Controlling Meaning

Are the Culture Wars are about more than the control of the narrative? Perhaps they are about the control of MEANING and interpretation, things that distinguish human beings? The creation of meaning derives from the motherboard of the one doing the creating.

Disallowing Learning

In the latter stages of my teaching career, I noticed the greater and greater tendency to disallow the teacher-learner dynamic on the grounds that the superiority implied meant that it was a kind of “punching-down” oppression. It became more and more fashionable to make a public exhibition of one’s humility in learning, Rousseau-style, from the children. Of course everyone learns stuff in whatever profession they are in so teachers would always be learning things (and sometimes from interactions with children) but this doesn’t justify disallowing the process of teaching. I wonder if there is also now a tendency to disallow the idea that there is a reservoir of wisdom in age in spite of the fact that a definition of wisdom might be the accumulation of knowledge from time and experience?

Malice v Stupidity

 More on MALICE v STUPIDITY. “Let’s rub the Right’s noses in diversity.” Philip Gould (Tony Blair’s SPAD). In the immediate particular this is malicious but it was only said because, in the general, it was believed to be morally justified (it was done for the educational *good* of the Right) for a dangerously stupid reason. The justification was founded on the assumption that, regarding immigration, the Right is devoid of “compassion” which is immoral. This is a stupid and self-righteous idea and a dangerous one if it contributes to the delegitimisation of the Right and the destruction of democratic two-sided conversation. To believe in malice in the general *and* the particular is harder in the West. It is easier to believe in regarding the Russian Revolution as, because of personal matters like the execution of his terrorist brother, figures like Lenin were fuelled by hatred of the establishment and the aristocracy. In the cases of Gould and Blair I think they would be paralysed without a sense of moral justification and horrified by the idea of acting out of naked malice. Especially in the case of Blair with his messianic bent they *had* to feel a sense of justification.

Reality as Given

 If you unburden the human mind of the centrality with which Enlightenment Descartes invested it in Cogito ergo sum it can relax and cheerfully and gratefully accept reality as given.

FRANKENSTEIN- GUILLERMO DEL TORO

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was really a dry run for Bladerunner and the expectations that we now have of artificial intelligence. And as with those fears the whole thing is based on a problem. That problem is that it is perfectly obvious that, if we are still in the dark about the actual nature of human being 300 years after René Descartes was dissecting corpses vainly hoping to find the location of the soul in the pineal gland, it cannot but be impossible to replicate such a creature. In spite of the best efforts of the neuro-scientists, we still simply don't know how free will, human selfhood or intelligence are instantiated. This leaves the AI worriers, Mary Shelley and del Toro with a paradox; if you are suggesting that it is hubristic, not to say impossible to create what a creator God or Evolution (tick box accordingly according to your beliefs) somehow delivered how are they going to create a notional creature who is supposed to have been created by a hubristic Enlightenment scientist who got above his station? What on Earth will that “creature” be like? Guillermo del Toro seems to adopt the Mary Shelley version; a sweet and guileless amalgam of high-minded Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage who just wants a friend. If you can willingly suspend disbelief over this insuperable paradox the film, as with the book, is tremendous High-Romantic fun. There is the killer line nicely delivered by the Monster in the film to Victor Frankenstein – “You are the true monster” because his hubris, in trying to replace God or Evolution (tick box accordingly according to your beliefs) is the real moral monstrousness in the story. The Heath Robinson, mixed grill appearance of the monster created suitably mocks the comical pretensions of his human creator. And there is a lot of fabulous architecture of the High Gothic/Art Nouveau comic book, dreamscape type we expect from Del Toro. There is an extraordinary Gothic tower perched on the edge of a cliff which doubles as Frankenstein’s lab and reminds one of Gotham City and an electricity sub-station at the same time. There are shades of Jekyll and Hyde in old style Victorian dissection theatres in Edinburgh and there is even a fine dash of Pre-Raphaelite-ism in the spectacle of Frankenstein’s prospective sister-in-law, played by Mia Goth, perched in the corner of a coach in a cloud of turquoise muslin like a sitter for John Everett Millais. Oh, and there are obviously AI (is CGI passé now?) deer and wolves which seems appropriate somehow. And I can tell Gerald Sholto, who loves Mary Shelley’s closing sequence, that this version begins in fine rerum.

Making Windows in to Trump’s Soul

For members of the animal kingdom ‘making a living’ is an imperative. If they don’t they ‘make a dying.’ An osprey has to catch fish, a sheep has to shave the grass and a human has to make a living wage or a profit, the latter being true because we flatter ourselves if we think we are not members of that kingdom and that, therefore, we are above such imperatives. We are thrown into this dynamic situation merely by being alive and have no say in the matter. From here it’s a short step to Adam Smith’s view of economics; the self-interest of individuals, driven by the imperative to survive, creates markets where prices are naturally lowered by competition to the good of all. So far, so Darwinian. And of course ‘self-interest’ has nothing to do with selfishness which is a different and moral issue which only arises much further downstream of all this. The former is something we have no say in. Take an interest in yourself and your family or die. It’s a bit like putting your own oxygen mask on first in an airplane so that you are in a condition where you can help others.

All of the above inevitably creates societies where businessmen and women, some more ‘successful’ (in both Darwinian and financial terms) than others. Human societies being what they are – social, those businessmen will also be involved in political nexuses. Business and politics cannot not interpenetrate as humans can be many things at once. The result of this is that those of other economic persuasions than the Adam Smith ones will always level the accusations of selfishness and corruption against the conservative businessmen who might accept the Adam Smith analysis. And, human nature being what it is and free will being what it is, there will be a proportion of successful businessmen who can justifiably be impugned for those sins. You could even extend this to say that whatever the proportion of the whole number of businessmnen are involved, it might be the case that a similar proportion of the transactions of most businessmen might be impugnable on this basis because the businss world is tough and Darwinian. But this occurrence of sin is no higher than that of other sins in other spheres and is not due simply to the fact  of such people being businessmen. There is nothing inherently wicked about being a businessman. It is merely evidence of general human fraility and susceptibility to temptation. There will be some truly reprehensible characters in the business world but the majority of businessmen will be generally good people out to make a living.

 

Donald Trump is a Republican businessman who, true to that caste, is pretty unashamed of and even celebrates that métier and that milieu. From my humble position I’d guess that in his sharp-elbowed and unforgiving world he has done some shady deals but that they would not entirely define his character. They are more a testimony the world within which he has chosen to operate. For those on the left, however, the mere fact of operating in that ‘capitalist’ (a word I choose not to use personally as it seems a prescription coined by Karl Marx precisely to demonise the operations of the world of normal trade) milieu as a player means that he can only be completely selfish and corrupt.

When Trump pulled off his extraordinary Gaza deal and gave hope to the whole region for some time in the future with the wider plan of the Abraham Accords with the assistance of the leaders of several Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey there were voices on the left who presumed to make a window into his soul to such an extent that they could confidently pronounce that it was all down to venality and vanity; he wants to make money out of the deal and he wants to be lionised by the Nobel Peace committee for bringing it home and that’s enough to sum up and dismiss him. No room at all was left for there being space left in his soul for a real desire to stop a long-perpetueted massacre.

I’d suggest that there certainly is room for that but that there might be something else in addition. Once the influence of religion died in the West its citizens were left with the problem of how to navigate the moral world. Many have solved this by setting up new ethical religions. They do this by choosing figures on the opposite political side to themselves and then creating new demonologies around them. In these demonologies the normal complement of flaws that all humans have are magnified until they are turned into pure demons a priori of any argument or of any action they might take. From these created moral triangualtion points on which they entirely depend whole moral landscapes are created. This means that, because the created demon is needed  for purposes of navigation, no action of Trump’s can ever be allowed to testify to anything other than the irredeemable purity of his wickedness. If is allowed that any action of his is motivated by anything else the whole moral shebang collapses. So we can be certain that whenever they look into his soul after any action they will always ascribe to it the basest of motives.

So what is the good motive I detect, apart from the genuine desire to stop the killing? As I mentioned earlier conservatism and conservative economics have long been demonised to the extent that the creed has been all but delegitimised on moral rather than intellectual grounds. Just look at Theresa May caving in and cravenly apologising for the Conservatives being the ‘nasty party.’ This demonisation of the right of the healthy political tension that has, until now rescued us from civil war, is what might be seen as risking plunging us into it. If you disable one side of the debate you remove the possibility of rescuing ‘jaw jaw’ and only ‘war war’ is left.

For some strange reason, in spite of his general isolationism, many on the left level the accusation at Donald Trump that he is a warmonger, something else that conservatives are supposed to be. What better way could there be to publicly rehabilitate conservatism morally than by deservedly winning the Nobel Peace Prize? It may not be simply a question of vanity or that favourite word which the left always apply to him; narcissism. There may be more to his character than meets a superficial survey. Humans are always more complex than their caricatures. It may be that, by receiving personal applause he is inadvertently achieving a great deal more; possibly the removal of conservatism from the demonologies. Or it may be that he knows what he is doing and we underestimate him….

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/maybe-trump-actually-knows-what-hes-doing/

A Cognitive Insult

 The depth of execration directed towards elected politicians in our time is explicable by the fact that they are the visible embodiment of the viability of a cognitive model that threatens the credibility of the model of the other side. In that sense, their continued existence is an insult, even traumatic, to the other side’s cognitive model and psychology. The two models are mutually exclusive.