My Care Profile

 

That ancient shrug, ‘what do I care’, ‘what do you care’  can no longer be sanctioned.  You must forever be curating your ‘care’ profile for who knows while you slept someone in America found a new victim of compelling intersectionality.  Being on Facebook or Twitser is not good for anybody’s mental health as far as someone who has never participated can tell.  On the whole the internet has been good for me.  Last week I learnt how to cure an airlock in a power shower.  I researched a push reel mower on youtube and now my carbon wallet is bursting and the lawn is better for it.

 

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

(from 'Ash Wednesday' by T.S. Eliot)

Catching Jordan Peterson

 

Jordan Peterson is harder to catch than a greased pig but that doesn’t stop people having a go.  Professor Hans-Georg Moeller (youtube ‘carefree wandering)  has a go.  He declares that Peterson is the mirror image of the woke, an anti-woke as it were and is therefore as much of an ideologue as his opposite number is.  However, that is, I believe, to misunderstand what ideology is.  It is a world view supported by a very narrow band of the explanatory spectrum.  For instance - it’s all class war or you’re a victim in a rigged racist game or its up to you to decide whether you’re a man or a woman.  Peterson in contrast to this promotes the idea of a Logos, a natural law that is a broad spectrum response that draws on traditional wisdom, a meditation on archetypal forms, the Hero, the Pilgrim, the Seeker and the Delphic Know Thyself.  These are supple, skilful, adaptive strategies that admit the concept of Freedom as a project (Sartre) and not as a given.  As a practising psychotherapist he would know that everybody has elements of the shadow (Jung) within them that deflects from the goal of freedom.  Lewis Waller(youtube ‘then and now’) in a simplistic parsing of ‘responsibility’ as response - ability claims that Peterson does not take into account the blocks to perfect freedom.  Lewis, he meets them everyday, like the carpenter meets a hammer.   Which is why he starts out with the basics of creating your own world i.e. pick up your room.  I go into the workshop feeling slack.  O.K. sweep the floor, sharpen your chisels, adjust a plane and then you’re there.  Dirk Bogarde the actor said - ‘you do your best work when you don’t feel like it’.  My understanding of this is, when you absolutely feel like it then you are drawing down your rote capacity but breaking through a block brings creative freedom.

There is a greater force than any psychopomp.  When we were leaving the ashram of Jillelamudi Ama ( Rajah Rajeshwari ) we asked through an interpreter ‘Does Mother have any instruction for us’  She replied ‘the Mother does not give instruction’.

Lewis Waller's youtube video on Tucker Carlson's paranoid style (Then and Now)

 

You would expect someone who identifies as a postmodernist to recognise and understand irony.  Lewis Waller doesn’t.  He’s the man behind the youtube video channel ‘Then and Now’

then and now 

 which is very well subscribed to.  It’s nicely produced with lots of graphics and a good deal of Waller behind his desk delivering in a very clear and emphatic intense manner content which demands serious attention due to its complexity and duration.   Good, fine, splendid but don’t get him started on conservatives because his animus against them causes distortions.  ‘Jordan Peterson is wrong about Ideology’, ‘Jordan Peterson is wrong about Responsibility’, ‘Tucker Carlson’s Paranoid Style’ or Tucker Carlson is wrong about Everything.

The Pomo chaps think that they own irony so when its used by Conservatives such as Carlson they tend to miss it. In his summation at the end of a 50 minute video of Carlson’s works and pomps he quotes the epilogue to ‘Ship of Fools’ which he claims represents the true agenda of Tuckerism.  Strangely though he leaves out the last few paragraphs.

Before I quote the epilogue in full let me first offer you the succinct definition  of H. Fowler in ‘Modern English Usage’:

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing  shall hear and shall not understand and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware of that more and of the outsiders incomprehension.

Here then is Carlson’s Epilogue to ‘Ship of Fools’:

Nothing that is happening in America today is unprecedented, or even unusual. A relatively small number of people make the overwhelming majority of significant cultural and economic decisions. Wars are fought, populations shift, the rules of commerce change, all without reference to what the bulk of the population thinks or wants.

This isn’t strange. It’s the story of all human history. Very few civilizations have operated in any other way. People naturally sort themselves into hierarchies. Those who have power defend it from those who don’t. Rulers rule, serfs obey. It’s a familiar system. We know it works, because it has for thousands of years.

The new ingredient, what makes our current moment so unstable, is democracy. Massive inequality can’t be sustained in societies where everyone can vote. In order to survive, democracies must remain egalitarian. When all the spoils seem to flow upward, the majority will revolt in protest. Voters will become vengeful and reckless.

They will elect politicians like Donald Trump as a sign of displeasure. If they continue to feel ignored, they will support increasingly radical leaders, who over time will destroy the ruling class, along with everything that made it prosperous. Left untended, democracies self-destruct.

There are two ways to end this cycle. The quickest is to suspend democracy. There are justifications for this. If your voters can’t reach responsible conclusions, you can’t let them vote. You don’t give suffrage to irrational populations, for the same reason you wouldn’t give firearms to toddlers: they’re not ready for the responsibility.

Nobody believes Jordan would become a happier country with free and fair elections.But there’s a cost to ending the vote. You can’t install an autocracy without widespread repression and bloodshed, especially in a secular society. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have revolutions because most Saudis accept that their royal family was installed by God. Nobody in East Germany ever believed that about their government. That’s why the East German regime needed machine guns and a wall to keep its citizens from fleeing. There’s no transitioning from democracy in America without civil war.

The other solution to the crisis is simpler: attend to the population. Think about what they want.

If they start dying younger or killing themselves in large numbers, figure out why.

Care about them.

If the majority is worried about something, listen. Give them back some of their power.

If they have strong feelings about an issue, don’t overrule them, even if (maybe especially if) their views seem reactionary.

You can’t force enlightenment by fiat. In a democracy, you can only persuade.

Go slowly. It isn’t easy to relinquish control to people you have power over.

But try.

If you want to save democracy, you’ve got to practice it.

Tucker Carlson is not proposing the suspension of democracy as Lewis Waller suggests but in fact recommending it as the antidote to chaos.

Realism Clew

 Realism Clew:

Very well.  There doesn't seem any way out of it.  If you want realism, thourough going realism, you have to hold to the immateriality of consciousness and the intellectual faculties.  This is the thread running through all of the various versions.  Plato has the forms or ideas impressed on the mind from their special realm.  The immateriality of the mind allows this pervasion and assures us that what we know and what is 'out there' is one and the same.  Philosophy tries to clear up the distortions that occur.  Aristotle and the Scholastics are more grounded, finding the relationship between the mind and the object the source of knowledge.  Aristotle says in Bk.XII of the metaphysics - "Everything which has not matter is indivisible".  This is I presume the core of the insight that object and mind can interpenetrate, that the object can be in the mind in its subtle form as it really is.  The mind grasps the reality of the object.  If we do not accept this as the default position then as Maritain writes:

"But it also indicates that there is an incomparable unity, a unity deeper than that between a model and a transfer, between the thing and thought, thought in act, I mean. For if things were modified or changed in any way by sensation or intellection (I do not mean in the conditions in which they exist, in their way of existing, I mean in regard to those things that properly constitute them, in what they are), then there would no longer be any truth or knowledge. Then the theorist of knowledge could not even express himself by wagging his finger because in such a case there would be left but two equally impossible recourses: either to say that knowledge implies a relation to things but deforms those things, and as a result they are never known; or else to say that knowledge implies no relation to things and that it is an absolute unfolding of thought having only itself as object. This is a position which is quite incompatible with the fact of error and negative ideas." ( from 'The Degrees of Knowledge")

Advaitins likewise relay on the immateriality of consciousness with the joint theory of vritti (mental modification) and upadhi (form of limitation/object) allowing knowledge to happen.  As in all the various schemas of Realism the fine print can be intricate.

Realism is Gravity

  

À hidden but powerful teleological motivation also intervenes at this point,to which  idealism unconsciously obeys, so cheating at its own game. Idealism's concern is precisely that it be not led to a certain terminus; it aims to avoid a certain final conclusion. Now if, from the very start, things and the extramental stability whereby they regulate our thought are so carefully rejected, it is because of the fact, above all else, that owing to a secret instinct that is the more imperious in that it remains unconfessed, the mind does not want in the end to be forced to come face to face with a transcendent, supreme reality, an abyss of personality before which every heart lies open and which our thought has to adore. The bastions and fortresses of idealistic philosophy thus appear to be just so many vast defence-works against divine personality. (from 'The Degrees of Knowledge' by Jacques Maritain)

  

This is important enough for Shankara to turn his mind to Vijnanavada.  Ontology is Theology and those that are bogged down in ‘Is it Theology or Philosophy’ miss being serious and remain essentially light floating away from the earth.  Realism is Gravity.

The non-grasbable Self in Kena Up., Meister Eckhart and Markus Gabriel

 

According to Meister Eckhart, then, we thinkers of thoughts are categorically distinct from any object we could ever perceive or think of.  With this basic line of thought, which I have here extended to the topic of the brain, Meister Eckhart discovered the topic of the radical non-objectivity of the self......

What Meister Eckhart is saying amounts to the claim that the self cannot be strictly identical with any object that it perceives. The self only falls under laws it gives to itself; it cannot be strictly determined by the objects it perceives.

(from ‘I am not a Brain’ by Markus Gabriel)

Browsing in the book I came across that observation.  My last post note on the Kena Upanishad would be a demurral. 

Self Knowledge 

  Kena is tentatively 500 B.C.  and Shankara 8th.Cent. A.D.  Professor Gabriel of Bonn University takes, as his book title suggests, a non-naturalist stance or at least not a linear functionalist one.  An interesting book written I surmise for the intelligent general reader, the igger as distinct from the iggerent (Mayo pronunciation)  My father was told the story of the man whose son was a student priest in Maynooth.  The son would not eat at the same table as his father and ‘I wouldn’t blame him’ says your man, ‘he was the iggernest man in Kilasser’.

Kena Upanishad on 'Can Brahman be Known'?

 

3: The eye does not go there, nor speech, nor mind.  We do not know (Brahman to be such and such), hence we are not aware of any process of instructing about it.

4: “That (Brahman) is surely different from the known; and again, It is above the unknown” - such was (the utterance) we heard of the the ancient (teachers) who explained it to us.

(Kena Upanisad I.3, 4 )

There  is what seems a straightforward admission that the logico-empirical method cannot establish the existence of Brahman.  Why might that be so?  If Brahman is the Self then the Self cannot be grasped in the way that any object might be.   The consciousness that is being grasped would have to grasp itself being grasped and that grasping of etc.  Bertrand Russell noted this in a letter to Frege.  There is inevitable infinite regress.  Shankara in his commentary :

Though the mind thinks and determines other things, it does not think or determine itself; for of it, too, Brahman is the Self.  A thing is cognised only by the mind and the senses.  As Brahman is not an object of perception to these, therefore,na vidmah,we do not know.

How then is Brahman to be communicated or taught to a disciple?  Brahman escapes all categories but there is deep wisdom embedded in the realised masters of traditional authority.  Put the disciple in the vicinity of a realised sage and he will begin to resonate with the knowledge of “the Brahman that is immediate and direct - the Self that is within all” (Brhadaranyaka Up. III.iv.1)

In this way, the text, “Thus we heard” etc., states how through a succession of preceptors and disciples was derived the purport of the sentence which establishes Brahman that Self of all which is devoid of distinguishing features, and is the light of pure consciousness.  Moreover, Brahman can only be known through such a traditional instruction of preceptors and not through argumentation, nor by study (or exposition), intelligence, great learning, austerity, sacrifices, etc.....

'The Psychology of Totalitarianism' by Mattias Desmet

The thesis of Desmet’s (Prof. of Psychology at Ghent University) book is very simple and easily stated.  The general official  reaction to Covid was an instance of what he calls mass formation.  Given the right social conditions which he points out are manifestly available in modern society namely alienation, high levels of anxiety, anomie, meaningless jobs, lack of a firm moral scaffolding, and the numberless worries generated by the agitations of social media, a significant proportion of the populace are ready to become ensorcelled by a single threat and form a crowd, an aggregation of headless chickens that devolves to the intelligence of the most stupid in the mob.  Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book ‘The Crowd’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ are precursors to this line of analysis which M.D. lays out with splendid clarity.  Of the two earlier books Le Bon’s is the more readable, Arendt’s is turgid with footnotes flourishing like scholastic weeds.

To get a good resume of the book’s main thesis your best resource is to view one of the many youtube videos in which Mattias Desmet appears.  There is much more detail in the book particularly about how the logico-empirical vision of science enables technocratic authoritarianism.  In the end chapters of his book he maintains that even this version of scienctific method is wrong, science is as much an intuitive process as an empirical one.  To discover the protophaenomenon (cf. Coleridge) 

Coleridge on Method 

is not a matter of diligent searching but alertness to its presentation or knowing where to look.  To alter Pater’s dictum about art, all science aspires to the condition of music.  Desmet uses examples from Chaos theory to illustrate the inevitable harmony and beauty that underlies any apparent disorder.

Some readers may find this philosophical coda to be an add on and unnecessarily elevated compared to the practical aspects of the earlier chapters, hovering as it does in the thin

air of panpsychism.  I think that it is a demonstration of the general need for a metaphysical superstructure that is resistant to the frenzies of popular agitation.  Everyone needs something like this though it may be unlike the speculations of Desmet.

This is an excellent book.  The central idiocy of Covidology is still going on and in one of his videos Desmet remarks that Totalitarianism always ends badly and worse may be on the way.  The German health ministry reports that serious adverse reactions may have occurred in 1 in 5,000 injections (note not people, injections):

adverse reactions to innoculation

Dr. Doshi in a study conducted by the British Medical Journal found that the adverse reactions exceeded the reduction in numbers requiring hospitalization due to Covid.