First some announcements:
1. On my other - more formal - blog, I ask "Does government-funded science play a role in stimulating innovation?" There I refute rising incantations that science, productivity and inventiveness would all do so much better if we revert them all back to the whim of plutocrat lords. (Yeah, that worked great for the 6000 years of stagnant feudalism!) with guest appearances by Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Adam Smith and... Jonas Salk.
2. Want the perfect gift for that professor or student of Anthropology or Paleontology?
3. Appearances (see the regularly updated schedule):
- Nov 7 my new play - The Escape - will premiere at the Caltech Atheneum.
- Nov 9 I speak at the Future In Review (FiRe) Conference in Palos Verdes, before flying to Tucson for the Tus-Con sci fi convention.
- April 8 - two Texas events for the April 8 eclipse - more later
And now... having a little trouble with your clogged dogmas? Let's have a look and see if we can get things flowing again! I'll start by quoting an exceptionally sapient article.
== Ideology as a refuge from practical problem solving ==
“Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated,” it “no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.”
— From Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality by Roger Berkowitz
I recommend you visit this linked essay which continues:
“In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” This “escape from reality,” as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing.”
“The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig.” What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion.” The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter.” Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality.”
“The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, On the Nature of Totalitarianism), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea.”
Do have a look at Roger’s article in Quillette, because the first half is so perfectly on target - diagnosing the same flaw in human nature that I often point-to -- our propensity for self-satisfying delusion, (a flaw that is also a taproot to our greatest gifts, like art and love).
Ideologies, especially, can be mass delusions that are ecstatically masturbatory, simplifying all of those who disagree into mistakes, to be corrected with erasure.
I concur, while adding that another (or overlapping) common element is romanticism. Nazism, Stalinism, the American Confederacy (in all eight of its manifestations) were all romantic movements. (Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on the novels of Sir Walter Scott!)
SF is not innocent! We see many common romantic features in the works of Tolkien and George Lucas and George R.R. Martin and Frank Herbert, wherein innately superior beings are portrayed as elegantly admirable (and pretty) while opposing orcs or robots or clone soldiers or masked storm troopers or hovering Harkonnens can be mowed down without qualm, as none of them have faces or mothers.
(More seductively subtle, the gifted, eloquent and deeply anti-enlightenment O.S. Card relentlessly pushes romantic notions of rule-by-demigod, in place of decadent democracy.)
I go into all this in Vivid Tomorrows. And while I have earned most of my income by penning tales that have strong romantic elements, I write such passages at night, when the wind rustles tree branches and I feel the thrumming echoes of the caves. But I also say romanticism has no business - after 6000 years of calamities - getting involved in the daytime pursuits of politics, policy, science, justice and negotiation based on pragmatically verifiable facts.
== Hatred of Modernity ==
Alas, the 2nd half of Roger's essay dives into a completely separate Arendt obsession, her dyspeptic growl at modernity and science which I deem easily refuted. For example, it was not ‘reconciliation’ that defeated Nazis, or Leninist romantics or the many phases of confederatism.
What's been our great strength? It was a spirit of courage to face that ‘loneliness’ in alliance with different and varied others, whose very differences contribute to a healthy and wholesome tribe/nation/humanity.
We are not all so terrified, all the time, that we must clutch demonizing ideologies. There are other emotions, like fortitude, patience, curiosity and humor. And yes, an appreciation of facts and willingness to change our contingent models of the world (despite Plato’s yammers about the hopelessness of that wondrous pursuit.)
Despite my respect for Hannah Arendt, I feel no compulsion to heed in the slightest either Nietzsche or Hegel, whose incantation spells I particularly detest. Where I disagree foremost is over the outright dismissal of human provability.
Like Roger Berkowitz, I do not take seriously the pathetic immortality fetishists or those nutters who think they can promote themselves - via miraculous technology - to godhood. But unlike him, I recognize that we stand on the shoulders of generations who struggled to make us better than them…
… and we are better! Each generation of Americans - for example - has struggled over demands that we expand our horizons of inclusion, beyond the horizons that were new to our parents. And slowly - (far TOO grindingly slowly) - we have done so, each generation. And science, disproving ten thousand pat and comfy folk assumptions, played a major role in that!
Indeed, if we do keep improving, our wiser heirs will almost certainly realize that we've only shown how very much farther there is to go.
== Civilizational Competition? ==
Western nations and allies, e.g. Japan and S Korea ("W+") are actually doing very well, overflowing with creativity, invention, science, productivity and the sort of moral rediscovery that has engendered a very active younger generation, fizzing with criticism and eagerness to save the world... traits that were squelched across those 6000 feudal/futile years. Traits that are utterly repressed in 'civilizational" rivals like China, Russia, radical Islam, etc.
Let's be clear. Only those nations with habits of self-critical error discovery have been at all active at addressing potentially existential problems, like the environment, or justice, or rule of law. It is either W+ habits of error-discovery or extinction. Period. I stand ready to show that in any arena, from debate to wager.
There is one reason for cultural anomie by Western+ citizenries. That cause is the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, cleverly leveraging the reflex toward criticism that's been trained into W+ citizenries, igniting healthy Suspicion of Authority into paranoia toward their own institutions.
In Europe and the U.S. this campaign has been augmented by cynically evil despots herding millions of victims to EU and U.S. borders as refugees, successfully sparking rightward 'populist' political reactions.
There is no 'civilizational' bullshit. One imperative - and just one - unites China, Russia, radical Islam, etc. into common cause. That unifying drive - propelled by male reproductive strategies a billion years old - is to re-establish the feudal pyramids of power that dominated 99% of human societies for 60 centuries or much more.
Squint and you can see it in all enemies of the W+... justifying pyramids of power. Some base it on religion, or tradition, or romanticism, or 'civilization rivalry.' But that is decoration.
The worldwide oligarchic putsch unites all enemies of the W+ Enlightenment Experiment (W+EE) for one reason: because the W+EE will likely succeed within the next 20 years at inculcating critical habits in ALL world youth! And when that happens, a return to feudal pyramids will be impossible, no matter how much money you have or political foes you defenestrate.
This may be their last chance. And they are pulling out the stops.
Liberal societies will not co-exist with any of that. As happened to Athens and Florence, liberalism will be crushed, burned, the atoms incinerated and dropped (this time) into the sun... and the experiment will never be allowed, again.
Or else, what will happen is what the cabals fear most. We may decide to save the world and the future despite them. By growing up.
