BE QUIET AND BE

This is the season for assertion of faith, for debates about the truth and belief, that seems to descend into a slanging match. So, for example, we have the opinions of the Anglican Bishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and Bob Ellis. Let us not give any ground so that we can verbally pulverize our protagonists, and let us just suppose that our belief is the source of all wisdom, a human quality sometimes in short supply. My partially in this bawl is with Ellis, humanism and atheism.

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My memory is that Christmas was a pre-Chrisitan festival, or set of festivals in North West Europe appropriated by the institutionalized church in one of those neat cultural appropriations so necessary to channel existing beliefs into an imposed paradigm that encourages compliances and it inexorably wipes away memory. So that the power of the medieval church is securely founded on the rock of medieval culture, almost to withstand contradiction, until it dissolves almost completely in the modern world.

Going against my grain, let me then introduce a different voice:

Let the wise guard their thoughts, which are difficult to perceive, which are extremely subtle, which wander at will.
Thought which is well guarded is the bearer of happiness.

-The Buddha (via The Blue Mountain Meditation Center.)

What is being said is not so much "Shut up" as "Be quiet", as least for a moment. I am inclined to be rancorous, if foolish, and I will discharge my mind in its present state.

The readers of this blog - if there are any - will I imagine always make up their own minds about the opinions and evidence put forward. If anything, I delight in being partisan and partial, and generally indifferent to established standards. Such license reflects my romance with the anarchic possibilities of the Internet, although the philosophy of anarchy may have a more serious purpose, as indeed may be true for philosophy in general.

Truth is a value for any writer, defined merely as stringing words together into expressions of meanings, and then aspiring to form paragraphs into a coherent, logical whole. So broadly defined anybody who writes a blog, or in the past diaries and letters, might in this sense be a writer. Let us claim some self respect and say that we are all writers, or could be if we knew what we were doing.

Knowing what you are doing is fitting into a paradigm, which reminds me of Einstein's comment to the effect that his education always got in the way of his understanding.For some people - literary professors and other like- minded people - an ability to write is a measure of an educated person. Of course, I think that education is too narrowly defined, but in writing we engage and reflect a civilization and a culture, whether we intend to, or not, because we use a social discourse invented for us incorporated into our consciousness.

Truth stirs my conscience. It is a personal thing, since in the first instance I communicate with myself, and what I write first amazes me before it fails to amaze anyone else. In this case, out of sight is not out of mind. Of course, since I can define it, I do not know what it is, except that I remember that Niels Bohr said:

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth

The reader, and there might be one, has to be kept in view, along with the mostly occluded self, to partially inform and frame the words and meanings. The reader is entitled to judge the evidence and the argument. We make judgments based on our perception of the source of information, our needs, our assumptions, how we imagine the world works, our prejudices, and even our cultural codes, whatever they maybe. So writing might be understood as a moral purpose because independent of being relevant or irrelevant, important or unimportant, the writer can be honest or dishonest.

For me truth has a practical meaning. The meaning is operative and provisional. Of course, tomorrow our prism or lens for looking at, refracting, and diffracting the world' may change. In fact was transformed for us as it did back in the early years of the twentieth century with Planck, Einstein and the others. I have not caught up. When I look out on nature, I imagine I see discrete objects not space and force fields, or how de Broglie's equation might fit in, let alone Planck's constant. So for all intents and purposes, I am still a determinist. Einstein expressly said that matter is energy and energy is matter, and he has a famous equation to prove it. I am not sure what for example Wordsworth or Blake, and others of their disposition in the nineteenth century, would have made of all this, but I think they would have regarded it as a world of greater possibilities than that defined by Newton and the "dark satanic mills".

Conscientiousness must exist at some level in ordinary interactions and relationships because most of us are not clever enough to be dishonest, or wish to be so disrespectful of others. A thought might be the truth that matters of great morality start with small matters easily overlooked. The possibility exists to compartmentalize relationships between subjects and objects. Such a position from the standpoint of human values diminishes us. I have to conclude I am not really conscientious having momentary sparks of consciousness. That leads to the thought: Are human values a contradiction in a materialist, reductionist, objective paradigm?

I go along with things. I subscribe. I give lip service. The paradigm is the paradigm. We all are, or believe ourselves to be forced to be practical and pragmatic, to reinforce by subscribing to power relationships, even when the emergencies that have brought hierarchies into being have served their purpose. To quote T S Eliot:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

This is the problem faced by real writers working for a living within an institution, such as a new organization, and it is a problem that blogs exist in part to overcome. There is a world of difference between writing for others and writing for ourselves, which might be seen as more indulgent and necessarily less serious, but in both worlds the shadow may fall. A fact that is characteristic of media ownership as it is of the economy in general is the tendency of markets produce oligopolies, conglomerations of power that reinforce themselves and feed on the existing culture and paradigms so that there is existence become invisible even though it surrounds us. They now with global reach, and for some parts of the the media, new problems. They decide in large part who can stand as a presidential candidate. If that is true they are responsible for Bush, who must be said has been very benevolent towards certain interest groups. Power creates reality, or the perception of reality, which might otherwise be the personal domain of journalism.

As the propagandists know, and never tire of reminding us, we mostly choose to believe what we believe, but this area of choice may be much narrower than we assume. So we are much more challenged by conflicting opinions than we like to imagine. We are up against those who strive to deceive and be dishonest, without any apparent moral qualms. I am my paradigm, except it is not my paradigm. The problem may be that I do not fully understand the paradigm in which I am embedded, or the paradigm may prove to incomplete, or completely wrong. Who I might be may exist outside the paradigm, which might be what you are, except we are at some point, between the interstices of existence, we are individuals.

Reference:

Brian L Silver - The Ascent of Science, The Sidback Preview, 1988.

I did not make up the references to Wordsworth and Blake, nor did I read the book, partly because I cannot see it easily to read, nor did I wholly understand what I could read either.

Michael N Nagler, "Compassion the Radicalism of This Age", Yes, (Fall, 1998).

The stuff I am quoting about paradigms and culture is my take, and possibily an inaccurate one, from Professor Michael Nagler Berkeley lectures on nonviolence. Each lecture is usually over an hour, and so it is not practical to quote them, since they do not exist in script. (The better access point given my internet connection is through the webcast version on the Metta site than through you tube.)