentally a simple question, one demanding a simple answer. Nothing else will do, emotionally.
Violent evangelism is a feature which originated in the West, in Christianity, although I suppose we could blame the Greeks somewhat, since they did tend to want to impose cultural hegemony in addition to political hegemony, in marked contradistinction to the Persians. They thought they were better than everyone, and knew best in all areas of life.
Christianity became Islam, and both of those energies animate those who ban people from Twitter for saying there are only two genders.
I have spoken from time to time of the philosophical importance of “this”, by which I mean a pointed finger. What cannot be spoken can still be understood. Wisdom reveals calm. Intelligence shatters it. The two are not incompatible, but the mind needs to know it must, in the end, be subordinate to what cannot be spoken.
I will continue to point to the philosophical importance of Kum Nye as a pathway to Shunyatta, to pure Presence.
On that note, I was reading another tired effort to justify the work and existence of Jacques Derrida the other day. The Buddhists preceded him by several millenia, and exceeded him in every possible way. It’s farcical that he did not simply take up Buddhist practice, and stop pretending he had something useful to say.
I will comment, though, that there was one interesting element. Consider the following in light of the recent efforts at cultural suicide by most Western European nations, perhaps particularly France:
If one were to select a key term in Derrida’s ethical outlook, it might be hospitality. He was active in promoting the rights of the sans-papiers in France and in championing cities of refuge, and his whole cast of thought rests on a willingness to welcome what is outside the accepted norms of the academic disciplines and of culture more widely. The very motor of human and social existence at its fullest is openness to what may come, and this openness is directly related to the absence of a fixed ground: arche-writing, différance, the trace-structure – these alternatives to presence all imply the inevitability of change, the healthy contamination of the inside by the outside, the dominant by the excluded, the possible by the impossible.
This last pair may seem a mere rhetorical flourish, but Derrida in fact took the question of impossibility very seriously. Hospitality is impossible, he tells us. To be truly hospitable would be to wholly surrender one’s control over one’s property in order to allow the guest complete freedom, with disastrous results (perhaps for the guest as well). So we necessarily hedge our hospitality around with conditions and limits; but we can’t even call it hospitality unless it is underwritten by that impulse of unconditional welcome. The same goes for giving, forgiving, loving, mourning, justice: all are impossible, but their impossibility is what makes them the ethical values they are.
This is a good example of what I call the “Treasure of Santa Vittoria” principle. In that story, the Germans had conquered an Italian village which had hidden all its wine. The Germans were ordered to find it. They looked exhaustively, Grundlich-ly, throughout the village. No stone was left unturned. It was a masterpiece of German thoroughness. They didn’t find anything. Then on the way out they noticed a cave, and one of the junior offices said: maybe we should look there? The senior officer says, in effect, fuck it. I’m tired. Of course, that is where the wine was.
Derrida is famous for doing painstakingly long close readings of various texts. His language is laborious. His reasoning contorted and reflexive. But he goes through this long effort to undermine the ethical underpinnings of Western civilization, then by way of recompense simply defaults to the cultural traditions he had learned by the time he was four in Algeria. The great Professor teaches what he was taught as a small child by his mother. He has not grown in any way. He has not seen what was obvious, which is that there is tremendous value in our traditions, not least their ability to adapt, grow, and increase in self understanding and knowledge, none of which were things he tried to contribute to.
[Edit: it occurs to me I can be more clear: the point of a search is to find. You cannot have a search if you are not looking for something which you can describe in some way. It can be a more clear intellectual understanding, or it can be an emotional state or both. Greater harmony, for example, has been a common goal.
What Derrida created was a method which was its own end. Reading texts his way WAS his work. If you are doing something for its own sake, that is not a serious intellectual pursuit, but a hobby. He would have done less harm had he dedicated himself to building model airplanes, or moving rocks in one pile to another then back again, like Camus’ absurdist hero in “The Plague”]
It is maddening seeing what is or was possible, and how close things came, and may come, to being much, much better.
We have been gifted the ability to make and read maps. Why would we consciously and intentionally burn them and turn off the lights, simply because some imbecile pointed out that maps are not ACTUALLY the territory and that mistakes remain possible? OF COURSE mistakes remain possible. Just stop being a fucking arrogant douchebag and over time we will get it all figured out, better than now.