culture

When the internet finds out that ignorance is bliss it goes crazy!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Alright, so here’s my rant for the week. Nice clickbait title, eh?

Clickbait titles are a tease, of course. They want you to follow them because their income depends on the number of hits they get. Our natural curiosity makes us vulnerable to this tactic and we fall for it all the time. Well, I thought I’d try to get you to have a look at my blog by using this stupid title. Is it working?

The title is misleading, of course, as many clickbait titles are. However, accuracy is not as important as getting you to click on their bait. Ignorance has its cost and its consequences. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it is a necessary condition for all of us. We cannot know everything about everything. The trick is to recognize and accept that.  You can only do something about it by way of learning to be open minded, critical (as in dissecting ideas, values, political events, everything) and scientific. Even at that, you may part the curtain of ignorance slightly. You’ll never open it completely.

Ignorance is the normal human condition at this time in history, especially since the industrial revolution. We have dealt with it using division of labour and so far that’s worked fairly well. A division of labour means that we cannot know everything about everything so we depend on other people to help us out every day of our lives with tasks we have no idea of how to accomplish ourselves. All of us are entirely dependent on others just to make it through a normal day and the more we live in a technologically complex world, the more that’s true. Basically, we are completely ignorant of most of the systems we rely on just to get through each day. And we don’t sweat that. It seems normal. It’s all good.

You may be adept at some things and a klutz at others. You may be a wonderful carpenter, a great mechanic, a skilled brain surgeon or a gifted musician but you’re not likely good at carpentry, mechanics, brain surgery, and music. You’re probably not one of the very few people who know about electricity and how to get it into your home. You trust that there are people who can ensure that electricity gets to your computers, stoves, refrigerators and heaters. You probably know nothing about farming either unless you’re one of the specialists in that field. Oh, you may dabble in growing your own food, but you may not know how to grow food on a scale large enough to feed your family or your village. You depend on others to produce the food you need. With some exceptions you will never know any of them personally. It’s true that some of us get pretty handy with tools, can grow a few veggies, repair a broken piece of furniture, glue a toy back together, or sew a badge on a shirt. We can do stuff without being an expert. But for the big stuff, we must leave it to the experts. Of course, experts can and do make mistakes and we need to make them accountable for their mistakes. What we need in that case is a method to measure success or failure and agree on a system of accountability. That in itself is no easy task. Science is a method of creating models of how the world works. Science can create systems to evaluate just how accurately any idea, structure, method, process, etc., conforms to how the world works.

So, we are ignorant of most things and that’s okay. However, there are things that you will pay dearly for if you ignore them.

For instance, if you see a little warning light on the dash of your car come on that looks like an oil can with one little drip of oil coming out of the spout and you ignore it and keep driving anyway there’s a good chance that you’ll trash your engine in the process. Don’t ignore warning lights on your dash! Automakers put them there for a reason. Don’t ignore the flashing lights at a railway crossing! Sheesh. Don’t run red lights!

The fact is that we get lots of warnings in our daily lives that we must heed, some of them are metaphorical warning lights that light up in our everyday lives that we ignore at our own peril, like ignoring our diet, high blood pressure, or a cold silence emanating from our partner. This is all fine and dandy, but there’s a whole other dimension to ignorance that revolves around ideas, policies, values, and social practices. That’s where I want to go now.

I know nothing about brain surgery and I don’t think you should trust me to remove your appendix. However, I have studied society and history for decades and I would expect that you would recognize that and give me my due. At least hear me out and listen to what I have to say before thinking of what you will come up with as a rebuttal based solely on your own personal experience or hearsay.

Most of you will have no educational experience to even begin to figure out what I’m up to here any more than you can figure out what makes a computer tick. It’s not because you’re stupid (well, some people really are) it’s because you’re ignorant, unknowing. My use of the word ignorant is not pejorative or negative, it’s accurate. You are largely unknowing and don’t have the resources to really figure out the dynamics that drive your existence, not your ideas, your values, your wants and desires, your sexuality, your emotions, nor your very lives and how difficult it is to figure out what the hell is going on. You may have some idea of what drives the dynamics of your life, and in fact, ignorance is not an either or thing. It can be partial…and, of course, that can be dangerous. Every day when I went to work, I was paid to think about these things. How many people have that kind of privilege?

This may sound harsh, but it’s simply true and there’s no way around it. We simply cannot know all things we need to know to live. Furthermore, we are all blinded by our institutions, those habits that drive our actions and thoughts. They prevent us from seeing the world for what it is. Why and how does that happen? Many scholars and scientists have spent their lives sorting out these issues with a great degree of success in my mind. To figure out how the social world works, you just have to know who these scholars and scientists are and read everything they wrote (or write). Then you have to think real hard about how their works relate to each other and build on each other. Who has the time or inclination to do that? The consequence of not doing that is continued ignorance (but don’t feel bad about that). The cost of doing it, unfortunately, in my experience is social compromise and intellectual loneliness (and I can live with that).

I really do feel that I have a fairly good grip on what drives us as humans in our specific cultures and how our cultures evolve. I got this grip from careful and systematic study at university and in private research. That makes me an expert, I guess.

In my next few blog posts I’ll explore various aspects of our lives and suggest models to explain them. That’s the scientific way. You can ignore what I say, of course. You may have particular expertise in a given activity or occupation. I’m sure I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to do your job.  If you want to know something about how society works, you might want to ask me or someone else who has spent a lifetime learning about these things. We each have our areas of expertise. Mine is society and history.

I’m a student of social and cultural life in a historical context. If you have anything you are curious about, ask me. See what comes out.

My next blog is about women and the way women have been portrayed and treated over history. A lot of what I write about will revolve around misogeny, sex, reproduction, patriarchy and seduction.

Ernest Becker 4: Nah, we don’t REALLY die, do we?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Ernest Becker 4: Nah, we don’t REALLY die, do we?

 

Alright, so Becker is keen on telling us that we are animals and our ‘animality’ must be considered in any analysis of what our place is on this planet.  More than that he states that like all animals we want to continue to live.  We crave life but know that it will end.  But that just can’t be!  We are such wonderful creatures, we’ve got these big brains and bodies that can give us such pleasure.  Why we must be the most intelligent things in the universe!  We can’t possibly die… Well, maybe, just maybe we don’t die.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Maybe our flesh and blood dies, but WE don’t.  Yes, disease and death are the twin evils that we face, but maybe, just maybe, that’s just a part of what we are.  Well…let’s let Becker speak now as gets to the point of his Introduction and of his book:

 

The reader has surely already seen the rub, and objected in his own mind that the symbolic denial of mortality is a figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood organisms, that if man seeks to avoid evil and assure his eternal prosperity he is living a fantasy for which there is no scientific evidence so far.  To which I would add that this would be all right if the fantasy were a harmless one.  The fact is that self-transcendence via culture does not give man s simple and staightforward solution to the problem of death; the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression…What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meaning of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety is created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men.  In seeking to avoid evil [in the form of death and disease] man is responsible for bringing more evil in to the world than organisms could ever do merely be exercising their digestive tracts.  It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.  This is the main argument of my book…how man’s impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.

 

So there you have it.  Some of you might consider this a little hyperbolic, but it’s nothing of the sort.  Any casual student of history or anthropology will tell you that attempts by people to destroy others who threaten their immortality are the hallmark of our time on this planet.  Just a hint to where we’re going with this from page 125 of EFE:  Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

Ernest Becker 3: Not my tummy, no, not that!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

 

 

I’m going to start right off with this quotation from Becker’s EFE, pages 3 and 4.

 

And this brings me to the unique paradox of the human condition: that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive organism; he is driven by the same craving to consume…to enjoy continued experience.  But man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die. [Oh no, not my tummy!]

 

…As I argued in The Denial of Death, man erected cultural symbols which do not age or decay to quiet his fear of his ultimate end – and more immediate concern, to provide the promise of indefinite duration.  His culture gives man an alter-organism which is more durable and powerful than the one nature endowed him with…

 

What I am saying is that man transcends death via culture not only in simple (or simple-minded) visions of gorging himself with lamb in a perfumed heaven full of dancing girls, but in much more complex and symbolic ways.  Man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life, some kind of larger scheme into which he fits: he may believe he has fulfilled God’s purpose, or done his duty to his ancestors or family, or achieved something which has enriched mankind…It is an expression of his will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because he has lived, has emerged on it, and has worked, suffered, and died…

 

This is man’s age-old dilemma in the face of death…what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.  Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning.  And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some way…

 

We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms is the basic motive for what is most distinctive about man – namely, religion.  As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, ‘not so much from…fear of natural death as of final destruction.’  But it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not…[it operates] to raise men above nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than purely physical things count.

 

So, culture is the mechanism by which we convince ourselves that we are immortal.  That has some pretty important consequences for us, and devastating ones at that as we’ll see tomorrow. 

 

These quotations may get shorter as we go along.  Right now it’s important to set the stage for what’s to come…

 

By the way, ellipses are used in the quotations to indicate that I’ve left some text out.  Square brackets include my interjections. 

 

Another ‘by the way’, you might be annoyed by Becker’s use of masculine pronouns everywhere and references to mankind and such.  Just remember that he wrote this in the early 70s, when I was getting married.  It was common to do this in those days and people still use masculine forms of speech to refer to all of us.  Be forgiving.  Exercise tolerance.  There’s not enough compassion in the world.