Monday, October 7, 2013
Vierne Plays Vierne
Vierne, like many French organists, was famous for his improvisations. Here is a piece he improvised for a recording session in 1929. He was quite a musician.
The Concept of Rights, of Justice of Equality Are Necessary Aspects of Seeing People As The Creation of God
One of the more interesting incoherencies in the alleged culture of the modern intellectuals is the use of the term "free thinker" to mean the adherents of an atheistic ideology that denies the possibility of anyone thinking freely. Yesterday I tried to show how the widespread belief in a form of biological determinism negates the required foundations of American liberalism. Tying us, absolutely, our actions, our interactions, our lives, our very experience to organic chemistry negates freedom, and the influence of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the current crops of those who have been to college is ubiquitous. It is THE default belief about all kinds of stuff, from gender roles, economic class, educational aspiration, the lives and deaths of huge numbers of people. Biological determinism in society has always been accompanied by doppelgangers of racism and sexism. In short, it is impossible to maintain both a belief in Dawkinsian evo-psy and liberalism with any kind of integrity, their intellectual reconciliation is impossible. I think that in the English speaking peoples that liberalism, in the American sense of the word, the legacy of the 19th century reformers, built on the legacy of the 18th century has been the loser. Without a doubt, American liberalism and its counterparts in Britain and even Canada, has been on the downward incline during the same period as the resurgence of Darwinian determinism*.
In Onward, Christian Liberals, Christianity's long tradition of social injustice, an essay published in The American Scholar in 2006, Marilynne Robinson made a far more convincing case for, not only the compatibility of American liberalism with Calvinism, but that historically much of American liberalism was a result of an understanding of Calvinism. When that liberalism was developing in the same places and among the same people involved in both the enormous eruptions of both the First and Second Great Awakenings, it would be hard to contend that the great reform efforts that constitute the social and political manifestations of that liberalism, its actual substance, had nothing to do with each other. I can think of no other thing that happened during that period, encouraging a change of behavior involving self-denial and the Biblical imperatives of doing justice to the widow, the orphan, the poor, the stranger among us that would account for reform movements large enough to make the kind of change that was made. Though I think that other religious groups, the Quakers, in particular, may have had a bit to do with it as well.
I am speaking from the perspective of American liberal Protestantism. As I understand the history of this tradition, it departed in the mid–18th century from the Calvinism its forebears had brought from England when it experienced the potent religious upheaval known as the First Great Awakening. The given of the movement was that people passed into a state of sanctity—and in effect were assured of their salvation—through an intense mystical/emotional experience, often a vision of Christ. The movement swept pre–Revolutionary America and left in its wake Princeton, Dartmouth, the temperance movement, a heightened sense of shared identity, and the model of revivalism as a norm of religious culture. There was criticism and reaction against extremes of enthusiasm, and an important Calvinist aversion to the idea that the fruits of salvation could be had by shaking the tree. And there was a period of quiet, which ended with the onset in the early 19th century of the Second Great Awakening, again based on the belief that salvation was realized in a mystical/emotional experience. It swept the Northeast, sending zealous New Yorkers and New Englanders out into the Territories, and left in its wake the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, any number of fine colleges, a revived temperance movement, Utopianism, Seventh-day Adventists, and Latter-day Saints. And also a literature on the treatment of an affliction they frankly called “religious mania.”
Having read a part of the enormous literature of mystical religion, I can point out you'll find some of the earliest warnings against such a "mania" contained in them. It has frequently been presented as dangerous and damaging to religious progress. That warning probably pre-dates Christianity.
As an ardent Calvinist, Robinson confronts the idea of predestination, presenting it in an entirely different manner than it is usually given. I would probably have to break copyrite law to quote enough of the article to give you an idea of what she says so I will only ask that you read her in full. While I am not, have never been and almost never will be a predestinarian**, she does a far more convincing job of squaring the circle, reconciling predestination with freedom, in a way that the molecular fundamentalists have not done. Something which I believe materialism is incapable of doing. She does a job of showing how much more of an advantage religious belief is for liberalism in that religious liberals don't think they know it all or can know it all or even an impressive part of it all. Molecular fundamentalism is as tied to a primitive and narrow assumption that they have the key to everything as biblical fundamentalism is to a primitive and narrow concept of their favored authority.
Only, whereas the molecular fundamentalist can brush aside as delusions, concepts of justice, of morality, of the inherency of rights and moral obligations, those are massively important and potent parts of The Bible. While there are certainly millions of professed believers in the Bible as divine authority who notably ignore its most important and frequent exhortations to do justice, to feed the poor, to clothe them, to love them, to treat the stranger among us as we treat ourselves, to not do unto others, and to do to others what we would have done to us, they can't simply cut those out of the text. The atheist fundamentalists have been blatantly denying those for more than a hundred-fifty years and there is no convincing explanation I know of which accounts for the reality of them under atheism. Convincing enough to produce evidence that atheists believe it to match the reforms growing out of The Great Awakenings. The stronger tendency among atheists is to ignore or deny their reality.
I have larger hopes that those claiming a belief in The Bible as the word of God seeing the error of their ways and behaving justly than in people whose fundamental holding makes that not only impossible but unnecessary.
* As a large group of scientists and others predicted at the dawn of the immediate predecessor of evo-psy, Sociobiology. A group that included some of the most eminent Darwinists of our time.
** Perhaps, as a moderate believer in universalism, I do believe in a kind of predestination. If everyone is made for salvation, that is predestined, perhaps more predestinarian than the idea that someone can choose to be saved or not, though I'd expect anyone would rather be saved, if their choice isn't hampered by ignorance or mental illness. Atheists are even more strictly predestinarian in that they believe we all are bound inevitably for eternal obliteration, our bodies destined for whatever bleak end that happens to be in fashion among the cosmologists any given month.
In Onward, Christian Liberals, Christianity's long tradition of social injustice, an essay published in The American Scholar in 2006, Marilynne Robinson made a far more convincing case for, not only the compatibility of American liberalism with Calvinism, but that historically much of American liberalism was a result of an understanding of Calvinism. When that liberalism was developing in the same places and among the same people involved in both the enormous eruptions of both the First and Second Great Awakenings, it would be hard to contend that the great reform efforts that constitute the social and political manifestations of that liberalism, its actual substance, had nothing to do with each other. I can think of no other thing that happened during that period, encouraging a change of behavior involving self-denial and the Biblical imperatives of doing justice to the widow, the orphan, the poor, the stranger among us that would account for reform movements large enough to make the kind of change that was made. Though I think that other religious groups, the Quakers, in particular, may have had a bit to do with it as well.
I am speaking from the perspective of American liberal Protestantism. As I understand the history of this tradition, it departed in the mid–18th century from the Calvinism its forebears had brought from England when it experienced the potent religious upheaval known as the First Great Awakening. The given of the movement was that people passed into a state of sanctity—and in effect were assured of their salvation—through an intense mystical/emotional experience, often a vision of Christ. The movement swept pre–Revolutionary America and left in its wake Princeton, Dartmouth, the temperance movement, a heightened sense of shared identity, and the model of revivalism as a norm of religious culture. There was criticism and reaction against extremes of enthusiasm, and an important Calvinist aversion to the idea that the fruits of salvation could be had by shaking the tree. And there was a period of quiet, which ended with the onset in the early 19th century of the Second Great Awakening, again based on the belief that salvation was realized in a mystical/emotional experience. It swept the Northeast, sending zealous New Yorkers and New Englanders out into the Territories, and left in its wake the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, any number of fine colleges, a revived temperance movement, Utopianism, Seventh-day Adventists, and Latter-day Saints. And also a literature on the treatment of an affliction they frankly called “religious mania.”
Having read a part of the enormous literature of mystical religion, I can point out you'll find some of the earliest warnings against such a "mania" contained in them. It has frequently been presented as dangerous and damaging to religious progress. That warning probably pre-dates Christianity.
As an ardent Calvinist, Robinson confronts the idea of predestination, presenting it in an entirely different manner than it is usually given. I would probably have to break copyrite law to quote enough of the article to give you an idea of what she says so I will only ask that you read her in full. While I am not, have never been and almost never will be a predestinarian**, she does a far more convincing job of squaring the circle, reconciling predestination with freedom, in a way that the molecular fundamentalists have not done. Something which I believe materialism is incapable of doing. She does a job of showing how much more of an advantage religious belief is for liberalism in that religious liberals don't think they know it all or can know it all or even an impressive part of it all. Molecular fundamentalism is as tied to a primitive and narrow assumption that they have the key to everything as biblical fundamentalism is to a primitive and narrow concept of their favored authority.
Only, whereas the molecular fundamentalist can brush aside as delusions, concepts of justice, of morality, of the inherency of rights and moral obligations, those are massively important and potent parts of The Bible. While there are certainly millions of professed believers in the Bible as divine authority who notably ignore its most important and frequent exhortations to do justice, to feed the poor, to clothe them, to love them, to treat the stranger among us as we treat ourselves, to not do unto others, and to do to others what we would have done to us, they can't simply cut those out of the text. The atheist fundamentalists have been blatantly denying those for more than a hundred-fifty years and there is no convincing explanation I know of which accounts for the reality of them under atheism. Convincing enough to produce evidence that atheists believe it to match the reforms growing out of The Great Awakenings. The stronger tendency among atheists is to ignore or deny their reality.
I have larger hopes that those claiming a belief in The Bible as the word of God seeing the error of their ways and behaving justly than in people whose fundamental holding makes that not only impossible but unnecessary.
* As a large group of scientists and others predicted at the dawn of the immediate predecessor of evo-psy, Sociobiology. A group that included some of the most eminent Darwinists of our time.
** Perhaps, as a moderate believer in universalism, I do believe in a kind of predestination. If everyone is made for salvation, that is predestined, perhaps more predestinarian than the idea that someone can choose to be saved or not, though I'd expect anyone would rather be saved, if their choice isn't hampered by ignorance or mental illness. Atheists are even more strictly predestinarian in that they believe we all are bound inevitably for eternal obliteration, our bodies destined for whatever bleak end that happens to be in fashion among the cosmologists any given month.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Does the Widespread Faith in Evo-Psy Damage Liberalism?
American style liberalism is based in faith, a belief in the possibility of change for the better, of people having better lives through better behavior. Individual people can see the the injustice done to people, even by themselves, and they can end the injustice and even, sometimes, make amends. That is the basis of liberalism, it is also the basis of democracy. That statement has probably already led to horror, the idea that liberalism depends on such a thing as faith is entirely unacceptable to many who like to think of themselves as liberal or even a position allegedly farther in that direction, on the left. But there isn't any other basis possible for that idea, it isn't the general run of experience that kind of beneficial change is likely or even possible, human history doesn't give much reason to believe in it so it is an extraordinary act of faith to believe that is possible and worth dedicating your efforts to. Never mind the faith required to make it your life's work, as the arduous task pf overcoming the entrenched oligarchic powers require.
Anything that impedes that faith will, inevitably, damage the effort, discouraging people from working for that liberal change, discouraging them from believing it is possible. Encourage them to believe the opposite, that the moral substance of liberalism is a delusion, that the universe is not arcing towards justice but to the elevation of the unjust, the natural and, so, right winners in a brutal struggle for existence. You can contrast the famous quotation from The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
to one only somewhat less famous from Richard Dawkins
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
That is the way the Dawkins quote is usually given but it comes in a longer pargraph. Just before that he said,
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
That was from his book, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. In that same book he says,
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
In those quotations is contained a complete and absolute destruction of any possible belief in the reality of liberalism as I've been talking about it. It also contains the absolute justification of its opposite, the pursuit of selfish gratification at the cost of anyone so unlucky as to have what we want and to be weak enough for us to take it for them, up to and including their oppression and death. And it entirely justifies the refusal to oppose those stronger and more ruthless than we are because opposing them could disadvantage us, better to cooperate and support them. It also contains the absolute destruction of any personal responsibility. We do what our DNA is coded to do. If that is what our DNA impels us to do than we carry out the mission that molecule sends us on AND, inevitably, whatever we do is the inevitable result of nature, of the predetermined code being made manifest in the world.
It will be objected by some that even Richard Dawkins has said we don't have to live as if that were the case, that we can make choices our DNA wouldn't. Having been a critic of Dawkins' incomplete and opportunistic scientific assertions in the past, I will say that he can't have it both ways. No determinist, whether they have a knowledge of DNA to give as their explanation of biological determinism or rely on some other mechanism to explain human thought and action, can escape that their determinism is an absolute system. It is inescapable, either directly or with several more steps of emergent complexity, that only makes it a bit more complex to see the molecular basis of it. Dawkins' modern version of predestination, based on molecular biology instead of divine whim, is no less absolute and no more a denial of human freedom. In it is also contained either the denial of morality and the reality of justice and of moral obligations or the plausible deniability required for us to decide to act either immorally or amorally. Dawkins' faith in his Darwinian view of life, in someone more disposed to harm weaker people than an academic who scribbles for a living, justifies not caring about other people or animals or the environment. It is the working amoral framework of the political opposite of liberals, including he pseudo-liberals who would, I guess, comprise a good percentage of those who would use evo-psy as their favored explanatory framework.
That framing has been all the fashion for several decades among the college educated class in the English speaking world. I have the feeling that it has surpassed previously favored framing, Freudian, behaviorist, and other deterministic systems in number of adherents and the strength of their faith in it. It is the ultimate Darwinian reduction and our academic training has a profound faith in that kind of molecular reductionist creed. Dawkins' specialty is in coming up with easily presented plausible scenarios to support that faith. He is the most successful catechist of his denomination of the wider materialist faith. And, as did Freud and others before him, he claims to have Darwin on his side. There is nothing in this faith which has more ritualistic potency than the invocation of Charles Darwin.
When I first started participating in blogs, reading them, commenting on them, the use of the word "meme" rather astonished me. I'd half forgotten the word from having read The Selfish Gene shortly after it came out. For a long time I couldn't remember where I'd seen the term before or what it was supposed to mean. Then I remembered thinking the word was one of the minor bad ideas contained in that book full of bad ideas. I think that it coming from so many people who believed themselves to be left of center kind of disturbed me. And, reading more of what they were writing, it was clear they'd pretty much bought the whole Sociobiological, evo-psy line without realizing it was a complete contradiction of their alleged political ideology. To put it in ancient terms of their faith, they were conflicted. But, unlike their desire justice, which is a hard sell to the best of us, the belief in determinism is framed in terms of science, which, in their actual faith, produces reliable information. Science is seen as possessing the key to complete and absolute knowledge, the irrefutable oracle which shows things as they really are, all others being obscure and unreliable and, let's put it honestly, evil.
I will say it plainly, the beliefs most of us carry about science are as credulously superstitious as those that fundamentalists carry about their favored scriptures. The childlike faith in that view of science is no less a denial of what science is and a desperate belief in what it not only is not but which it never really claimed to be. And in no other area is this the case than in those who believe in the alleged science of thought and thinking. The impossibility of performing the most basic of scientific requirements, observation and real measurement, the absolute reliance on self-reporting of thoughts by the most unobjective of parties, the total absence of physical artifacts of thoughts in the past, require that something be substituted in place of those required actions. What is generally substituted are scenarios and schemes based in promissory materialism, asserting what "must be" there because in materialism and previously existing materialist framing of that - the most popular current one, natural selection - it is asserted no other explanation is as coherent with that framing. It is really no different from the elaborate "Marxist" or theological systems built to be coherent with the theory, not with observable reality physically attached to it. Materialism applied to invisible, unobservable "entities" is no more reliable than any other thought about what cannot be seen, measured, analyzed and measured against observable. Materialism relies on some kind of metaphysical thinking no matter how much the materialist claims not to be doing exactly what they so obviously have to to arrive at their belief.
-----------------
The political impotence of contemporary liberalism is something that is also endlessly discussed on the putatively liberal blogs, the same ones that spout Dawkinsian materialism, not comprehending that they are supporting their "liberalism" with the poison that weakens and eventually kills their more idealistic aspirations.
Liberals will have to make a choice between those two faiths, the one exemplified in the most real terms, political change that made life better for millions of people and which provides the only proven force to continue that change, or in the pseudo-scientific negation of the reality of what liberalism requires. That someone working in the quasi-academic, quasi-scientific milieu that Dawkins has can be expected to spout fashionable positions that are common to it. That some of those generally trend towards some of the positions more reliably supported by traditional liberalism isn't a big surprise. But, considering what else comes with the Dawkinsite faith, that is unsustainable. It has certainly proven to be politically impotent, as the political situation in Britain, the United States and other English speaking countries since the publication of The Selfish Gene and its adoption as an article of faith in the college educated class shows. It has extended a trend that began under the influence of its preceding materialist creeds, most notably behaviorism.
Liberalism requires faith in the reality of its prerequisites and goals. And since making real political change of that kind requires overcoming the massive combined powers of selfishness, greed, egocentricity, custom and ignorance, and those codified in preexisting laws and legal dogmas - which massively favor the wealthy and powerful - that liberal faith has to be extremely strong, strong enough to lead to effective action based in risk and self sacrifice. What is represented to be liberalism today can't even rouse itself to believe in the reality of its goals. It has replaced that faith with a cynical, dyspeptic view of life that is the emblem of ideals damaged and obliterated with materialism and its extensions. The small and inadequate progress made towards justice, towards a moral life and society based in equality and inherent rights is not founded in materialism but in escaping it.
Evolutionary psychology is only the most recent but also one of the most effective weapons that damages American style liberalism, its idealistic and non-material basis and the power of personal belief, even to absolute conviction, that powers it in a political context. That people like David Brooks find its basis and results congenial to his politics is telling, I would say definitively refuting, in so far as it is compatible with liberalism is concerned. I think it is far more of an impediment to real liberalism than biblical fundamentalism is. The biblical requirement to do justice, as asserted by the Jewish prophets back into the earliest books of the First Testament asserts the reality of justice, morals and the equal right all people have to those things. As seen in the quote from Richard Dawkins, materialism denies the real reality of those things. I think that it is more likely that a religious fundamentalist will listen to their conscience and escape the limits and contradictions of their creed to work for justice than it is that someone benighted by something asserted to be science will. And believing that the core of the moral teaching of their tradition as expounded by the prophets, to do justice and not to do to others that which is hateful to them, they will actually do the work of making that happen in reality. I've lost my faith in materialism to do that, I think it will always, as a result of its core beliefs, trend in the other direction no matter what it professes in contradiction to that belief.
Materialism, in the end, is a static system, as cyclical and deterministic as so many ancient systems of belief are presented to be. It is as determined as the bonding of atoms and molecules, the thing that all of its reality consists of. You have to have something else to escape that kind of thing, with its biological casts and determinations. You have to believe in the massively difficult to believe reality of morals and justice and the possibility of people to freely choose to act in contradiction of natural selection, producing the only possible escape from that dreary spiral of survival of the fittest, the ultimate emergent manifestation of that molecular chemistry. The Reverend King's cosmology requires movement and change for which materialism contains insufficient space or scope.
Anything that impedes that faith will, inevitably, damage the effort, discouraging people from working for that liberal change, discouraging them from believing it is possible. Encourage them to believe the opposite, that the moral substance of liberalism is a delusion, that the universe is not arcing towards justice but to the elevation of the unjust, the natural and, so, right winners in a brutal struggle for existence. You can contrast the famous quotation from The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
to one only somewhat less famous from Richard Dawkins
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
That is the way the Dawkins quote is usually given but it comes in a longer pargraph. Just before that he said,
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
That was from his book, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. In that same book he says,
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
In those quotations is contained a complete and absolute destruction of any possible belief in the reality of liberalism as I've been talking about it. It also contains the absolute justification of its opposite, the pursuit of selfish gratification at the cost of anyone so unlucky as to have what we want and to be weak enough for us to take it for them, up to and including their oppression and death. And it entirely justifies the refusal to oppose those stronger and more ruthless than we are because opposing them could disadvantage us, better to cooperate and support them. It also contains the absolute destruction of any personal responsibility. We do what our DNA is coded to do. If that is what our DNA impels us to do than we carry out the mission that molecule sends us on AND, inevitably, whatever we do is the inevitable result of nature, of the predetermined code being made manifest in the world.
It will be objected by some that even Richard Dawkins has said we don't have to live as if that were the case, that we can make choices our DNA wouldn't. Having been a critic of Dawkins' incomplete and opportunistic scientific assertions in the past, I will say that he can't have it both ways. No determinist, whether they have a knowledge of DNA to give as their explanation of biological determinism or rely on some other mechanism to explain human thought and action, can escape that their determinism is an absolute system. It is inescapable, either directly or with several more steps of emergent complexity, that only makes it a bit more complex to see the molecular basis of it. Dawkins' modern version of predestination, based on molecular biology instead of divine whim, is no less absolute and no more a denial of human freedom. In it is also contained either the denial of morality and the reality of justice and of moral obligations or the plausible deniability required for us to decide to act either immorally or amorally. Dawkins' faith in his Darwinian view of life, in someone more disposed to harm weaker people than an academic who scribbles for a living, justifies not caring about other people or animals or the environment. It is the working amoral framework of the political opposite of liberals, including he pseudo-liberals who would, I guess, comprise a good percentage of those who would use evo-psy as their favored explanatory framework.
That framing has been all the fashion for several decades among the college educated class in the English speaking world. I have the feeling that it has surpassed previously favored framing, Freudian, behaviorist, and other deterministic systems in number of adherents and the strength of their faith in it. It is the ultimate Darwinian reduction and our academic training has a profound faith in that kind of molecular reductionist creed. Dawkins' specialty is in coming up with easily presented plausible scenarios to support that faith. He is the most successful catechist of his denomination of the wider materialist faith. And, as did Freud and others before him, he claims to have Darwin on his side. There is nothing in this faith which has more ritualistic potency than the invocation of Charles Darwin.
When I first started participating in blogs, reading them, commenting on them, the use of the word "meme" rather astonished me. I'd half forgotten the word from having read The Selfish Gene shortly after it came out. For a long time I couldn't remember where I'd seen the term before or what it was supposed to mean. Then I remembered thinking the word was one of the minor bad ideas contained in that book full of bad ideas. I think that it coming from so many people who believed themselves to be left of center kind of disturbed me. And, reading more of what they were writing, it was clear they'd pretty much bought the whole Sociobiological, evo-psy line without realizing it was a complete contradiction of their alleged political ideology. To put it in ancient terms of their faith, they were conflicted. But, unlike their desire justice, which is a hard sell to the best of us, the belief in determinism is framed in terms of science, which, in their actual faith, produces reliable information. Science is seen as possessing the key to complete and absolute knowledge, the irrefutable oracle which shows things as they really are, all others being obscure and unreliable and, let's put it honestly, evil.
I will say it plainly, the beliefs most of us carry about science are as credulously superstitious as those that fundamentalists carry about their favored scriptures. The childlike faith in that view of science is no less a denial of what science is and a desperate belief in what it not only is not but which it never really claimed to be. And in no other area is this the case than in those who believe in the alleged science of thought and thinking. The impossibility of performing the most basic of scientific requirements, observation and real measurement, the absolute reliance on self-reporting of thoughts by the most unobjective of parties, the total absence of physical artifacts of thoughts in the past, require that something be substituted in place of those required actions. What is generally substituted are scenarios and schemes based in promissory materialism, asserting what "must be" there because in materialism and previously existing materialist framing of that - the most popular current one, natural selection - it is asserted no other explanation is as coherent with that framing. It is really no different from the elaborate "Marxist" or theological systems built to be coherent with the theory, not with observable reality physically attached to it. Materialism applied to invisible, unobservable "entities" is no more reliable than any other thought about what cannot be seen, measured, analyzed and measured against observable. Materialism relies on some kind of metaphysical thinking no matter how much the materialist claims not to be doing exactly what they so obviously have to to arrive at their belief.
-----------------
The political impotence of contemporary liberalism is something that is also endlessly discussed on the putatively liberal blogs, the same ones that spout Dawkinsian materialism, not comprehending that they are supporting their "liberalism" with the poison that weakens and eventually kills their more idealistic aspirations.
Liberals will have to make a choice between those two faiths, the one exemplified in the most real terms, political change that made life better for millions of people and which provides the only proven force to continue that change, or in the pseudo-scientific negation of the reality of what liberalism requires. That someone working in the quasi-academic, quasi-scientific milieu that Dawkins has can be expected to spout fashionable positions that are common to it. That some of those generally trend towards some of the positions more reliably supported by traditional liberalism isn't a big surprise. But, considering what else comes with the Dawkinsite faith, that is unsustainable. It has certainly proven to be politically impotent, as the political situation in Britain, the United States and other English speaking countries since the publication of The Selfish Gene and its adoption as an article of faith in the college educated class shows. It has extended a trend that began under the influence of its preceding materialist creeds, most notably behaviorism.
Liberalism requires faith in the reality of its prerequisites and goals. And since making real political change of that kind requires overcoming the massive combined powers of selfishness, greed, egocentricity, custom and ignorance, and those codified in preexisting laws and legal dogmas - which massively favor the wealthy and powerful - that liberal faith has to be extremely strong, strong enough to lead to effective action based in risk and self sacrifice. What is represented to be liberalism today can't even rouse itself to believe in the reality of its goals. It has replaced that faith with a cynical, dyspeptic view of life that is the emblem of ideals damaged and obliterated with materialism and its extensions. The small and inadequate progress made towards justice, towards a moral life and society based in equality and inherent rights is not founded in materialism but in escaping it.
Evolutionary psychology is only the most recent but also one of the most effective weapons that damages American style liberalism, its idealistic and non-material basis and the power of personal belief, even to absolute conviction, that powers it in a political context. That people like David Brooks find its basis and results congenial to his politics is telling, I would say definitively refuting, in so far as it is compatible with liberalism is concerned. I think it is far more of an impediment to real liberalism than biblical fundamentalism is. The biblical requirement to do justice, as asserted by the Jewish prophets back into the earliest books of the First Testament asserts the reality of justice, morals and the equal right all people have to those things. As seen in the quote from Richard Dawkins, materialism denies the real reality of those things. I think that it is more likely that a religious fundamentalist will listen to their conscience and escape the limits and contradictions of their creed to work for justice than it is that someone benighted by something asserted to be science will. And believing that the core of the moral teaching of their tradition as expounded by the prophets, to do justice and not to do to others that which is hateful to them, they will actually do the work of making that happen in reality. I've lost my faith in materialism to do that, I think it will always, as a result of its core beliefs, trend in the other direction no matter what it professes in contradiction to that belief.
Materialism, in the end, is a static system, as cyclical and deterministic as so many ancient systems of belief are presented to be. It is as determined as the bonding of atoms and molecules, the thing that all of its reality consists of. You have to have something else to escape that kind of thing, with its biological casts and determinations. You have to believe in the massively difficult to believe reality of morals and justice and the possibility of people to freely choose to act in contradiction of natural selection, producing the only possible escape from that dreary spiral of survival of the fittest, the ultimate emergent manifestation of that molecular chemistry. The Reverend King's cosmology requires movement and change for which materialism contains insufficient space or scope.
Friday, October 4, 2013
Santiago de Murcia Pieces
Paul O'Dette Baroque Guitar
Amazing what you can do with, essentially, five strings.
Thank You Jeffrey McFadden: Of Interest To Guitar Players
I have mostly recovered from my accident last December and can play piano again. But my brief retrospective return to playing guitar has been lots of fun. I'll probably keep it up a bit.
Looking at the massive corpus of classic guitar music and lute music available for free online was quite an eye opener for me. If we had such resources available in my student days and computers to make writing papers and producing finished scores so easy a lot of us would have had much different lives in music.
One thing that I found this week is so excellent, so practically vital to guitar players that I'm astonished to find it is available for free. Fretboard Harmony for University Study: Method and Historical Context, the doctoral dissertation of Jeffrey James McFadden of the University of Toronto contains the best practical advice on improvising harmony in a classical (or any) context that it's an act of real charity that it's being given away for less than twenty dollars a copy. I recommend it and if I ever have an occasion to teach guitar again, I'll use it.
The exercises are so good I would advise people interested in historical performance to adapt them to lute tuning. While they are general and not geared to historical practice they will get you a lot farther down that road than anything else I'm aware of. Also available are the two facsimiles of the very rare early treatises dealing with this subject, both in the original Spanish. Here is the pdf for Santiago de Murcia's Resumen de acompañar , this and other articles available online can go a long way to clarifying the text and the tablature. Somewhat less clear and more suggestive than explicit is this text by the famous Gaspar Sanz, the part relevant to this post, his "short treatise on how to accompany perfectly" at the end of the text. Reading the tablatures from the originals is challenging but kind of fun. But I'd master McFadden's exercises first before honing them to any particular historical period.
Update: Someone pointed out this file of the Murcia Resumen to me, which is displayed much more clearly on my browser. I haven't tried printing out pages from it.
Looking at the massive corpus of classic guitar music and lute music available for free online was quite an eye opener for me. If we had such resources available in my student days and computers to make writing papers and producing finished scores so easy a lot of us would have had much different lives in music.
One thing that I found this week is so excellent, so practically vital to guitar players that I'm astonished to find it is available for free. Fretboard Harmony for University Study: Method and Historical Context, the doctoral dissertation of Jeffrey James McFadden of the University of Toronto contains the best practical advice on improvising harmony in a classical (or any) context that it's an act of real charity that it's being given away for less than twenty dollars a copy. I recommend it and if I ever have an occasion to teach guitar again, I'll use it.
The exercises are so good I would advise people interested in historical performance to adapt them to lute tuning. While they are general and not geared to historical practice they will get you a lot farther down that road than anything else I'm aware of. Also available are the two facsimiles of the very rare early treatises dealing with this subject, both in the original Spanish. Here is the pdf for Santiago de Murcia's Resumen de acompañar , this and other articles available online can go a long way to clarifying the text and the tablature. Somewhat less clear and more suggestive than explicit is this text by the famous Gaspar Sanz, the part relevant to this post, his "short treatise on how to accompany perfectly" at the end of the text. Reading the tablatures from the originals is challenging but kind of fun. But I'd master McFadden's exercises first before honing them to any particular historical period.
Update: Someone pointed out this file of the Murcia Resumen to me, which is displayed much more clearly on my browser. I haven't tried printing out pages from it.
Boring Music Covered By A Shtick Too Boring To Be Offensive On A Cracker
Missed this little item about a metal-rock themed burger joint trying on PZ Meyer's shtick of "communion desecration". The joint is called "Kuma's Corner" and its slogan is Eat beef. Bang your head. After making the huge sacrifice of listening to some of the Swedish metal band "Ghost" which it is honoring with its stupid allegedly edgy "communion burger" publicity stunt, I think what's left from all that head banging has a lot in common with the meat on the buns. Of course the "communion host" is unconsecrated so it's not a "communion host", like the "host" used in PZ Myers' own publicity stunt, it's just a cracker.
I would be interested to see the patrons that this place attracts because I suspect they might make the average crowd at iHop look merely plump. There must be a jillion fat calories in one of those things.
And the music? Fourth generation Black Sabbath as imagined by the products of a cradle to grave welfare state. Not that I'm at all opposed to cradle to grave welfare states, just that it's disappointing one would produce the kind of crap pop culture that comes out of Sweden. They so want to be daring and edgy but they lack the experience that requires, something they've got in common with lots of American schlock pop culture. I won't link the the music which is crap but here's an, uh, interview I tried out of sheer boredom. It supports my contention that all that head banging has made them meat heads.
When Robert Johnson sang about selling his soul to the devil he was convincing, these boys are just idiots playing dress up and thrilling an audience stupid enough to buy them. Johnson was alleged to have gotten his brilliant technique and music in the bargain. If these kids got theirs in the bargain it is clear Johnson's soul was worth more. Or maybe he was just too smart to settle for so little, something that rock fans have been doing for the past sixty years. Rock is what is left when you take everything interesting out of the blues. It's a rare rocker who can put something interesting back into it, metal substitutes volume and play-time, would be outrageousness for what is real. As can be seen in this publicity stunt.
I would be interested to see the patrons that this place attracts because I suspect they might make the average crowd at iHop look merely plump. There must be a jillion fat calories in one of those things.
And the music? Fourth generation Black Sabbath as imagined by the products of a cradle to grave welfare state. Not that I'm at all opposed to cradle to grave welfare states, just that it's disappointing one would produce the kind of crap pop culture that comes out of Sweden. They so want to be daring and edgy but they lack the experience that requires, something they've got in common with lots of American schlock pop culture. I won't link the the music which is crap but here's an, uh, interview I tried out of sheer boredom. It supports my contention that all that head banging has made them meat heads.
When Robert Johnson sang about selling his soul to the devil he was convincing, these boys are just idiots playing dress up and thrilling an audience stupid enough to buy them. Johnson was alleged to have gotten his brilliant technique and music in the bargain. If these kids got theirs in the bargain it is clear Johnson's soul was worth more. Or maybe he was just too smart to settle for so little, something that rock fans have been doing for the past sixty years. Rock is what is left when you take everything interesting out of the blues. It's a rare rocker who can put something interesting back into it, metal substitutes volume and play-time, would be outrageousness for what is real. As can be seen in this publicity stunt.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Louis Vierne
I am not very familiar with the music of Louis Vierne so I'm going to be listening to all of his organ symphonies. Here's the first one.
Ulf Norberg, organ
Maria Norberg, assistant
Anders Söderlund, recording
Score
Ulf Norberg, organ
Maria Norberg, assistant
Anders Söderlund, recording
Score
Thursday Recommendation
You might want to read this article by Jim Hightower about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership that is being pushed like NAFTA was could destroy even more of the only things that make life possible for hundreds of millions here and billions around the world.
Like NAFTA the WTO and others of these corporate designed ways to destroy democracy by treaty, any elected official that pushes or supports these things should be informally considered guilty of treason. That the "founders" didn't include selling out The People during peace time, for the profit of the oligarchs in their definition of legal treason shows that they were not the perspicacious, omniscient sages they are sold to us has having been. That the media has not forced the pull out from these things only shows how unreliable they are, as well.
Update: And before I begin my long day, for those who like a bit of a brawl. Here's my comment from last night.
Ah, Alternet gives the Jesus bashers another round. I've been looking at the number of hits these posts get and the comments, Alternet is practicing hate talk in order to up its hit numbers, no doubt getting more ad revenue from it.
The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was the last really effective leader that the American left has had, changing laws, changing lives for the better. The anti-religious talkers, notably not doers, never producing anything but futility, have a long record of ineffectiveness. It would be stupid to continue to follow them into political impotence.
Like NAFTA the WTO and others of these corporate designed ways to destroy democracy by treaty, any elected official that pushes or supports these things should be informally considered guilty of treason. That the "founders" didn't include selling out The People during peace time, for the profit of the oligarchs in their definition of legal treason shows that they were not the perspicacious, omniscient sages they are sold to us has having been. That the media has not forced the pull out from these things only shows how unreliable they are, as well.
Update: And before I begin my long day, for those who like a bit of a brawl. Here's my comment from last night.
Ah, Alternet gives the Jesus bashers another round. I've been looking at the number of hits these posts get and the comments, Alternet is practicing hate talk in order to up its hit numbers, no doubt getting more ad revenue from it.
The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was the last really effective leader that the American left has had, changing laws, changing lives for the better. The anti-religious talkers, notably not doers, never producing anything but futility, have a long record of ineffectiveness. It would be stupid to continue to follow them into political impotence.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Thoughts About The Week of Shutdown and Beginning of Affordable Healthcare
You've, no doubt, heard the assertion being made that the Republicans who have shut the government down have been acting out of principle. Which is an odd thing to call the bald and sordid and gleeful harming of poor people, poor school children, those whose lives depend on federal programs, federal workers, for political gain.
The Republicans who have shut down the government are also credited with some kind of adherence to philosophical principles. Which is presented as some kind of virtue. I have to say that I used to be somewhat suckered with that stupid idea in the past, that adherence to an abstract philosophical principle even as it harms people was shielded from its results by the claim that it was the result of philosophical rumination. Criminal conspiracies, especially the successful ones, are also the product of intellectual activity. Perhaps the fact that the ones with clean hands and good clothes are so freely let off for some of the biggest crimes committed is a related delusion. Especially as in a number of cases it involves the same people and their circle of family and friends.
Not much of anything that comes out of the Washington press corps is worth of listening to, it is certainly not worthy of belief. As I type this that's where my inspiration is coming from. The problem isn't that our government services are centralized, made equally available around the country, it's that the politically effective media is centralized in Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles. What's more, it is centralized in the hands of the obviously interested rich. Including "public radio" and TV. The last time I saw figures, Steve Inskeep was making more than 300,000 dollars a year to lie on behalf of Republicans and I suspect he, looking at the salaries of others in his job feels he is a poor man. Not to mention their benefits package which certainly contains full health coverage. Since I'm hearing what Steve is saying reflected in his local equivalent here in Maine, I will not be giving them any of my money to promote the Republican party that has shut down the government and the wealthy people who they all work for.
This would never have happened under the media rules in place during the 1960s. The tea party was the product of hate talk radio and cabloid TV, the impotence of the Democrats in office is as well. That is a direct result of releasing TV and radio from their public service obligations, their obligation to not lie, their obligation to provide equal time under the Fairness Doctrine. It is a direct result of allowing people like Murdoch and corporations like Clear Channel to feed endless lies to the American People. That Ronald Reagan was the one who gave that desideratum to the "free speech" industry to them and that it has been the right-wing liars who have been the beneficiaries shows what a wrong-headed idea it was all along.
Democracy cannot be made without some raw resources, without which it cannot exist. One of those is accurate information had by a sufficient number of people to keep them from being duped by their enemies. The People have a limited number of hours to obtain that information and they are entirely dependent on other peoples' reports of reality to get it. That is a resource as limited as the bandwidth that is considered a public property assigned for use. Any abuse of the limited hours available for people to devote to public affairs by broadcasting lies - including the lies told by the cabloids - is damaging to self-government, it destroys the ability of The People to govern us in order to produce an effectively beneficial result.
The First Amendment to the Constitution is there to enable that self-government, it isn't there to cripple and destroy it, yet that is the clear experience of thirty years of electronic media being allowed to serve itself instead of the public. Pretending that print is going to have the effect it did in the past, ignoring that electronic media has entirely and permanently changed the facts under which the First Amendment exists from now on, serves the enemies of democracy, it serves the enemies of The People and our common good. You might want to consider that as the Republicans on the Supreme Court use it to destroy democracy this term. You might want to consider that as you hear NPR, or as I think of it, the FOX farm team, distort the shut down and Affordable Health Care. They're doing that out of philosophical principle too, the same one that is keeping poor kids from going to Head Start, damaging their ability to learn what they need to know to have a decent life. Ain't the intellectual class a wonder to behold.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Shut Down
The Republican Shut-Down of Government Starts Today.
Let's work to make it as much of a success for them at the polls as the last one.
Let's work to make it as much of a success for them at the polls as the last one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)