Another play redone by the wonderful Riverside Township Radio Players. And it's Norman Corwin, who was one of the best of the "golden age" radio writers.
If you want to compare, here's the original.
I will warn that it was from the early 40s, some of the satire might not age that well.
The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion. In his praxis, he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all. He is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events. The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument. Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime. Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be; a true believer. I choose the word "argument" thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion.
Scientific statements can never be certain; they can only be more or less credible. And credibility is a term in individual psychology, i. e. a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer. To say that some proposition is credible is, after all, to say that it is believed by an agent who is free not to believe it, that is by an observer who, after exercising judgment and (possibly) intuition, chooses to accept the proposition as worthy of his believing it. How then can science, which itself surely and ultimately rests on vast arrays of human value judgments, demonstrate that human value judgments are illusory? It cannot do so without forfeiting its own status as the single legitimate path to understanding man and his world.
But no merely logical argument, no matter how cogent or eloquent can undo this reality; that science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom. When I say that science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison, I mean that the attribution of certainty to scientific knowledge by the common wisdom, an attribution now made so nearly universally that it has become a commonsense dogma, has virtually deligitimatized all other ways of understanding. People viewed the arts, especially literature, as sources of intellectual nourishment and understanding, but today the ares are perceived largely as entertainments. The ancient Greek and Oriental theaters, the Shakesperian stage, the stages peopled by the Ibsens and Chekhovs nearer to our day - these were schools. The curricula they taught were vehicles for understanding the societies they represented. Today, although an occasional Arthur Miller or Edward Albee survives and is permitted to teach on the New York or London stage, the people hunger only for what is represented to them to be scientifically validated knowledge. They seek to satiate themselves at such scientific cafeterias as Psychology Today, or on popularized versions of the works of Masters and Johnson, or on Scientology as revealed by L. Ron Hubbard. Belief in the rationality-logicality equation has corroded the prophetic power of language itself. We can count but we are rapidly forgetting how to say what is worth counting and why.
This passage was a good part of why I first decided to go through the then, for me at least, novel exercise of typing large passages of books out to comment on what they said. Then, in the period of the new-atheist fad of the now going on two decades past, even before I had concluded that the three mainstays of conventional atheist-materialist-scientism were deadly to my primary goal, the success of egalitarian democracy, hollowing out the foundations of it, I was already enormously annoyed by exactly this aspect of the common-received atheist faith and its popular expression in the semi-commercial "skepticism" movement. More generally I was beginning to really understand that, far from supporting equality and a democratic system based on justice, the common received culture of the college-credentialed was more likely to produce white-collar Republicans who were prone to fascism in protection of their accumulated wealth under a morality that was a legalistic expression of an even more vulgar materialism, modern Mammonism. And that that was as apt to be true of those on the secular left as it was the overt capitalist right and center - according to the conventional meaning of those terms. Snobbery among the college-credentialed on the left played no small part in that, as well, secular leftism being more a lifestyle choice than an expression of a well-founded morality that supports an effective and full struggle to establish equal justice which could not be found in its required and hegemonic ideological foundations, in any way.
While Joseph Weizenbaum may not have exactly expected my analysis of the crisis on the very different parts of the coalition that are what we call "the left" to come the way it does from his statement that "science has been converted into a slow-acting poison" due to that faith in its all enveloping potency and its sole legitimacy I think my analysis of it in regard to American politics, the politics in countries in which "the left" means everything from what remains of Marxism to a watered down secularist materialist modified 18th century style European laissez-faire liberalism under a degraded form of republicanism is correct.
The extent to which "the left" has given up the faith that equality, that justice, that fairness are true BECAUSE THAT IS HOW GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE, that the universe itself tends in that direction and that people have a moral obligation with consequences to bend their actions in that direction as well, is the extent to which "the left" will not only never succeed but will, as well, peter out into the kind of impotence that has characterized the left in the period after its high point in America, the weeks and months and all too brief years when the agitation led by The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and others, most of whom were people of faith, led to lawmaking to pursue equal justice, economic justice in the mid-1960s. The progress that was made after that was an after-glow and as that faded it became largely a matter of a few agenda items considered "leftist" or "liberal" largely out of a coincidental intersection where laissez-faire for the elites met up with a more general egalitarian program of justice. I think that is what accounts for the fact that even as equal rights for Black People and other People of Color has been successfully attacked, especially in voting rights by the Republican-fascist right, much of the agenda for gay men and lesbians has succeeded. The equal justice on the basis of things such as employment, marriage equality allowed for gay men and lesbians, even supported by one of the most potent enemies of the rights of Black People, of other People of Color, the enemy of the right to cast a vote and have it counted, Chief "Justice" John Roberts is certainly due to him wanting those things for "people like him" not because he has any devotion to the general equality of all people and universal justice. He is, in fact, an interesting study in the intersections of those two generally opposing things, 18th century "liberalism" and the more general, egalitarian traditional American meaning of that word as so well and prophetically addressed by The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. throwing in Republican-fascist intent to dominate absolutely and anti-democratically into that mix.
One of the themes I have developed was the enormous price that the American left has paid due to its championing the rights of and even some of the claims of those devotees to the ultimate expansion of the materialistic scientism and atheism of the past, the Marxists. Marxism is an ultimate expression of that received faith which I have come to see is one of the most deadly poisons of a real left, one motivated by the pursuit of equality, equal justice in its real meaning - in which economic justice is the center - and one which, using the language of equality, of fairness, a fairness which has never existed during any of the Marxist regimes supported by the Marxist left, has duped even traditional American style liberals into being their patsies to the ever enduring damage to the real left. It is no accident that anti-commie talk has reemerged now, even today when the most Marxist of countries, China, has an economy that Marx might recognize as his nightmare capitalism on steroids and the North Korean slave state contracts slave labor out to the Putin regime, which has given up the pretense of Marxism altogether, keeping the gangster-boss political and law structure which Lenin and Stalin cemented into place as "Communism" as soon as they took power. If Trotsky had won his power struggle with Stalin, he'd have done the same probably with at least as much violence as Stalin did. And all that time the American "left" supported that or at least discouraged the recognition of the Marxist left here for being the stooges and admirers of gangster strong-men that they were.
I think there is no more of a quintessential example of that than the lore of the Hollywood 10 who were, to a person, either present day or past supporters of Stalin, well-paid by the movie industry to write and, um, "create" even as their hero kept a jack-boot on the arts, literature, murdering writers and poets and people in the theater and movie industry in ways well known in the United States. Some of the figures in and around that, the people whose far more limited persecution we were to lament and rage over were open signatories in support of Stalin's show trials and summary executions, some of whom never allowed those to bother them at all as they lived in a continuing affluence afforded them as even under-cover scribblers for the American movie industry. What they never were was a real danger to American democracy in line with their intentions, there was no way they were going to sucker most Americans into voting for Marxism through the entertainment industry. Their real damage to democracy came from their associating themselves with the real left, the Democratic Party and so to its discrediting which the Republican-fascists are reviving even as they are the ones taking their instructions from and supporting the intentions of a former Communist gangster dictator in Russia. The party that put his puppet into power and which keeps him as the Hollywood-TV invented leader of their party.
If you don't think that is relevant to what Joseph Weizenbaum discusses in this introduction to his book Computer Power and Human reason, I will remind you he began with this:
In
1935 Michael Polanyi, then holder of the Chair of Physical Chemistry
at Victoria University of Manchester, England, was suddenly shocked
into a confrontation with philosophical questions that have ever since
dominated his life. The shock was administered by Nicolai Bukharin,
one of the leading theoreticians of the Russian Communist party, who
told Polanyi that "under socialism the conception of science pursued for
its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would
spontaneously turn to the problems of the current Five Year Plan."
Polanyi sensed then that "the scientific outlook appeared to have
produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was
no place for science itself." And further that "this conception denied
altogether any intrinsic power of thought and thus denied any grounds
for claiming freedom of thought."
Marxism was not the only strain of that thinking, it was and is widely held under any interpretation of the world under a materialistic, scientistic and almost all atheistic framings of reality. It was as true for Nazism as it was Stalinism, it is as true for eliminative positivisim and evolutionary psychology even those parts of it which claim to use science to support its degrading of minds to being those of "lumbering robots" that exist for the benefit of DNA, their status as insignificant expressions of the movements and combinations of molecules controlled by nothing but the "laws of science" either unaware of or uninterested in the fact that those laws exist in no place except the minds they are degrading in the interest of their ideology. That actually does comprise a good part of the metaphysics as taught by modern universities, it is the faith taught by them and supported by the culture of the college-credentialed who probably couldn't do second year algebra, never mind understand any of the alleged scientific basis of its claims.
Meanwhile, the real American left must keep on even as the secular left whines about its ennui and annoyance because the real left knows that they have an enduring moral obligation to try and struggle to produce equality in results, in real lives, in real life and not in impotent theory. The real American left is a lot harder than the secular left or the even more degraded form of that, the play-left. It is no wonder that the Democrats in nominal control of the American government have a hard time ruling even with the support of a majority of Americans for their intentions. So much is stacked against them. I have looked and I have seen the secular left is already doing what they do, slamming their inability to deliver promptly what they want to do. They do that even as the person honored by the "Center For Inquiry" for her contribution to bringing atheism into politics, Krysten Sinema is one of the roadblocks to doing that. At least people are calling her a "conservative Democrat" as she does it. Before she became a Senator a lot of people were calling her a liberal because of her sexual orientation. Which may tie up another of the threads in this post.
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I am tempted to go over more of Joseph Weizenbaum's book, skipping the chapter in which he creates a game to try to explain how a computer works. If you want to read his book, which I would encourage because there is a lot more than just this to it, I would encourage you to read the chapter which opposes the practice of instrumental reasoning. Though all of it is very important to understanding why this is a danger to the struggle for equality, equal justice, economic justice, and democracy. It is probably as important to understanding how "scientific materialism" as politically expressed in Marxism is as fundamentally opposed to even the weak, half-measure towards achieving that equality, electoral democracy as other, more overtly anti-egalitarian ideologies claiming to, as well be expressions of "applied science" as laissez-faire capitalism and Nazism are. As are, in a strictly American context, the various Republican-fascist ideologies that enshrine the Constitution, giving it a similar status as "science" takes in other ideologies. The Constitution, written largely by those who were proponents of 18th century scientistic hegemony, the "enlightenment" carries in it not a slight amount of that poison, though its motives were purely those of slave-holders and bankers and mercantile economic interests. They found nothing in their materialism or scientism to counter their self-interests.
The brief expression of something higher at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, suppressed by their "enlightened self-interest" away from the declaration of God endowing all people with inalienable rights. Jefferson as willing as Madison or any of the others to turn his back on that as it profited him. I think it was, for him, a logical problem of explaining the rights of white men and their source which can only come from The Creator - he could not account for them with science or materialistic philosophy - while never intending to extend those to all. There is no way the documents and governmental structures set up by such people would not include opportunities for those to legally prevent equal justice as has, in fact, comprised so much of the history of the Constitution, the Supreme Court and, as is most often seen, the anti-democratically constituted Senate. I am convinced more and more, the more I look into these things that either you believe that God created all people as equal and in God's image or you are looking out for #1.
BEFORE GIVING YOU MORE of Joesph Weizenbaum's introduction to Computer Power and Human Reason I should point out for people who may be young enough to not have heard of him that in the early 1970s, B. F. Skinner, a Harvard Behaviorist Psychologist who promoted his dystopian scientistic-materialist vision through writing novels that, for some reason, were promoted and became briefly fashionable even as his school of psychology was falling into discredit and out of fashion. There was a commune set up to put his theory in place, I don't know much about it other than that they made and sold hammocks.
Not that what replaced it was more congenial to the basis of democracy (equality, justice, morality), the neo-eugenics generating Sociobiological - Evolutionary Psychological ideas of, first, E. O. Wilson and, then its popularized off-shoot by none other than the briefly celebrated new-atheist figure, Richard Dawkins.
Skinner did, indeed, assert that human values and freedom were illusory as does, inevitably all materialism, all scientism and, I would assert, all of atheism that clings to materialism and scientisim, which is just about all of it. Even the opponents of Behaviorism and Evo-Psy who are materialists will, eventually, unless they simply choose to ignore those issues, either advocate scientistic nihilism of that sort or will support its precursors. Weizenbaum, if I am recalling correctly, was an atheist but he was someone whose view of science prevented him from falling into scientism and the kind of materialism that other atheists, such as some in the coalition opposed to Sociobiology on the basis of its neo-eugenics character, in fact advocated. Of that group the only one I'm aware of still living is Richard Lewontin who I think it is fair to say avoids the implications of his materialism by choosing to not deal with it. Much as I admire some of these people, I don't think, in the end, that materialism is true and am certain that scientism isn't and like all untruths, they will inevitably lead to catastrophic ends.
It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinner argues. If they are, then it is presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do. But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certain knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves.
I will break in here to remind readers of the recent series I did on the Chapter "The Concept of Structure" from A. S. Eddington's book, The Philosophy of Physical Science in which he said something very similar on the basis of the foundation of modern physics. I should probably go back and index those and post an index for people who want to go back to see that what Weizenbaum is saying here is similar if not identical to what Eddington said almost forty years earlier.
When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations. No such sets of correspondences can ever be proved to be correct. At best, they can be falsified, in the sense that formal manipulations of a system's symbols may lead to symbolic configurations which, when read in the light of the set of correspondences in question, yield interpretations contrary to empircally observed phenomena. Hence all empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored, not on bedrock as is commonly supposed, but on the shifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture, and intuition. It is not even true, again contrary to common belief, that a single purported counter-instance that, if accepted as genuine would certainly falsify a specific scientific theory, generally leads to the immediate abandonment of that theory. Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say, observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is, by faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict. In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.
If there is one thing this makes one think of in 2021, it is the invention of "dark matter" and "dark energy" to be the undefined, unobserved, unexperienced, unknown majority of the stuff of the universe because certain equations of the current models of modern physics cannot otherwise be made to include the actual observations of the speed of the expansion of the universe. Just what those two entities are, what their properties are, what they do - other than make the equations come to what is perhaps a temporary balance - is entirely unknown. I would like better to understand how the barren fashion of string theory and M-theory fit into Weizenbaum's description of the game of science but that might require there to be some, actual, predictions or observations that support those theories on which a huge number of theoretical physicists have made their names and supported their often quite lofty careers in science, though the "things" they deal with may not exist anywhere except in their own collective minds and culture, they may lead to the decadence of science that Peter Woit warns they very well may be an expression of.
Another thing this section reminds me of is the fact that the mathematical basis of modern science as an expression of probabilities began with Christian Huygen's mathematical analysis of the probabilities in games of chance, gambling. Which isn't to call into question the moral nature of mathematical probability, it's to point out that, considering that, the description of the basis of all of science being probabilities and not the popular notion of a rock-solid, absolute foundation of absolutely reliable knowledge, that should not be surprising on its history. Science, like philosophy, like religion, like literature that deals with human experience, history, is a product of its historical and cultural development. It is one of the pretenses of the line of historical and cultural development in materialism and scientism and atheism that the actual character of science is not what it is. Richard Lewontin, in a passage I've given before, admitted that that is based, not on a realistic view of what science is, what it can and cannot do, what it can and cannot be, but is based on the preferences of those engaged in it.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
You may notice that even here Lewontin, in his explanation of the consequences of his and his colleagues preferences include them creating "an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, NO MATTER HOW COUNTER-INTUITIVE, NO MATTER HOW MYSTIFYING TO THE UNINITIATED." Only he, in the same review of one of Carl Sagan's sillier books he admits that the "uninitiated" inevitably includes all scientists because, unlike perhaps in the time of Huygens, the field of science has expanded to the point where people working within even one of its subspecialties MUST take what their colleagues claim about their even more finely defined specialty on faith because the prerequisite knowledge to those claims is already outside of their expertise.
First, no one can know and understand everything. Even individual scientists are ignorant about most of the body of scientific knowledge, and it is not simply that biologists do not understand quantum mechanics. If I were to ask my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to explain the evolutionary importance of RNA editing in trypanosomes, they would be just as mystified by the question as the typical well-educated reader of this review.
One position I mean to argue appears deceptively obvious: it is simply that there are important differences between men and machines as thinkers. I would argue that, however intelligent machines may be made to be, there are some acts that ought to be attempted only by humans. One socially significant question I thus intend to raise is over the proper place of computers in the social order. But, as we shall see, the issue transcends computers in that it must ultimately deal with logicality itself - quite apart from whether logicality is encoded in computer programs or not.
The lay reader may be forgiven for being more than slightly incredulous that anyone should maintain that human thought is entirely computable. But this very incredulity may itself be a sign of how marvelously subtly and seductively modern science has come to influence man's imaginative construction of reality.
Surely, much of what we today regard as good and useful, as well as much of what we call knowledge and wisdom, we owe to science. But science may also be seen as an addictive drug. Not only has our unbounded feeding on science caused us to become dependent on it, but, as happens with may other drugs taken in increasing dosages, science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison. Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for the establishment of an age of rationality, but with his vision of rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality. Thus have we very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived from a higher standpoint. Even murderous wars have come to be perceived as mere problems to be solved by hordes of professional problem-solvers. As Hannah Arendt said about recent makers and executors of policy in the Pentagon:
"They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being "rational" . . . They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them; that is, they were eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though those were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be . . . [They] did not judge; they calculated . . . an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotiv of decision making."
And so too have nearly all political confrontations, such as those between races and those between the governed and their governors, come to be perceived as mere failures of communication. Such rips in the social fabric can then be systematically repaired by the expert application of the latest information-handling techniques - at least so it is believed. And so the rationality-is-logicality equation, which the very success of science has drugged us into adopting as virtually an axiom, has led us to deny the very existence of human conflict, hence the very possibility of the collision of genuinely incommensurable human interests and of disparate human values, hence the existence of human values themselves.
I am greatly tempted to comment on this because I think in it Joseph Weizenbaum lays out some of the most intrinsically dangerous consequences of the adoption of that invention of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, the modern scientistic-materialistic conception of reality. I am deeply tempted to comment at length on that except that the philosopher he quoted, Hannah Arendt, did a far better job in that essay, Lying in Politics which he takes those too brief excerpts from.
The first explanation that comes to mind to answer the question “How could they?” is likely to point to the interconnectedness of deception and self-deception. In the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public. The great advantage of publicly established and accepted propositions over whatever an individual may secretly know or believe to be the truth is neatly illustrated by a medieval anecdote, according to which as entry, on duty to watch and warn the townspeople of the approach of the enemy, jokingly sounded a false alarm, and was the last to rush to the walls to defend the town against his imagined enemies. From this, one may conclude that the moresuccessful a liar is, the more people he has convinced, the more likely it is that he will end by believing his own lies.
In the Pentagon Papers, we deal with people who did their utmost to win the minds of the people, that is, to manipulate but since they labored in a free country where all kinds of information were available, they never really succeeded. Because of their relatively high station and their position in government, they were better shielded—in spite of their privileged knowledge of “top secrets”—against this public information, which also more or less told the factual truth, than those whom they tried to convince and of whom they were likely to think in terms of mere audiences, “silent majorities,”who were supposed to watch the scenarists’ productions. The fact that the Pentagon Papers revealed hardly any spectacular news testifies to the liars’ failure to create the convinced audience which they then could join themselves.
Still, the presence of what Ellsberg has called the process of “internal self-deception” is beyond doubt, but it is as though the normal process of self-deceiving were reversed; it was not as though deception ended with self-deception. The deceivers started with self-deception. Probably because of their high station and their astounding self-assurance, they were so convinced of overwhelming success, not on the battlefield but on the grounds of public relations, and so certain of thesoundness of their psychological premises about the unlimited possibilities in manipulating people, that they anticipatedgeneral belief and victory in the battle for people’s minds. And since they lived anyhow in a defactualized world, they did not find it difficult to pay no more attention to the fact that their audience refused to be convinced than to other facts.
The internal world of government, with its bureaucracy on one hand, its social life on the other, made self-deception relatively easy. It seems that no ivory tower of the scholars has ever better prepared the mind for wholly ignoring the facts of life than the various think tanks did for the problem-solvers and the reputation of the White House for the President’s advisers. It was in this atmosphere, where defeat was less feared than admitting defeat, that the misleading statements about the disasters of the Têt offensive and the Cambodian invasion were concocted. But what is even more important is that the truth about such decisive matters could be successfully covered up only in these internal circles by worries about how to avoid becoming “the first American President to lose a war” and by the always present preoccupations with the next election.
So far as problem solving, in contrast to public relations managing, is concerned, self-deception, even “internal self-deception,”is no satisfactory answer to the question “How could they?” Self-deception still pre-supposes a distinction between truth and falsehood, between fact and fantasy, which disappears in an entirely defactualized mind. In the realm of politics, where secrecy and deliberate deception have always played a significant role, self-deception is the danger par excellence; the self-deceived deceiver loses all contact, not only with his audience but with the real world which will catchup with him, as he can remove only his mind from it and not his body.
The problem-solvers who knew all the facts presented regularly to them in the reports of the intelligence community had only to rely on their techniques, that is, on the various ways of translating qualities and contents into quantities and numbers with which to calculate outcomes, which then, unaccountably, never came true, in order to eliminate, day in and day out, what they knew to be real. The reason why this could work for so many years is precisely that “the goals pursued by the United States government were almost exclusively psychological,”that is, matters of the mind.
Reading the memos, the options, the scenarios, the way percentages are ascribed to the potential risks and returns—“too many risks with too little return”—of contemplated actions, one sometimes has the impression that a computer ratherthan “decision makers” had been let loose in Southeast Asia. The problem-solvers did not judge, they calculated; their self-confidence did not even need self-deception to be sustained in the midst of so many misjudgments, for it relied on the evidence of mathematical, purely rational truth. Except, of course, that this “truth” was entirely irrelevant for the“problem” at hand. If, for instance, it can be calculated that the outcome of a certain action is “less likely to be a general war than more likely,” it does not follow that we can choose it even if the proportion were eighty to twenty, because of the enormity and incalculable quality of the risk; and the same is true when the odds of reform in the Saigon government versus the “chance that we would wind up like the French in 1954” are 70 percent to 30 percent.
That is a nice outlook for a gambler, not for a statesman, and even the gambler would be better advised to take into account what gain or loss would actually mean for him in daily life. Loss may mean utter ruin and gain no more than some welcome but nonessential improvement of his financial affairs. Only if nothing real is at stake for the gambler—a bit more or less money is not likely to make any difference in his standard of life—can he safely rely on the percentage game. The trouble with our conduct of the war in South Vietnam was that no such control, given by reality itself, ever existed in the minds of either the decision makers or the problem-solvers.
Please note, I have installed a search window on the side panel because the one that used to appear on a bar at the top of the page seems to keep disappearing on my computer. You can use it to do a word search for this blog. Not that I expect it will lead those who troll me to fact check, they don't care about that.
It was part of the amusement of Trump's blog flopping to hear all kinds of people like the rap quoting buttoned-down Ari Melber identify blogs as out of fashion in a world where Twitter took over that function. Others will tell you that Twitter is old, too.
I tried being in fashion briefly in my sophomore year of high school, found it was expensive and over-rated and chose to not care about it after that. I think Trump's blog flopping as his Twittering succeeded is because Twitter is an intrinsically superficial format, I've seldom seen anything worthwhile on it that didn't require the equivalent of an article or blog post to back it up. I think it's telling that Trump on Twitter was dangerous, Trump the blogger is an impotent flop. It's the difference between needing to provide substance or at least being able to and being able to get by with triggering emotions without content. I never learned much of anything reliable from watching a TV commercial, either.
YOU ARE THE GOD who inhabits the scroll,
We do not know how, we do not doubt it,
We trust enough to say "Glory to you, Lord Christ"
"Praise to you Lord Christ, and "The word of the Lord, Thanks Be to God,"
We say it about the weird, objectionable parts of the scroll
Partly by habit, partly because we do not listen very much
Partly because we hunger and want a word addressed to us.
So we thank you for this radio-active scroll that has been set among us,
For all our criticism and all our orthodoxy it is not tamed or domesticated or made safe
May it shatter and offend and heal and transform.
For a minute tonight position us in front of the scroll
Let it vex us and stir us and make us new.
We pray in the name of Jesus the sure child of the scroll. Amen.
It seems like a fitting place to start, the prayer that Walter Brueggemann said at the start of his first lesson about Jeremiah Walking Into And Out Of The Abyss, which begins with the historical context of the book in its setting in Israel and the surrounding lands and noting the similarity between the sacking of Jerusalem, the killing of the sons of the King, the exile of a limited number of the elite inhabitants of Israel in Babylon and the trauma in the United States caused by 9-11 as a symbolic event in American history. Walter Brueggemann notes that the actual text of the Old Testament which we have is a product that is intimately tied up with those events, a large number of the books are a product of the prophetic criticism of the political, religious and moral character of Israel to which it directly attributes the experience of disaster, foreign domination and destruction, exile, all of which is seen as a product of injustice and economic inequality within the society. For anyone who figures religion has no business being involved in civics and things like economic justice, they should read the Bible because the entire basis of the monotheistic religions and, in fact, most all religion is intimately tied to those things. On the side of equality and justice or, in bad religion, on the side of the elites. The Catholic right, financed by billionaires and millionaires, replacing here the gangsters who corrupted the Church since late classical kings and other thugs started making it the official religion of their gangster regimes is intimately tied up in the support of economic, social and legal injustice, the role that the polls indicate that most of "white evangelicalism" plays among that segment of Protestants. Right wing Judaism plays the same role today, despite their claims to be as devoted to this literature as the Christian right claims to be devoted to the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament. To anyone who reads the text, no, they are not.
The prayer that acknowledges the extremely disturbing and confusing and offending text of the Scriptures and how that potential is as well the source of its value for upsetting and renewing us if we think about it seriously and deeply and not taking any safe and devaluing view of it.
Walter Brueggemann starts out by considering the line of kings leading to the Exile, beginning with King Josiah's (626-609), death followed by the 3 month reign of his son and four other kings that followed in quick succession. Which can be listed as:
Josiah (627- 609) who Jeremiah considered the last good and just king, indeed the best of the lot of them.
Jehoahaz (609)
Jehoiakim (609 - 598)
Jeconiah (December 598-March 597)
Zedekiah (597-586), deposed in the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar.
In the short section of the video devoted to going over the historical background to Jeremiah (which ends about 17:45 on the video), Brueggemann notes the fall of the Assyrian empire to the Babylonians in 609 as an important event that isn't mentioned directly in the text. He recommends to the class that they read from 2 Kings 23-25 for a description of the politics of the thing and Jeremiah during the last five kings of Jerusalem.
If you don't understand what the book is about, you won't understand any of it anymore than you'll get the current American disaster up to and including the crisis in which the truth doesn't matter for a disastrous percentage of the population without understanding the politics and the rising levels of inequality and injustice. I would note one big difference between then and now is the factor of electronic dissemination of propaganda (it's interesting how what are lies are called "information" by our educated classes) and how scientistic secularism is certainly a contending force here which it was not for an understanding of Jeremiah. For those of my age cohort trying to understand how things went so bad, a lot of what was taken as good under the hegemony of popular, secular culture is as much a contributing factor in that as the old-line racism, economic injustice and other assorted evils attributed to the American right. If you have to justifying religion involving itself in "politics" and "economics" against the right, among the secular left there is a faction that demands an enhanced if not totalitarian "separation of church and state." To them I demand that they produce an a-religious movement for economic justice and equality (they are in fact the same things) as potent as that achieved by the work of Martin Luther King jr or the other religious reformers who tend to be minimized if not erased by lefty historians but whose work and influence and leadership of those whose motivations directly derive from their religious belief have the power to move politics and, with less success, the secular priesthood of the courts. That is what can shatter, heal and transform us, secularist atheism produces nothing but despair and impotent violence. That's what I've had to conclude.
-----------------------------
Someone who followed my very first period of writing online asked me how I got from the "separation of church and state" to my present skepticism of that, it was a product of an online discussion I participated in (NOT at Eschaton) surrounding that movie they made where Anthony Hopkins played a Hollywood conception of the post-presidential John Quincy Adams. The host of another blog complained that people had attributed the abolitionist movement to religious motivation. I pointed out that in at least one case I knew of, an abolitionist abandonned that in favor of slavery due to their reading of the Bible. Which is historically true in that one case. However, I didn't stop there, I read more about the history of the abolitionist movement and other movements that had political success in changing things toward equality and the claims to the justice of that made by those who had brought about that change and it led to me abandonning my "separation of church and state" absolutism and to believe that the American left got suckered out of not only one of but the decisive force for equality, not only in religion but, in the case of American society, the only one that will work to do it. Along the way I had to admit that while religion can and the Bible does support the existence of the foundations of equality, materialism, scientism and atheism not only don't support that, in most cases they actively oppose the reality of the moral obligation to do that. I did most of, though not all of, that research online. So, the internet can have an educational effect, if you're willing to put in the work and be changed by it.
REMEMBER THIS THE NEXT TIME you hear someone wonder why and how democracy is in decline in the age of the internet, even as "freedom" is the fetish of fascists as well as those who support democracy, in some fashion. I'd guess that will be sometime before noon, today.
Certain individuals of quite differing minds, temperaments, interests, and training have - however much they differ among themselves and even disagree on many vital questions - over the years expressed grave concern about the conditions created by he unfettered march of science and technology; among them are Mumford, Arendt, Ellul, Roszak, Comfort, and Boulding. The computer began to be mentioned in such discussions only recently. Now there are signs that a full-scale debate about the computer is developing. The contestants on one side are those who, briefly stated, believe computers can, should, and will do everything, and on the other side those who, like myself, believe there are limits to what computers ought to be put to do. It may appear at first glace that this is an in-house debate of little consequence except to a small group of computer technicians. But at bottom, no matter how it may be disguised by technological jargon, the question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable. That question has, in one for or another, engaged thinkers in all ages. Man has always striven for principles that could organize and give sense and meaning to his existence. But before modern science fathered the technologies that reified and concretized its otherwise abstract systems, the systems of thought that defined man's place in the universe were fundamentally juridical. They served to define man's obligations to his fellow men and to nature.
I will break into this paragraph to point out that this is one of the most important and dangerously ignored distinctions between mathematical and scientific framing of thought which by agreement and, so, inevitably leave out all considerations of morality from their formal discourse. The consequence of that, when the claim is that science produces the only valid means of ascertaining "the truth" as is, actually the faith of scientism and most of the philosophically degraded forms of atheism, is that there is more than a mere tendency to downplay or ignore questions of morality to denying those questions are real or are, at best, the product of social consensus among members of a society. And even members within a society who mean to profit themselves under this degraded understanding of moral obligations and, as is always legally and politically important, a belief that there will be an ultimate price to be paid for immorality will have no qualms about getting away with as much as they can get away with. If you think that framing is not a problem, consider how the modern legal apparatus, under "enlightenment" scientistic thinking, in which all questions must resolve themselves in a never attainable logically compact argument has allowed Trump to get away with everything all of his life. Judges, lawyers, members of juries, certainly members of appeals and Supreme Courts are always finding outs for themselves and those they want to let off through the far from logically tight use of that standard which does not work for large portions, perhaps most of human life and human experience of the world. There are lapses in that system of a kind not that much different from the injustices that religious authority is often guilty of, only one based merely on logical formalism has no means of identifying why that is wrong, which is why judicial wrongdoing is so often explained away as a matter of judicial formalism and convenience.
The Judaic tradition, for example, rests on the idea of a contractual relationship between God and man. This relationship must and does leave room for both God and man, for a contract is an agreement willingly entered into by parties who are free not to agree. Man's autonomy and his corresponding responsibility is a central issue of all religious systems.
I will break in again to note that it is this aspect of covenant making, breaking, keeping and restoring which Walter Brueggemann identifies as one of, if not the central concern of the Jewish Scriptural tradition, Old and New Testaments inclusive. Something which was news to me when I first heard his explanation of that in his book The Bible Makes Sense but which makes so much of the otherwise confusing literature in that collection understandable.
The spiritual cosmologies engendered by modern science, on the other hand, are infected with the germ of logical necessity. They, except in the hands of the wisest scientists and philosophers, no longer content themselves with explanations of appearances, but claim to say how things actually are and must necessarily be. In short, they convert truth to provability.
And as I've pointed out above, that claimed required standard of provability is as useful to those who want to get away with as much as they can, both outside the civil law and inside it, with all manner of outs and permissions to ignore truths that are clear but which cannot be stated in terms of logical formalism. Which Weizenbaum also understood.
As one consequence of this drive of modern science, the question, "What aspects of life are formalizable?" has been transformed from the moral question, "How and in what form may man's obligations and responsibilities be known?" to the question, "Of what technological genus is man a species? Even some philosophers whose every instinct rebels against the idea that man is entirely comprehensible as a machine have succumbed to the spirit of the times. Hubert Dreyfus, for example, trains the heavy guns of phenomenology on the computer model of man. But he limits his argument to the technical question of what computers can and cannot do. I would argue that if computers could imitate man in every respect - what in fact they cannot - even then it would be appropriate, nay,urgent, to examine the computer in the light of man's perennial need to find his place in the world. The outcomes of practical matters that are of vital importance to everyone hinge on how and in what terms the discussion is carried out.
As one of the comments on this series pointed out in regard to armed drones being given the "ability to decide for themselves" whether to bomb a wedding party in the desert or tall people or others is a problem, here and now. Even people who are absolved from exercising the highest level of care to not make mistakes will make such decisions, relying on the formalized protocols for making such decisions, especially remotely, which is also how so many police who assassinate Black People and other do so with the confidence that their Union and lawyers can use such formality in the legal system to get away with it. Allowing machines which will not be accountable in any way that matters to them to make such decisions is not going to make things better, though I can imagine them being adopted on the formality of cost saving and other such "efficiency."
One position I mean to argue appears deceptively obvious; it is simply that there are important differences between men and machines as thinkers. I would argue that, however intelligent machines may be made to be, there are some acts of thought that ought to be attempted only by humans. One socially significant question I thus intend to raise is over the proper place of computers in the social order. But, as we shall see, the issue transcends computers in that it must ultimately deal with logicality itself- quite apart from whether logicality is encoded in computer programs or not.
We live in a world so degraded by materialism, by scientism, by faith in computing, by atheism, I'd argue, that we can have rich tech savants - so many of whom prove to be idiots - who are taken seriously when they propose things such as human immortality in the form of computerizing "our brains" of "downloading" all of our experience, all of our personality, all of our thoughts into a physically durable form and, so, we can be said, according to their definition of all of those in terms of computable terms and equations, to be immortal. I would assume such thinking would require multiple copies of our non-souls be kept around as J. K. Rowling had Voldermort producing multiple horcruxes to ensure his immortality. Though I do have to wonder how they'll get by the little issue of all of the protons in the universe decaying, that is unless the present day models that produced that theory are overtaken and overturned by future models of the universe.
In the meantime, all of this that Joseph Weizenbaum warned about almost a half a century ago has only become more and more dangerous. It is asked how the modern democratic order has been so endangered in the age of the computer and the internet while ignoring that the very thing that democracy depends on, a view of human beings as transcendent thinking entities, able to achieve freedom of thought and to practice equality which is dependent on something even more of an accomplishment, when it is accomplished, the morality of good will, of doing justice, of making love real in interactions of people with other people and other living beings. None of that is expressible in logical formalism, none of it can be computed, none of it can enter into scientific thought so any system based in an absolutist view of science or materialistic monism can not possibly support the foundations on which egalitarian democracy, or even the lesser form of mere electoral democracy for a single second.
WHILE I'M SURE the people who live in Teaneck NJ find it a nice place to live in, especially now that one of its most dishonest and malignant idiots lives in Queens, I have about as much interest in its cultural life as I do any town in any state that that idiot would disdain as beneath any regard at all and which I have no intention of visiting. As I said, I never heard of a "Teaneck Symphony" which would seem to have left no imprint on the first several pages of the quick google search I did when someone asked me if I'd ever heard of it. I said I never had and wondered if the idiot might have mistaken it for the orchestra that is located in that town, the Bergen Orchestra which I hope is still an ongoing thing as they seem to have been doing a fairly good job as many small-town orchestras strive to do, including not acting as a musical museum, concentrating on the few dozen chestnuts from the past but participating in the ongoing creation of new pieces of music in the present. I'm very pro-orchestra, as long as they're participating in ongoing creation instead of being a Lenin's Tomb pumping embalming fluid into those chestnuts that have been done to death.
What more can I be expected to do on the subject? If the idiot is complaining, let him gather the URLs and send them to me. I might look it up and I may put a footnote on this later, if, as I suspect he won't, he doesn't. I'm tired of doing the work any responsible educated college-grad would know rightly belonged to them as the person making a claim. That one doesn't is a product of the for-profit habit of colleges and even some universities credentialing idiots who they neglected to require become educated in the time they were paying customers. That is something that is rampant in the post-WWII model of colleges and universities which had to, as well, deal with the fact that home TV and other entertainment have produced a generation of functional illiterates and low-level literates.
I've pointed out that the rump members of the Eschaton online community are buffalo butts who never bother to read things to find out if they say what the other buffalo butts there claim they said, even ones they've had the opportunity to discover to be habitual liars over the more than a decade that blog has been hosting lies and the liars who lie them. Damned if I'm going to waste any more of my time presenting evidence that they refuse to look at. They don't care about the truth, they care about propping up their prexisting prejudices that they move around like a kiddie moves building blocks or color forms. They're spoiled children, really. Duncan's hardly even going through the motions and they could not care less. Smart people don't spend their time in such a milieu.
Update: I once knew a young woman who was tragically mentally ill. One of the most destructive features of her mental illness, since she was innocent, almost always self-destructive, was that if a small part of a lie was true, she believed the entire thing was made true by that. The eejits of Eschaton are so stupid and, or, so uncaring about the truth that in all these years of being witness to a more malignant form of that in Simps, they haven't cottoned on to the fact that he is a pathological liar, one of his go-to methods of lying is by leaving out part of what is said, pretending that his editing is what was said. I never said any such thing and if I thought it would make the slightest difference to those boobs I'd, yet again, show you a link to where you could read what I did say. As I said, I'm tired of doing that and since the guys and gals over there never read anything much, it doesn't matter. No wonder secularism is so impotent in fighting against Trumpian Republican-fascism, they've got too much in common with it.
"Jeremiah Wright's sermon about goddamn America, what he was talking about was plucking-up and tearing down, and of course, that got on the air-waves and quoted out of context and all that happened but that's what a poet does. So the language that Jeremiah Wright used is very offensive. But no more offensive than [the prophet] Jeremiah"
IN RECOMMENDING THE podcast by some Lutheran preachers going over the weekly lectionary readings and the interview two of the did with the UCC-Episcopalian (I guess you can be those "plus" too) Water Brueggemann, I came across the four lecture-sermons Brueggemann gave on Jeremiah in 2013. I decided to post all four of them over a month or, maybe more, with a few other resources than the ones he recommends in his lecture. That is with the encouragement for you to do the same thing, find things to read and think about and write about. It's one of the most rewarding things I've done to read different interpretations of the prophetic books and the other Scriptures. Here is the first of his presentations in that series.
You can find innumerable old commentaries and some newer ones on all of the books of the Bible online, some of them are excellent, some, in my opinion, not worth much,some of them potentially dangerous, some downright dishonest. One that I don't always agree with, one which is certainly not a Brueggemann level, deep historical-scholarly reading of the text is the Christian Community Bible, which often gets condemned for being too much a product of Catholic liberation theology. But I think the intended audience of that translation and commentary might more closely match the original audience that Jeremiah was talking to, peasants oppressed by both rulers and the hierarchy that supported their oppressors. And their oppressors. My plan is to post occasional other commentary as this, hopefully, goes on.
BEFORE GOING ON with Joseph Weizenbaum's introduction to Computer Power And Human Reason, you should remember that when he wrote the book in 1975, computers were still huge machines that existed only at universities and colleges rich enough to have one (or access to one by line) industries and businesses or government institutions. Perhaps a few very rich people had one but the access to them was nothing like it became in the following two decades. I think anyone who does not think that the problems Weizenbaum outlined in this section has not magnified and intensified with the common use of computers they aren't living in the world as it really is. The very things he has noted were already present then, the ideas, the habits of thought, the language, the ideology of scientism (which he describes as being endemic at M.I.T. and among people with educational credentials and those trying to get them) has become commonplace and important both in its presence in political discourse and in its violation by those who pick and choose which science they'll believe (or be told to believe by the media) to the outrage of others who, I will note, also pick and choose what they'll believe.
These, then are the thoughts and questions which have refused to leave me since the deeper significances of the reactions to ELIZA I have described began to become clear to me. Yet I doubt that they could have impressed themselves on me as they did were it not that I was (and am still in a concentrate of technological society as a teacher in the temple of technology that is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that proudly boasts of being "polarized around science and technology." There I live and work with colleagues, many of whom trust only modern science to deliver reliable knowledge of the world. I confer with them on research proposals to be made to government agencies, especially to the Department of "Defense." Sometimes I become more than a little frightened as I contemplate what we lead ourselves to propose, as well as the nature of the arguments we construct to support our proposals. Then, too, I am constantly confronted by students, some of whom have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to know the world, and who seek only a deeper, more dogmatic indoctrination in that faith (although that word is no longer in their vocabulary). Other students suspect that not even the entire collection of machines and instruments at M.I.T. can significantly help give meaning to their lives. They sense the presence of a dilemma in an education polarized around science and technology, an education that implicitly claims to open a privileged access-path to fact, but that cannot tell them how to decide what to count as fact. Even while they recognize the genuine importance of learning their craft, they rebel at working on projects that appear to address themselves neither to answering interesting questions of fact nor to solving problems in theory.
Such confrontations with my own day-to-day social reality have gradually convinced me that my experiences with ELIZA was symptomatic of deeper problems. The time would come, I was sure, when I could no longer be able to participate in research proposal conferences, or honestly respond to my students' need for therapy (yes, that is the correct word), without first attempting to make sense of the picture my own experience with computers had so sharply drawn for me.
Of course, the introduction of computers into our already highly technological society has, as I will try to show, merely reinforced and amplified those antecedent pressures that have driven man to an ever more highly rationalistic view of his society and an ever more mechanistic image of himself. It is therefore important that I construct my discussion of the impact of the computer on man and his society so that it can be seen as a particular kind of encoding of a much larger impact, namely, that on man's role in the face of technologies and techniques he may not be able to understand and control. Conversations around that theme have been going on for a long time and they have intensified in the last few years.
I will repeat that the one issue that first led me to re-read and start commenting here on Joseph Weizenbaum's book were news reports about university based computer scientists working under contracts with the American and British military establishments to develop "artificial intelligence" that would be put into armed drones so that the drones could "decide" to bomb a target independent of human decision making, to rely on the computers to "decide" that it's OK to kill individuals or groups of people based on whatever the scientists working for the generals and colonels decided on as the criteria could reliably identify people it's OK to kill .
I have commented here and elsewhere about the similar work of computer scientists that instruct machines to classify images of people for good and bad traits, and how, without any intention of doing so, search engines will, for example, return images of entirely innocent People of Color in searches for "criminals" or any number of other negative, objective stereotypical categories. And that started to be noted far more than a quarter of a century after Weizenbaum wrote his book. I theorized last year that such things were inevitable because the people creating the systems and those using them (remember, the algorithms for search engines modify their operation under number of clicks by people) will have already imbibed racial and other stereotypes. Even without any intention to do so, they will become part of the program.
Machines don't have the ability to reflect on what "they are doing" and in consultation with morality, something which science and math cannot codify, resolve to try not to do it. Those aspects of the programming at Google, at Youtube, at Facebook that have been such a boon as fascists, neo-Nazis, Putin, the Mercers, etc. AND WHICH THEY INTENTIONALLY TAP FOR THE OWN ENDS, inevitably reflect and concentrate racism, sexism, ethnic and other stereotypes are there by the intentions of the companies and the geeks they hire to write code, those are the source of their wealth, they aren't going to voluntarily give those up no matter how damaging and evil the consequences of them are.
And those systems, the ones at Google and Facebook's and the ones developed to bomb people independent of human judgment, are not different in kind or capable of not choosing to follow stereotypes and to make themselves the tools of evil intent, by those who merely notice those feature of the systems are there and exploitable or those who intentionally engineer them into systems to similarly exploit those terrible aspects of modern technology as I am sure the Mercers, the Putin regime, other gangster regimes in control of government and those financed by billionaires and multimillionaires will.
The systems the Pentagon and British and other militaries are commissioning from places like M.I.T. and Cambridge and other science departments will probably include other malignant aspects that are yet unknown, probably unknown to the very scientists who write the programs and certainly unknown to the machines they are programming.
If anything the problems Joseph Weizenbaum saw then are far worse now because none of what he warned about was taken seriously. Not serious enough to do something about it. I have to think the amorality of science and scientism has more than a little to do with that and we cannot continue to live with that. We can certainly die from it.
Robert Reich
@RBReich
·
May 30
You know how you got your vaccine without paying a dime? You didn’t spend hours on the phone with your insurance company. You weren’t reduced to a profit margin.
That’s how all health care could be.
Don’t listen to those people. It’s rubbish. Write it off. Critics have given me too much bad advice in the past. I remember Kenneth Tynan demolishing The Blood Knot in London. Today Tynan is in his grave and The Blood Knot isn’t. I was once told that my play is too specifically written for a South African audience, and that I should write in a more universal sense ... for an English-speaking audience ... can you believe advice like that? Thank God I’ve read my Tolstoy and my William Faulkner to know that by virtue of their regionalism they became universal. I have never benefited from a critic’s advice ... they see themselves as performers at the expense of your work. If you want advice, go stand at the back of the theatre during a performance of your play and watch the audience. They’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t. If I was ever to be a critic ... just for a few months, then I would open every review with this line: “This is one man’s opinion, it is not the truth!” Athol Fugard
Jean-Baptiste Dupont, organist
SPIEGEL: You write in your memoirs: "My heart aches when I consider all the things I am supposed to give up."
Hans Kung: That's true. I'm not saying goodbye to life because I'm a
misanthropist or disdain this life, but because, for other reasons, it's
time to move on. I am firmly convinced that there is life after death,
not in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person
into God's infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the
dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor
deny. It's a question of reasonable trust. I have no mathematic and
scientific evidence of this, but I have good reasons to trust in the
message of the Bible, and I believe in being taken in by a merciful God.
SPIEGEL: Do you have a concept of heaven?
Kung: Most ways of speaking about heaven are pure images that cannot be
taken literally. We are far removed from the notions of heaven in the
period before Copernicus. In heaven, however, I hope to learn the
answers to the world's great mysteries, to questions such as: Why is
something something and not nothing? Where do the Big Bang and physical
constants come from? In other words, the question that neither
astrophysics nor philosophy has answers for. At any rate, I'm talking
about a state of eternal peace and eternal happiness.
SPIEGEL: Today, physics can explain the dark cosmos, with its billions
of stars, much better than it could in the past. Has this shaken your
faith?
Kung: When we consider how enormous and dark the universe is, it
certainly doesn't make things easier for faith. When he wrote his Ninth
Symphony, Beethoven could still hope that "above the canopy of stars
must dwell a loving father." We, however, must accept how little we
ultimately know. Ninety-five percent of the universe is unknown to us,
and we know nothing about the 27 percent of dark matter or the 68
percent of dark energy. Physics is getting closer and closer to the
origin, and yet it cannot explain the origin itself.
SPIEGEL: You want your funeral to end with the hymn "Now Thank We All Our God."
Kung: Because it expresses that my life has not perished but has been completed. It's something to be happy about, isn't it?
POST LITERACY would have had to be invented to name what online comment threads are made of. Eschaton isn't the stupidest example of that, it's just typical. Not caring if what gets said is true as long as it gratifies the prejudices of those who frequent that place - OCD Is Us! - is a big part of it.
Updates: At which of the two or three "Eschacons" was this taken?
Update 2: I never heard of a Teaneck NJ orchestra, I can't find any mention of one online that, as he claims went out of business in the 1960s. I think the idiot of Teaneck might be mistaking it for the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra which is an ongoing thing and appears to be not bad for a small town orchestra. Kind of on the same level as the Portland, Me. Symphony. I'm most impressed with small town orchestras that do first performances of commissioned works and, more impressive than that, later performances of new music. Stupy's idea of an orchestra is something that plays movie music and pops.
I'm not interested in responding to that particular lie, though if the status of the law were to change, I'd sue Duncan Black for repeatedly and knowingly carrying it as well as Stupy for telling it. Needless to say, none of the eejits of Escahton have ever bothered to come here to test the claim. They don't read much, which is why Duncan doesn't write anything anymore. His early success spoiled it for him, I never expected to become popular so I don't care if they don't read me. I suspect I might get more hits on average than Stupy's pop music blog where you can read the same things that were being said by pop music scribblers back in the 1960s. It's a very economical form, pop criticism, it repeats the same stuff not needing to come up with new material. Classical Kabuki Theater is more innovative, even those guys who do one role for their entire career have to work with more stuff.
ONE OF THE THINGS that I've found out through the internet is that contrary to the typical pseudo-lefty secularist prejudice, a lot of professional clergy are not only very intelligent, they are some of the deepest thinkers about current affairs. And as someone who is a sort of Catholic-plus, it has been a revelation and a pleasure to find out how deeply many protestant ministers and preachers can be when they discuss the world we live in out of their experience of reading and studying the ancient Jewish scriptures. I came across the Youtube channel Working Preacher which is described:
From the Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary, we are dedicated to the renewal of the church's proclamation. WorkingPreacher.org posts resources for preaching, and we will be adding videos here from scholars, students, and events to help further the craft of preaching.
I'm in the process of doing a massive transplanting job, always an occasion for listening to lectures and interviews and discussions. I was going to post a recent interview with Walter Brueggemann on his newest book about Preaching Jeremiah but I think the discussion by three preacher-scholars about the official lexicon for next Sunday, June 6 has one of the best explanations I've ever heard of why people, from the time of Samuel till today love to hand over control to gangsters, kings or dictators. If I didn't need to get this work done today I'd type out the text of what was said but I recommend listening to it and the entire discussion because it is excellent stuff and not infrequently quite amusing. I've found that far from being the stereotypical pietists, these people have a very realistic, very serious but also very humane understanding of what Brueggemann said he always goes back to, texts that were retained as Scriptures because in the centuries in which the Bible was being assembled, people found great value in what could be learned from the texts. I think that their discussion of the texts is a really valuable entry point into them and the vast repository of criticism and commentary on the texts. Far from being useless baggage from the past, this is enormously important, enormously informative recording of human experience considered at a very high level.
MY BROTHER TELLS ME that the old-fashioned, post-WWII musical sex comedienne (what she called herself) Rusty Warren died last week at the age of 91. I wasn't a particular fan of her material which was pretty stupid and crude, which, ironically, depended on one thing and one thing alone, people being embarrassed enough about sex to laugh at someone talking about it in public. One of the obits I read out of mild curiosity said she was called "the mother of the sexual revolution" though what she perhaps mothered was the replacement of comedy by stuff that got laughs by merely causing embarrassment in audiences too drunk or stupid to understand the difference between that and what was funny. I was introduced to Rusty Warren's act when a young woman I was friends with brought a couple of her LPs over in a "you won't believe what my father listens to" demonstration. My brother was there at the time. We listened to them once, I didn't need to hear them again. It already seemed old-fashioned to me in the late 1960s, cutting edges of a decade before become rapidly blunt. She seems to have understood her career better than a lot do, including what developed from her kind of material.
RUSTY: I don't know if I'd consider the material tame or not. You have to realize that we spoke differently in the '60s. We veiled a lot of what we were saying and how we were saying it. But it was SEX just the same. Ours was more innuendo than the realistic way it's talked about on stage today. And the female commediennes today are coming right out and saying what they want to say and don't have to worry about being censored.
RUSTY: Not really. Occasionally I have run into some of the current comics, as I did at the Improv on the night I was presented the award. And I found some of the less experienced guys falling back on the "When you can't say anything funny, say F***" syndrome. Most of the more experienced guys had a set-up, middle and end to whatever they were trying to get across. I don't like angry comics, violence against women comedy or unnecessary vulgarity in their so-called humor.
RUSTY: Yes it was. I was asked to do the daytime shows when I was in the cities that had them, to promote my current place of engagement, like Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett, but never worked Ed Sullivan or Johnny Carson.
RUSTY: It probably is easier. Thank God I never had to write a CLEAN ONE!!
Yeah, that's what I guessed about it, most alleged comedy takes the easy way out. Earlier in the interview she said that Sophie Tucker advised her never to lie to the audience because they were smarter than you'd think. Maybe that was true then, it's not true of the comedy audiences now. They'll laugh stupidly at anything. They've been well trained to accept nothing by comedians and the entertainment industry.
IT WAS SOMETIME ABOUT THREE YEARS AGO that I realized how many times a week I was hearing or reading someone use the term "algorithm" as if something being related to one (or what they labeled as one) was some kind of guarantee of enhanced reliability. I have a feeling that easily a majority of those who used the term couldn't define what it means, no more than they could "data" as they also used that very limited term in a similar fashion Something which still strikes me as extremely bizarre though powerfully suggestive. I'd love it if someone would compile a representative sample of very specific mathematical and scientific terms that enter into pop culture in a way that totally mashes them even as they bestow an aura of being in the know.
2. The fact that individuals bind themselves with strong emotional ties to machines ought not in itself to be surprising. The instruments man uses become, after all, extensions of his body. Most importantly, man must, in order to operate his instruments skillfully, internalize aspects of them in the for of aesthetic and perceptual habits. In that sense at least, his instruments become literally part of him and modify him, and thus alter the basis of his affective relationship to himself. One would expect man to react more intensely to instruments that couple directly to his own intellectual, cognitive, and emotive functions than to machines that merely extend the power of his muscles. Western man's entire milieu is now pervaded by complex technological extensions of his every functional capacity. Being the enormously adaptive animal he is, man has been able to accept as authentically natural (that is, as given by nature) such technological bases for his relationship to himself, for his identity. Perhaps this helps to explain why he does not question the appropriateness of investing his most private feelings in a computer. But then, such an explanation would also suggest that the computing machine represents merely an extreme extrapolation of a much more general technological usurpation of man's capacity to act as an autonomous agent in giving meaning to his world. It is therefore important to inquire into the wider senses in which man has come to yield his own autonomy to a world viewed as machine.
3. It is perhaps paradoxical that just, when in the deepest sense man has ceased to believe in - let alone to trust - his own autonomy, he has begun to rely on autonomous machines, that is, on machines that operate for long periods of time entirely on the basis of their own internal realities. If his reliance on such machines is to be be based on something other than in unmitigated despair or blind faith, he must explain to himself what these machines do and even how they do what they do. This requires him to build some conception of their internal "realities." Yet most men don't understand computers to even the slightest degree. So, unless they are capable of very great skepticism (the kind that we bring to bear while watching a stage magician) can we explain the computer's intellectual feats only by bringing to bear the single analogy available to them, that is, their model of their own capacity to think. No wonder, then, that they overshoot the mark; it is truly impossible to imagine a human who could imitate ELIZA, for example, but for whom ELIZA's language were his limit. Again, the computing machine is merely an extreme example of a much more general phenomenon. Even the breadth of connotation intended in the ordinary usage of the word "machine," large as it is, is insufficient to suggest its true generality. For today when we speak of, for example, bureaucracy, or the university, or almost any social or political construct, the image we generate is too often that of an autonomous machine-like process.
I have repeatedly had to point out that computers are constructed to imitate some of the simpler activities that human minds engage in, they are models, metaphors of human minds. Yet people have been convinced to turn that around and define human minds by what those unthinking machines do. That is in part due to stupidity on the part of some people, it is, however, very much an expression of ideological motivation on the part of others, even some of whom should certainly understand the difference. A computer is no more a thinking entity than an abacus or a simple electrical circuit, of the kind that computers are made of.
But that habit of attributing unrealistic powers to artificial entities didn't start with computers, it is an ancient habit of thought among human beings, one which the modern materialistic-scientistic ideology pretends it has surpassed and buried when it is merely a different species of the same genus. In fact, it is a very strong expression of the same thing.
In some sense the very model of social or political constructs for which we generate an autonomous operation and existence is science, try pointing out, as I have many times, that science consists of what the human community of scientists accept as science at any given time, including all of those theories, claims and ideas which will soon or later be discarded, some of which are allowed to do enormous harm before they are discredited and discarded and you will meet with anything from baffled confusion to enraged fury. I don't think that that confusion exists to that extent, or at least in a way that can elicit such emotional rage when you talk about the model of the physical sciences, mathematics, to which there would seem to be little popular emotion attached. I wonder if it is because with science there is an investment in the successful technological applications to which successful science can be made real to people in a way related to what Weizenbaum discussed in these sections of his introduction.
But I do know that the rage is in no small part the product of the ideological apparatus that has been constructed around science, as a "thing" that is not actually any more real than the social and political construct which is made of the consensus of science at any given time. Atheist-materialist-scientism requires that there be an autonomous entity which doesn't exist, science as an independent, even held to be an objective machine for generating truth even a sort of meta-truth that is more true than true. I have identified a number of gods, even creator gods that atheism creates to explain phenomena that science can't identify the origin of, natural selection, random chance, probability (not to be confused with actual mathematical probability but as a supreme creative agent, even, in some of the most insane claims of such a-theology, creating jillions of universes and the vastly improbable first organism of life on Earth). There are others.
Joseph Weizenbaum was right that it is tragically ironic that just as people are putting their faith in machines as artificial, man-made intelligences, so many of us have been talked out of having the slightest faith in human minds. I think a good part of that is the work of the sciences that never have and never will follow the rules of science, especially psychology and other allegedly scientific treatment of minds, individually and collectively. While perhaps unintended, it was not by mere chance that it was a machine mimicking a routine of psychology that revealed how gullible the early, mostly university based users of DOCTOR and ELIZA were.
But I think what we are seeing is that far from building a culture in which human beings are freed from ancient, animistic superstitions, the modern culture of materialism has destroyed any faith in the real possibility of freedom except as an expression of the attempt to satisfy appetites, consumers of products sold for the profits of those in a position to produce, often the ones who have control of machines, especially computers. It is that industry in satisfying appetites in what might be one of its most subtle and seductive forms, seductive because it seems to be entirely voluntary while being so manipulative, "social media" the algorithmic collection of data and peddling "other similar content, etc. that have produced the insanity of present day media-fascistic culture of which Trump is merely the floating baby balloon as a masthead as it heads straight for the rocks.
Far from being made free by the rejection of religious belief modernism is beset by more subtle and base and stupid material gods that make those of the ancient pagan pantheons seem believable. Those gods are most like the ones described in the rather condescending (perhaps racist) literature concerning the "cargo cults" in post-war scientific anthropology. I'd have to go back and read that literature again but if my memory serves me, I think that's a valid suspicion.
Note: If you don't like me calling disreputable science (discontinued science) such as abounds in psychology and anthropology, science, without scare quotes, it's not my fault. I don't get to decide what is science though I have stopped letting "science" off the hook by pretending that science that does get thrown on the enormous heap of discontinued science was never science with all the rights and privileges and enormous power (and lasting effects) accorded to science by modern academic and legal and political culture. If you don't like that, tell the sci-guys to tighten their requirements according to their PR promotion of science. Eugenics was and still is science, it is still as much a part of science in 2021 as it was when scientists were sterilizing racial minorities and poor people and drawing up lists of who to kill. I wouldn't count on those not starting up again as they appear to have when the for-profit imprisoning of migrants in Georgia was reported to have done within recent memory.
I am posting this tonight because Monday is going to be really busy for me.
