Dear corporate media:
STFU already! I really don’t know how much more I can take of your platitude-dripping violence-fetishizing orgasm over the Orlando shooting. Yes, of course it was a tragedy. I don’t need you or anyone else to tell me that fifty people dying from bullet exposure is a horrible thing (although it remains to be seen how many of those killed were victims of over exuberant SWAT cops in the spasmodic throes of their own power orgasm).
And please, please, please stop calling it "the worst mass-shooting in American history" or "the worst mass shooting on American soil." This is simply not true, at least not without ignoring enormous chunks of documented history or radically deforming the definition of "mass-shooting"—a single event where lots of innocent people get shot—or both.
Wikipedia tells me that as many as 300 people died at Wounded Knee (only one historical example among many). Many of those were children, and they all died during a single mass-shooting event. The event is part of American history. And Wounded Knee is, last time I checked, "American soil."
Maybe you could revise your headlines to read "worst non-government-sanctioned mass shooting" or "worst non pogrom-related mass shooting" or maybe "worst mass killing on American soil not perpetrated by white men wearing uniforms." Although I’m not sure whether those would be entirely accurate either.
Yours in disgust,
OldDog
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Thursday, May 12, 2016
No way back to the human side of the screen
I see others around me, those others I care for the most, jacked firmly into their handheld universes, leaving only the barest shell of a human being behind, leaving me treading in desperation over the thinnest surface of a relationship, hoping to occupy those fleeting moments of transition in the ongoing flow pulsing across the slick screens in their palms.
And I frequently end up there too, of course. I all-too often find myself seduced into digitally constructed worlds of distraction. The irony here is that the more time we spend distracting ourselves with these invented worlds of hollow meanings, the more we need to be distracted from our ever-hollowing lives. We are filling ourselves to the very brim with emptiness in a frantic attempt to keep our feelings of emptiness at bay.
Research has confirmed the association between time spent with online social networking sites and depression, for example. And regardless of the direction of the causal relationship—whether online socializing causes depression or depressed people seek relief in online social distraction—our insatiable desire for increased connectivity suggests that there is something lacking in our lives, something essential, something authentically human.
The biggest lie of all is that technology is neutral, that it is merely a medium for us to use as we see fit. Technology doesn’t dehumanize people, people dehumanize themselves with their technology—or such is the myth. Humans have always relied on technology. We are members of the only species currently in existence who could not exist without technical assistance. This was as true for our prehistoric ancestors 250,000 years ago as it is for us. But there is something about our tools today that reverses the natural relationship between us and our devices. Human devices used to serve human needs and goals. Now it is clearly the other way around.
Participation is our choice, after all. But peel back the veneer of techno-propaganda only slightly and it becomes clear that it is never a matter of free choice.
And I frequently end up there too, of course. I all-too often find myself seduced into digitally constructed worlds of distraction. The irony here is that the more time we spend distracting ourselves with these invented worlds of hollow meanings, the more we need to be distracted from our ever-hollowing lives. We are filling ourselves to the very brim with emptiness in a frantic attempt to keep our feelings of emptiness at bay.
Research has confirmed the association between time spent with online social networking sites and depression, for example. And regardless of the direction of the causal relationship—whether online socializing causes depression or depressed people seek relief in online social distraction—our insatiable desire for increased connectivity suggests that there is something lacking in our lives, something essential, something authentically human.
The biggest lie of all is that technology is neutral, that it is merely a medium for us to use as we see fit. Technology doesn’t dehumanize people, people dehumanize themselves with their technology—or such is the myth. Humans have always relied on technology. We are members of the only species currently in existence who could not exist without technical assistance. This was as true for our prehistoric ancestors 250,000 years ago as it is for us. But there is something about our tools today that reverses the natural relationship between us and our devices. Human devices used to serve human needs and goals. Now it is clearly the other way around.
Participation is our choice, after all. But peel back the veneer of techno-propaganda only slightly and it becomes clear that it is never a matter of free choice.
Monday, May 9, 2016
Everywhere in chains
"Man is Born Free but is everywhere in chains" is the opening line to Rousseau’s Social Contract. It was not meant as hyperbole, but rather as a statement of the self-evident fact that participation in civilized society requires us to abnegate the lion’s share of our personal freedoms.
John Gray, in his book The Silence of Animals suggests that there is something "fishy" about Rousseau’s statement by relating it to an analog that is literally about fish, something Gray calls an "ichthyophil" take on Rousseau. Suppose Rousseau’s statement is changed to "fish are born to fly, but everywhere they swim." And, further, suppose that you use the fact that there are certain fish that appear actually to fly for short distances as evidence that even though fish are water-bound for the present, they are continually striving toward flight. Of course this is absurd. Fish are water beings, with a host of finely-tuned adaptations that make them specifically suited for life underwater. They were born for no other purposes than the ones they in fact pursue during the courses of their subaquatic lives. Fish are precisely what they are meant to be.
But why, Gray asks, should we humans be different from other animals? Why is it that we are not what we are meant to be, that we are born for freedom but are everywhere living as slaves? Civilization is obviously a human creation. To claim civilization as some kind of anti-human mode of existence seems as absurd as claiming that fish aren’t really meant for a life underwater. Termites build termite mounds, humans build cities. Fish move in schools, antelope in herds, ants and bees in colonies; and humans occupy violently guarded, bureaucratically structured systems of power and authority. Surely civilization is a natural part of the human design. Civilization is the human analog to the fishes’ water.
But this doesn’t feel quite right to me.
The logic of Rousseau’s statement might be attacked from a slightly different direction, and one that takes a more parsimonious route than Gray’s fish analogy. Man is an abstraction. Mankind—the species—is not born in a literal sense. And it makes little sense to say that man as an abstract category can be free, sad, strong, or any other adjective designed to describe the condition or circumstances of an individual agent. Individual men and women can be free or not. It is, however, a mistake to say an entire species is in possession of a characteristic that can exist only in concrete form in some proportion of individual members.
But this approach seems artificially dismissive of what feels to be a truly substantive set of issues—most notably the fact that you and I are not at all free.
There is a third possible take on Rousseau, one that has the potential to redeem at least a small measure of the original intent of his statement, perhaps (although it might render the rest of his Social Contract a moot exercise). Consider man in the abstract sense of the term, as the human species, and interpret born as a metaphor for the evolutionary emergence of humanity. Man was indeed born free in this metaphorical sense. The human species emerged in the complete absence of violently imposed hierarchies of power and authority beyond those found in simple (and perpetually shifting) primate dominance relations, and has spent the bulk of its existence as a species in this primordial state of freedom. But now, and for only the last few millennia—a relative blink of an eye—the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet are forced to live in ways that reflect a profound absence of freedom, living lives that are far, far removed from the hunter-gatherer egalitarian prototype.
John Gray, in his book The Silence of Animals suggests that there is something "fishy" about Rousseau’s statement by relating it to an analog that is literally about fish, something Gray calls an "ichthyophil" take on Rousseau. Suppose Rousseau’s statement is changed to "fish are born to fly, but everywhere they swim." And, further, suppose that you use the fact that there are certain fish that appear actually to fly for short distances as evidence that even though fish are water-bound for the present, they are continually striving toward flight. Of course this is absurd. Fish are water beings, with a host of finely-tuned adaptations that make them specifically suited for life underwater. They were born for no other purposes than the ones they in fact pursue during the courses of their subaquatic lives. Fish are precisely what they are meant to be.
But why, Gray asks, should we humans be different from other animals? Why is it that we are not what we are meant to be, that we are born for freedom but are everywhere living as slaves? Civilization is obviously a human creation. To claim civilization as some kind of anti-human mode of existence seems as absurd as claiming that fish aren’t really meant for a life underwater. Termites build termite mounds, humans build cities. Fish move in schools, antelope in herds, ants and bees in colonies; and humans occupy violently guarded, bureaucratically structured systems of power and authority. Surely civilization is a natural part of the human design. Civilization is the human analog to the fishes’ water.
But this doesn’t feel quite right to me.
The logic of Rousseau’s statement might be attacked from a slightly different direction, and one that takes a more parsimonious route than Gray’s fish analogy. Man is an abstraction. Mankind—the species—is not born in a literal sense. And it makes little sense to say that man as an abstract category can be free, sad, strong, or any other adjective designed to describe the condition or circumstances of an individual agent. Individual men and women can be free or not. It is, however, a mistake to say an entire species is in possession of a characteristic that can exist only in concrete form in some proportion of individual members.
But this approach seems artificially dismissive of what feels to be a truly substantive set of issues—most notably the fact that you and I are not at all free.
There is a third possible take on Rousseau, one that has the potential to redeem at least a small measure of the original intent of his statement, perhaps (although it might render the rest of his Social Contract a moot exercise). Consider man in the abstract sense of the term, as the human species, and interpret born as a metaphor for the evolutionary emergence of humanity. Man was indeed born free in this metaphorical sense. The human species emerged in the complete absence of violently imposed hierarchies of power and authority beyond those found in simple (and perpetually shifting) primate dominance relations, and has spent the bulk of its existence as a species in this primordial state of freedom. But now, and for only the last few millennia—a relative blink of an eye—the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet are forced to live in ways that reflect a profound absence of freedom, living lives that are far, far removed from the hunter-gatherer egalitarian prototype.
Monday, May 2, 2016
Democracy is a euphemism
"Doctrines that prevent people from understanding the cause of their social existence have great social value." –Marvin Harris
Modern democracy relies on the illusion that there is something special about majority consensus beyond the majority’s physical superiority if things were ever to turn violent.
The power of the majority is a matter of simple physics: greater collective mass.
The rules, laws, and social expectations of civilized existence rest upon a single moral principle: might makes right. This is as true today as it was in ancient Babylon.
Modern democracy relies on the illusion that there is something special about majority consensus beyond the majority’s physical superiority if things were ever to turn violent.
The power of the majority is a matter of simple physics: greater collective mass.
The rules, laws, and social expectations of civilized existence rest upon a single moral principle: might makes right. This is as true today as it was in ancient Babylon.
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
A nasty and brutish fetish
A recent entry in Futurity (an internet news (?) magazine) is titled "For Early Humans, Life was no Picnic 1.8 Million Years Ago." The article is about some researchers who had mapped the landscape of the Olduvai Gorge during the time a couple of our ancestral human relatives inhabited the region. The short lived (30-40 year life expectancy) and short statured (4.5 to 5.5 feet tall) creatures had extremely hard lives, we are told.
And how do we know this? How do we know their lives were extremely difficult? How do we know life was not, in fact, an actual perpetual picnic for these folks?
Because, despite the fact that food and water were plentiful and shade and shelter were abundant, they had to compete with so many other carnivores for meat.
That’s it.
Life was hard for Paranthropus and Homo habilis because they couldn’t simply grab some McDonalds or pick up a roast for Sunday dinner at the local grocery store.
It’s amazing anyone was able to survive long enough to reproduce. Their populations must have been microscopic and constantly teetering on the verge of extinction. It’s astounding that evolution had anything to work with at all!
It is vitally important that we understand that the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (and contemporaries) were (and are) full of unimaginable hardship and suffering. Hobbes’ view of life outside the warm and protective embrace of civilization has been enshrined—literally, as an idol might be placed in a shrine and regularly showered with offerings and ritual expressions of worship.
It is vitally important that we know this right down to the very fibers of our modern civilized being because it is absolutely not true.
And how do we know this? How do we know their lives were extremely difficult? How do we know life was not, in fact, an actual perpetual picnic for these folks?
Because, despite the fact that food and water were plentiful and shade and shelter were abundant, they had to compete with so many other carnivores for meat.
That’s it.
Life was hard for Paranthropus and Homo habilis because they couldn’t simply grab some McDonalds or pick up a roast for Sunday dinner at the local grocery store.
It’s amazing anyone was able to survive long enough to reproduce. Their populations must have been microscopic and constantly teetering on the verge of extinction. It’s astounding that evolution had anything to work with at all!
It is vitally important that we understand that the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (and contemporaries) were (and are) full of unimaginable hardship and suffering. Hobbes’ view of life outside the warm and protective embrace of civilization has been enshrined—literally, as an idol might be placed in a shrine and regularly showered with offerings and ritual expressions of worship.
It is vitally important that we know this right down to the very fibers of our modern civilized being because it is absolutely not true.
Friday, April 22, 2016
Go team human!
A species is an organizational device, the result of a particular taxonomic structuring of the world. Species does not refer to a concrete entity. The human species can’t have needs, for example. Individual people have needs—and although each person shares many needs in common with every other person, no singular needy entity mysteriously emerges from the expression of these mutual needs. To say that the human species has needs—as a species—is to speak nonsense. Species is a concept, a construct, an abstraction.
Don’t get me wrong—it is an extremely useful abstraction. But just like its close cousin, humanity, it is a tool of thought and a linguistic convenience, not a thing in the world. It is important not to lose sight of this fact because there are concrete real-world repercussions to treating abstractions as if they were actual entities (“Corporations are people my friend”).
In addition, there appears to be a strong tendency for us to attach more importance to the abstraction, the idea, than to the concrete entities the abstraction subsumes—in the same way that the team becomes more important than the individual players.
The movie, Interstellar provides an interesting case study of this tendency.
The human part of the plot of Interstellar is simultaneously banal and unbelievable, but the broader story it sits upon is neither banal nor unbelievable: a future in which the Earth is rapidly becoming a dustbowl and humans are doomed. All government money and resources in this future world are being directed at food production. GMO corn is the last major food crop to survive, and there is every indication that it will be dying out in short order as well—GMO or not. All is not lost for the humans, however, because NASA has been secretly diverting billions of dollars to a massive space colonization project.
The NASA project has a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A is a city-sized space station that can accommodate an untold number of people—untold, but obviously far fewer than the Earth’s remaining population. The problem with Plan A is a lacuna in theoretical physics, specifically a missing piece of an equation involving gravity that would allow the space station to get off the planet. But not to worry, because Plan B is already in full swing. Plan B involves launching small groups of astronauts through a mysterious wormhole placed next to Saturn by some unknowable five-dimensional alien beings simply referred to as "they." The wormhole leads to a distant and unnamed galaxy, and allows access to a star system with a number of potentially habitable planets. Oh, and the important part, the astronauts sent through the wormhole are packing specially selected frozen gametes so that if they do find a good place to land they can eventually reestablish the human species, and also ensure a wide range of genetic diversity so that evolution has something to work with as the species accommodates the idiosyncrasies of its new planetary home.
Interstellar suffers from a cadre of logical kinks, impossible coincidences, and hard-to-suspend-disbelief plot vehicles that are typical of the science fiction movie genre—the most egregious of which is that the mysterious five-dimensional beings turn out to be a distant future iteration of the human species. So, powerful five-dimensional beings go back in time to set up a wormhole close to their planet of origin so that they might survive to evolve into five-dimensional beings that can travel back in time to set up a wormhole next to their planet of origin….
But set aside the recursive circularity of the wormhole’s origin for a moment. There is another issue being dealt with here that strikes to the heart of the matter, the real issue; the only issue: the future survival of the human race. The most important thing is that the human species survives. This is more important than any of the lives of any of the people involved. We must continue—although it is clear that this "we" is not all inclusive. Even stronger, the only "we" that really matters is some abstract "us" in the future that does not include a single soul alive today. This unanalyzed assumption sits like a monolithic 2001 Space Odyssey obelisk on the brain of the movie’s writers and viewers alike: it is imperative that the human species has a future; humans must survive.
Why?
Why does it matter whether the distant future is inhabited by our progeny? It makes no difference to anyone alive at this moment if every human on the planet disappears two hundred years from now. Our lives will be as rich and full and complete (or not) regardless of the future of the species (or lack thereof).
Don’t get me wrong—it is an extremely useful abstraction. But just like its close cousin, humanity, it is a tool of thought and a linguistic convenience, not a thing in the world. It is important not to lose sight of this fact because there are concrete real-world repercussions to treating abstractions as if they were actual entities (“Corporations are people my friend”).
In addition, there appears to be a strong tendency for us to attach more importance to the abstraction, the idea, than to the concrete entities the abstraction subsumes—in the same way that the team becomes more important than the individual players.
The movie, Interstellar provides an interesting case study of this tendency.
The human part of the plot of Interstellar is simultaneously banal and unbelievable, but the broader story it sits upon is neither banal nor unbelievable: a future in which the Earth is rapidly becoming a dustbowl and humans are doomed. All government money and resources in this future world are being directed at food production. GMO corn is the last major food crop to survive, and there is every indication that it will be dying out in short order as well—GMO or not. All is not lost for the humans, however, because NASA has been secretly diverting billions of dollars to a massive space colonization project.
The NASA project has a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A is a city-sized space station that can accommodate an untold number of people—untold, but obviously far fewer than the Earth’s remaining population. The problem with Plan A is a lacuna in theoretical physics, specifically a missing piece of an equation involving gravity that would allow the space station to get off the planet. But not to worry, because Plan B is already in full swing. Plan B involves launching small groups of astronauts through a mysterious wormhole placed next to Saturn by some unknowable five-dimensional alien beings simply referred to as "they." The wormhole leads to a distant and unnamed galaxy, and allows access to a star system with a number of potentially habitable planets. Oh, and the important part, the astronauts sent through the wormhole are packing specially selected frozen gametes so that if they do find a good place to land they can eventually reestablish the human species, and also ensure a wide range of genetic diversity so that evolution has something to work with as the species accommodates the idiosyncrasies of its new planetary home.
Interstellar suffers from a cadre of logical kinks, impossible coincidences, and hard-to-suspend-disbelief plot vehicles that are typical of the science fiction movie genre—the most egregious of which is that the mysterious five-dimensional beings turn out to be a distant future iteration of the human species. So, powerful five-dimensional beings go back in time to set up a wormhole close to their planet of origin so that they might survive to evolve into five-dimensional beings that can travel back in time to set up a wormhole next to their planet of origin….
But set aside the recursive circularity of the wormhole’s origin for a moment. There is another issue being dealt with here that strikes to the heart of the matter, the real issue; the only issue: the future survival of the human race. The most important thing is that the human species survives. This is more important than any of the lives of any of the people involved. We must continue—although it is clear that this "we" is not all inclusive. Even stronger, the only "we" that really matters is some abstract "us" in the future that does not include a single soul alive today. This unanalyzed assumption sits like a monolithic 2001 Space Odyssey obelisk on the brain of the movie’s writers and viewers alike: it is imperative that the human species has a future; humans must survive.
Why?
Why does it matter whether the distant future is inhabited by our progeny? It makes no difference to anyone alive at this moment if every human on the planet disappears two hundred years from now. Our lives will be as rich and full and complete (or not) regardless of the future of the species (or lack thereof).
Thursday, April 21, 2016
A brief anti-transhumanist rant
If human life is essentially a technology, then the problems associated with human existence are essentially technological problems, and as such, they have technological solutions. All social problems, for instance, can be solved by developing and applying the right kinds of social technologies—and most problems in modern society are political, requiring only minor adjustments to the present bureaucratic structuring of power. From a more personal standpoint, if human bodies are biological technologies that have been rendered inefficient by dumb evolutionary processes that are blind to the obvious advantages of rational intentional design, then it should be possible to compensate by intentionally augmenting the human body and extending the capacities of the human mind. So along with artificial hips and mechanical heart valves, we have an ever expanding inventory of chemical fixes and bookstore shelves filled with self-help books providing blueprints for organizing your life and techniques designed to get your life "back on track." Human nature—like all other aspects of the natural world—can be retooled and upgraded.
This thought-form reaches its logical extreme in a bizarre utopian movement called transhumanism, which has apparently been gaining widespread popularity among technophiles, science fiction fans, and other techno-groupies. According to transhumanists, industrial civilization is leading us toward a "posthuman" future, a world in which humanity will have been eclipsed and replaced by its own technological offspring. The "trans" part of transhumanism is meant to highlight that we are, at this point and in the immediate future, moving through a transitional period en route to a posthuman state of technological perfection, a period in which more and more of our organs and cognitive capacities will be replaced or enhanced with technologically superior alternatives. At some point in the future, all that is human—like everything else on the planet and every other planet within our grasp, I suppose—will have been refashioned, and we will have made ourselves into an entirely new kind of artificial life form and thus achieve technological immortality. For transhumanists, this is our manifest destiny as a species.
Transhumanism is ridiculous on its face (whether that face is made of flesh or a synthetic bioplastic). Its core assumptions emerge from a failure to distinguish metaphor from reality—especially with respect to biological evolution—and reflect a post-industrial, technology-centered projection of enlightenment-era notions of human progress. But from a psychological standpoint, there is more to transhumanism than mere metaphoric confusion. It is a childish attempt to disguise and deny uncomfortable truths of post-modern life. It provides a kind of fairytale gloss over the dehumanizing and oppressive nature of global civilization.
Transhumanism is ridiculous; nevertheless it may harbor a kernel of validity, especially with respect to the "transition" part. Global industrial civilization—like all civilizations of the past—is unsustainable and simply cannot continue. As fossil resources become stretched to the vanishing point, as potable water and palatable food become more and more rarified commodities, as poverty spreads and expands among the masses while wealth and power become increasingly concentrated in a shrinking elite, we may indeed be transitioning into a posthuman future, albeit one in which humans—artificial and otherwise—are entirely absent.
This thought-form reaches its logical extreme in a bizarre utopian movement called transhumanism, which has apparently been gaining widespread popularity among technophiles, science fiction fans, and other techno-groupies. According to transhumanists, industrial civilization is leading us toward a "posthuman" future, a world in which humanity will have been eclipsed and replaced by its own technological offspring. The "trans" part of transhumanism is meant to highlight that we are, at this point and in the immediate future, moving through a transitional period en route to a posthuman state of technological perfection, a period in which more and more of our organs and cognitive capacities will be replaced or enhanced with technologically superior alternatives. At some point in the future, all that is human—like everything else on the planet and every other planet within our grasp, I suppose—will have been refashioned, and we will have made ourselves into an entirely new kind of artificial life form and thus achieve technological immortality. For transhumanists, this is our manifest destiny as a species.
Transhumanism is ridiculous on its face (whether that face is made of flesh or a synthetic bioplastic). Its core assumptions emerge from a failure to distinguish metaphor from reality—especially with respect to biological evolution—and reflect a post-industrial, technology-centered projection of enlightenment-era notions of human progress. But from a psychological standpoint, there is more to transhumanism than mere metaphoric confusion. It is a childish attempt to disguise and deny uncomfortable truths of post-modern life. It provides a kind of fairytale gloss over the dehumanizing and oppressive nature of global civilization.
Transhumanism is ridiculous; nevertheless it may harbor a kernel of validity, especially with respect to the "transition" part. Global industrial civilization—like all civilizations of the past—is unsustainable and simply cannot continue. As fossil resources become stretched to the vanishing point, as potable water and palatable food become more and more rarified commodities, as poverty spreads and expands among the masses while wealth and power become increasingly concentrated in a shrinking elite, we may indeed be transitioning into a posthuman future, albeit one in which humans—artificial and otherwise—are entirely absent.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Vengeful gods lead to global conquest?
Headline from the Washington Post (February 12, 2016): “Fear of a vengeful God may explain humanity’s global expansion”
Several thing here. First, and most trivially, god was spelled with a capital ‘G’ in the headline and throughout the article. I suspect that this was done so as not to offend sensitive monotheists. But more insidious are the dual implications that “humanity” refers to a singular kind of substance and that having this substance spread itself across the globe was a good thing.
Taken at face value the headline is tautology, obvious to anyone with an eighth grade public school understanding of world history. From the conquistadores to the Puritans, 16th century European colonial expansion into the new world is a tale of the exploits (literally) of vengeful god believers—with smallpox-packing missionaries thrust against indigenous resistance like psychological battering rams.
The story following the headline is about a psychology experiment finding that people whose religious beliefs include a vengeful, all-knowing god are less likely to cheat when playing a game in which their cheating could not be discovered. Basically, participants in the study played several rounds of a game in which they rolled a two-colored die in their head and put coins into cups depending on the imagined outcome. After a participant imagined rolling a die in their head, the experimenter told them what the randomly chosen color for that round was. If the color they imagined rolling “matched” the color the experimenter told them, they “won” that round and could put a coin in their own cup. If it mismatched, they lost and had to put a coin in the cup of an imagined distant person from their own religious community. Cheating was measured by the extent to which the coins were unequally distributed (in the person’s favor) after the game. Participants who believe in an omniscient god who would punish you for lying were less likely to put more coins into their own cup.
The researchers went from these results to the conclusion that this—the belief in an all-seeing and punishing god—explains the broad-based cooperation among strangers that is prerequisite for large-scale cultural expansion.
All-seeing sky-god = global conquest? Perhaps pushing the data just a bit.
Perhaps more problematic is the thought form that sees humanity as an entity capable of entering into cause and effect relationships. It wasn’t some abstract humanity that expanded itself around the globe. It was individual persons locked into potent and irresistible hierarchical power relations—relations imposed and enforced through lethal violence.
And while it is true that religion turns out to be an extremely useful tool for legitimizing these power relations, belief in an all-seeing deity with anger management problems hardly explains the African slave trade or the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
Several thing here. First, and most trivially, god was spelled with a capital ‘G’ in the headline and throughout the article. I suspect that this was done so as not to offend sensitive monotheists. But more insidious are the dual implications that “humanity” refers to a singular kind of substance and that having this substance spread itself across the globe was a good thing.
Taken at face value the headline is tautology, obvious to anyone with an eighth grade public school understanding of world history. From the conquistadores to the Puritans, 16th century European colonial expansion into the new world is a tale of the exploits (literally) of vengeful god believers—with smallpox-packing missionaries thrust against indigenous resistance like psychological battering rams.
The story following the headline is about a psychology experiment finding that people whose religious beliefs include a vengeful, all-knowing god are less likely to cheat when playing a game in which their cheating could not be discovered. Basically, participants in the study played several rounds of a game in which they rolled a two-colored die in their head and put coins into cups depending on the imagined outcome. After a participant imagined rolling a die in their head, the experimenter told them what the randomly chosen color for that round was. If the color they imagined rolling “matched” the color the experimenter told them, they “won” that round and could put a coin in their own cup. If it mismatched, they lost and had to put a coin in the cup of an imagined distant person from their own religious community. Cheating was measured by the extent to which the coins were unequally distributed (in the person’s favor) after the game. Participants who believe in an omniscient god who would punish you for lying were less likely to put more coins into their own cup.
The researchers went from these results to the conclusion that this—the belief in an all-seeing and punishing god—explains the broad-based cooperation among strangers that is prerequisite for large-scale cultural expansion.
All-seeing sky-god = global conquest? Perhaps pushing the data just a bit.
Perhaps more problematic is the thought form that sees humanity as an entity capable of entering into cause and effect relationships. It wasn’t some abstract humanity that expanded itself around the globe. It was individual persons locked into potent and irresistible hierarchical power relations—relations imposed and enforced through lethal violence.
And while it is true that religion turns out to be an extremely useful tool for legitimizing these power relations, belief in an all-seeing deity with anger management problems hardly explains the African slave trade or the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
How to kill a zombie
Vampires, werewolves, mummies, and zombies, the classic horror movie villains, have something eerily in common. They all involve a tradeoff in which some version of immortality is obtained at the expense of one or more critical elements of their human essence. The "undead" vampire is reduced to photophobic hunter, his cold and emotionless immortality requiring continual renewal with the blood of fresh victims. The werewolf, entirely immune to all weapons not made of pure silver, is forced under the spell of the waxing moon to periodically abandon his humanity entirely and become a bloodthirsty beast. The mummy rises stiffly from his eternal resting place to serve sentence on those who flagrantly violate the curse that was cast to guard his dusty peace. Zombies continue as mindless and soulless corpses, hungrily pursuing the living in an insatiable quest for brains. The thing that makes each of these creatures scary isn’t so much that they go around killing innocent people—hell, cheap toasters do that—it’s that they are almost, but not quite, human. They have a quasi-humanity in which some critical component, some vital human element, has been removed. And in their almost-but-not-quite-humanity, they are exactly like us in a way that is truly terrifying.
The zombie case is particularly informative. Here we have the merest form of the human, the decaying dead body animated by some inhuman force. What is curious here is that in most zombie movies, the locus of this animating force is not entirely clear. Is it an internal hunger for brains that drives the walking dead? If so, then the zombie is not entirely dead to the world of desire. Or, is it an externally existing power, a spirit of evil (or the machinations of a brain-eating virus) that drives the not-creatures through a web of magnetic attraction? Notice that the specific locus of the controlling impetus usually makes no difference in terms of how to actually stop the zombie. In almost every case, you "kill" the zombie by smashing or severing its head.
There may be a cryptic lesson here for those who wish to escape the brain-eating beast called civilization and return to an authentic human realm of meaning and purpose.
The zombie case is particularly informative. Here we have the merest form of the human, the decaying dead body animated by some inhuman force. What is curious here is that in most zombie movies, the locus of this animating force is not entirely clear. Is it an internal hunger for brains that drives the walking dead? If so, then the zombie is not entirely dead to the world of desire. Or, is it an externally existing power, a spirit of evil (or the machinations of a brain-eating virus) that drives the not-creatures through a web of magnetic attraction? Notice that the specific locus of the controlling impetus usually makes no difference in terms of how to actually stop the zombie. In almost every case, you "kill" the zombie by smashing or severing its head.
There may be a cryptic lesson here for those who wish to escape the brain-eating beast called civilization and return to an authentic human realm of meaning and purpose.
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