"I return to hell."
Remember the narrative of the nineties? The Olive Tree and the Lexus narrative? The inevitable march of capital over the sullen bodies of obstetric leftists? The final, historic turn to private enterprise all over the third world? Latin America was the happy, happy example for NYT shills of the process like Thomas Friedman, who has turned his supernatural talent for bad advice to Iraq these days – appropriately enough. The war in Iraq can considered, in some ways, the logical extension of the globalization ideology – if you don’t like private enterprise, we’ll kill you.
Two items today should be noted.
One is an old item, from the Guardian, Feb. 12. Go to it. It is a review of a unique document, the diary of a Brazilian woman, Carolina Maria de Jesus, who spent her life in the “insoluble hell” of a Sao Paulo shanty town – Beyond all pity. Maria de Jesus’s money life – our Siamese twin/devil in this life – was spent gathering junk to sell. Especially papers, waste papers, according to the author of the article, Felipe Fortuna:
“De Jesus wrote out of her poverty. By day and by night, waste paper and writing paper were the materials from which she built her life: by day, she made money by gathering and sorting paper, but at night, when she could, she would confront the blank pages of her notebook.
'The diary is not, by definition, a controlled creative process, nor is it a fictional work: it is a text bound by dates, which develops chronologically, without the need for climaxes. Nevertheless, the diary of De Jesus always records her life in the shanty town as an experience of overcoming, to which the succession of days and nights is crucial. All of a sudden, she will record how she doesn't know what the next day will bring, whether there will be any paper to sort, and therefore any food. She is in a constant state of precariousness, like someone who for years experiences work in a hospital, prison or mental asylum. And the life of De Jesus is as surprising as her text, both to her and her readers.”
Maria de Jesus saw the shantytown as the eternal impress of an active degradation which was dragging her to the bottom, and which would drag her children to the bottom, a perspective that might make some purveyors of identity politics nervous. Ourselves, we understand the irritation – living on the edge of your nerves sensitizes you to the trivial, to the neighbors’ disgusting behavior, to the law that rules out all generous gestures as suicidal. Here’s an example of an entry:
“The birthday of my daughter Vera Eunice. I wanted to buy a pair of shoes for her, but the price of food keeps us from realising our desires. Actually we are slaves to the cost of living. I found a pair of shoes in the garbage, washed them, and patched them for her to wear.
I didn't have one cent to buy bread. So I washed three bottles and traded them to Arnaldo. He kept the bottles and gave me bread. Then I went to sell my paper. I received 65 cruzeiros. I spent 20 cruzeiros for meat. I got one kilo of ham and one kilo of sugar and spent six cruzeiros on cheese. And the money was gone.
I was ill all day. I thought I had a cold. At night my chest pained me. I started to cough. I decided not to go out at night to look for paper. I searched for my son Joao. He was at Felisberto de Carvalho Street near the market. A bus had knocked a boy into the sidewalk and a crowd gathered. Joao was in the middle of it all. I poked him a couple of times and within five minutes he was home.”
Another piece of more ephemeral news comes to us via today’s NYT, which reports, unsurprisingly, that privatization is dead in Latin America.
“El Alto, Bolivia -- Piped water, like the runoff from the glaciers above this city, runs tantalizingly close to Remedios Cuyuña's home. But with no way to pay the $450 hookup fee charged by the French-run waterworks, she washes her clothes and bathes her three children in frigid well water beside a fetid creek.
So in January, when legions of angry residents rose up against the company, she eagerly joined in. The fragile government of President Carlos Mesa, hoping to avert the same kind of uprising that toppled his predecessor in 2003, then took a step that proved popular but shook foreign investors to their core. It canceled the contract of Aguas del Illimani, a subsidiary of the $53 billion French giant Suez, effectively tossing it out of the country and leaving the state responsible.”
The swing back is going to be interesting – especially as the ideologues attempt to explain the conjunction of economic recovery and that horrid state, interfering in the economy:
“No companies have been more buffeted than those running public utilities offering water, electrical and telephone services, or those that extract minerals and hydrocarbons, which, like water, are seen as part of a nation's patrimony.
In Peru, despite major economic growth, foreign investment fell to $1.3 billion last year from $2.1 billion in 2002. Ecuador has also seen investments sag, as oil companies that once saw the country as a rosy destination have faced the increasingly determined opposition of Indian tribes and environmental groups.
Argentina, which has taken a decidedly leftist path in the economic recovery following its 2001 collapse, has recouped only a fraction of the investments it attracted just a few years ago.”
Investment from the outside – the dulcet, rustling sounds of dollars coming into a country – was accompanied, throughout the eighties and nineties, by another sound – the sucking sound of capital leaving the country to pay for both an unsustainable boom in imported consumer items and the mausoleum like piles of monstrous, useless debt. We will see if Latin American left leaning governments – even those, like Brazil’s, pursuing right leaning economic policy – start to understand that investment from the outside should come from Latin American countries themselves.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Monday, February 21, 2005
War crimes alert
John Burns, the NYT reporter who is to the American army what the legendary guinea pig is to the legendary S.F. polysexual, breathlessly informs us that the same tactics that were used against Falluja are now being turned against Ramadi.
“Between August and November, the strategy drove Shiite rebels out of the holy city of Najaf, forced a standdown by the same group in Baghdad's Sadr City district, and ended Sunni insurgents' stranglehold on Falluja, a major staging post for attacks.
The Falluja offensive ended with much of the city reduced to rubble, and insurgent groups still capable, weeks later, of mounting attacks from isolated pockets of resistance.
But American commanders acknowledged a more compelling reason that the offensive had proved less decisive than they had hoped. Many rebels fled ahead of the offensive, some north to Mosul, some southeast toward Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad, and others to Ramadi, 40 miles to the west, where insurgents last year took a measure of control almost on a par with their takeover of Falluja.”
Hey, how’s this for a compelling counter-narrative: a foreign army comes in, destroys hospitals, the majority of houses and small businesses, commits acts of terrorism both from the air and on the ground against a civilian population, and disperses it with maximum cruelty across the countryside – and population retaliates? Of course, I’m merely joking: surely the civilian population rejoiced at having its children shot at, its homes leveled, its religion desecrated, and it refugees treated to repeated humiliation by the Americans, because they knew that really, in our hearts, we are freedom lovin’ band. Rat Pack nation under God, just swingin’ in old Mesopotamia.
So, in the hall of shame, where the Sand Creek massacre stands next to My Lae and Falluja, we will soon be inscribe the name Ramadi. We can look forward to a lot of pics of kids burned to the gills, young men gutted, and the like, in the next few weeks. Discomforting, but just think what it feels like to the Iraqis.
John Burns, the NYT reporter who is to the American army what the legendary guinea pig is to the legendary S.F. polysexual, breathlessly informs us that the same tactics that were used against Falluja are now being turned against Ramadi.
“Between August and November, the strategy drove Shiite rebels out of the holy city of Najaf, forced a standdown by the same group in Baghdad's Sadr City district, and ended Sunni insurgents' stranglehold on Falluja, a major staging post for attacks.
The Falluja offensive ended with much of the city reduced to rubble, and insurgent groups still capable, weeks later, of mounting attacks from isolated pockets of resistance.
But American commanders acknowledged a more compelling reason that the offensive had proved less decisive than they had hoped. Many rebels fled ahead of the offensive, some north to Mosul, some southeast toward Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad, and others to Ramadi, 40 miles to the west, where insurgents last year took a measure of control almost on a par with their takeover of Falluja.”
Hey, how’s this for a compelling counter-narrative: a foreign army comes in, destroys hospitals, the majority of houses and small businesses, commits acts of terrorism both from the air and on the ground against a civilian population, and disperses it with maximum cruelty across the countryside – and population retaliates? Of course, I’m merely joking: surely the civilian population rejoiced at having its children shot at, its homes leveled, its religion desecrated, and it refugees treated to repeated humiliation by the Americans, because they knew that really, in our hearts, we are freedom lovin’ band. Rat Pack nation under God, just swingin’ in old Mesopotamia.
So, in the hall of shame, where the Sand Creek massacre stands next to My Lae and Falluja, we will soon be inscribe the name Ramadi. We can look forward to a lot of pics of kids burned to the gills, young men gutted, and the like, in the next few weeks. Discomforting, but just think what it feels like to the Iraqis.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
In the NYT Magazine, there is a small piece by Jim Holt about intelligent design. The point Holt is making is of the traditional burlesque variety - the often incredible “sloppiness” of design of creatures in nature that so often renders them so unfit that they go extinct argues, at the very least, that the intelligence doing the designing is of a low order. However, Holt’s piece includes a paragraph we can’t let go by:
“From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.”
This is wrong, and it is the wrong way to go to overthrow ID. A testable proposition usually means one in which observations can be hooked to quantities of some kind. Those quantities are what make possible predictions – and, in fact, it is often the quantitative effect one is watching. ID, like any theory, tells us enough about the world that we can look around and see whether what it says relates to what we find. So, the old burlesque principle (did Adam have a navel, yuck, yuck) is not going to cut it.
What should we look for if ID is true? Our post here gives you the background. To cut to the chase: where there’s a watch, there’s a watch factory. The increasing complexity of design entails a parallel increase in material evidence for that design. Thus, ID is as testable as any other theory – if that material evidence is spotty, then ID would be disputable. That the material evidence, so far, is completely and seamlessly non-existence makes it a good bet that ID is less likely to be true than, say, medical astrology. That its advocates have never lifted a finger to find the material trail that leads to ID events shows pretty much that we are dealing with buncombe artists – which do seem to infest the ranks of the evangelical set.
Unfortunately, those who argue against ID are so convinced that it is nonsense (understandably) that they don’t take it seriously enough to ask about its consequences. If they treated it more seriously as a theory, its gross inaccuracies would more quickly expose it as nonsense.
“From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.”
This is wrong, and it is the wrong way to go to overthrow ID. A testable proposition usually means one in which observations can be hooked to quantities of some kind. Those quantities are what make possible predictions – and, in fact, it is often the quantitative effect one is watching. ID, like any theory, tells us enough about the world that we can look around and see whether what it says relates to what we find. So, the old burlesque principle (did Adam have a navel, yuck, yuck) is not going to cut it.
What should we look for if ID is true? Our post here gives you the background. To cut to the chase: where there’s a watch, there’s a watch factory. The increasing complexity of design entails a parallel increase in material evidence for that design. Thus, ID is as testable as any other theory – if that material evidence is spotty, then ID would be disputable. That the material evidence, so far, is completely and seamlessly non-existence makes it a good bet that ID is less likely to be true than, say, medical astrology. That its advocates have never lifted a finger to find the material trail that leads to ID events shows pretty much that we are dealing with buncombe artists – which do seem to infest the ranks of the evangelical set.
Unfortunately, those who argue against ID are so convinced that it is nonsense (understandably) that they don’t take it seriously enough to ask about its consequences. If they treated it more seriously as a theory, its gross inaccuracies would more quickly expose it as nonsense.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Portents
If the Bush administration’s embrace of both unilateralism and third world deficit financing really does signal the twilight of the American era – and if projections of the budget deficits to come are accurate, it is hard to see post Bush America as anything more than a much bleaker place – one wonders what happens after the hegemon self destructs?
There’s a story in Fortune this week by Vivienne Walt about the deals being made between the Iranian government and China’s businesses that might be a small indicator. A little background music, maestro.
The U.S., pursuing its cordon sanitaire around Iran, long ago set itself up for a Persian Gulf policy that was completely at odds with reality. Of course, the Bush people, exemplary nitwits, have been the enthusiastic gravediggers of that policy, going from an unnecessary invasion to a war crime studded occupation to the current narcotized superfluity as patrons of the coming Iraq Islamic Republic. Always trust these people to turn stupid policies into disastrous ones, paid for by more borrowing. We would be more up in arms at this site about, say, the asset stripping going under the name of “social security reform” if it weren’t for the thought that every dollar borrowed to put into the pockets of the super-rich is another dollar that won’t go towards the WMD of hegemony.
Having successfully rendered the U.S. more vulnerable to the attacks of the intact Al Qaeda, and committing the U.S. to a failing policy in which another thousand or so American kids will be pointlessly slaughter, while they themselves are encouraged to pointlessly slaughter, the Bush people have been feeling their oats lately, which is why the beady eye has been cast on Iran. Yet as the world knows, the U.S. can’t afford to invade Iran, since it has neither the manpower nor the money. It can come up with both. However, to come up with both would mean alienating the Snopes set, who solidly support Bush only to the extent that he provides inspiring occasions for Snopesian national anthem singing and tax cuts to disguise the coming encroachment on inkind benefits. To actually snatch Snopesian kids and have them die pointlessly in advancing on Teheran might actually interrupt the wet dream, thus sharpening the Snopesian eyesight for the rip off of any hope for their own retirement, and the increasing costs of keeping the old folks in chicken wings and arthritis pills.
Here’s the key graf from the Fortune article:
“Under the gas agreement reached last October, China will import more than 270 million tons of natural gas over the next 30 years from Iran's South Pars field in the Persian Gulf, the largest natural-gas reserve on the planet, which Iran shares with its tiny neighbor Qatar. That will bring Iran about $70 billion in hard currency. And that's just the start. The two-part deal also gives Sinopec a half-share in one of Iran's most important new discoveries, the Yadavaran field, an energy-rich area in southwest Iran, allowing the company to explore for oil over the next few decades. With the field's oil reserves estimated at about 17 billion barrels, China's operations could be worth another $100 billion.”
Interestingly, the market opened up by China has interested India, as well. Feelers are out from India to Iran. We have no doubt that, as these deals congeal into infrastructure, it becomes much more risky for the U.S. to bomb the place.
One of the monuments of the Bush era – its elevation of hypocrisy to the golden rule – is embodied in no Southern entrepreneur so much as Richard Scrushy, erstwhile head of HealthSouth. For amusement’s sake, we urge our readers to take a gander at the NYT article about him. Scrushy is a piece of work – cut from the same cloth, actually, as his fellow entrepreneur, Bush, but without the family connections that made it possible for the latter to climb unscathed out of the hole of petty corporate crime. Scrushy, our readers will remember, provided much amusement for LI in the first denuding wave of corporate melt-downs back in 2002.
Here are three grafs which somehow give off a whiff of Karl Rove:
“Mr. Scrushy, 52, began attending Guiding Light not long before his indictment in 2003 on charges of overseeing a $2.7 billion conspiracy to defraud shareholders of HealthSouth, a chain of rehabilitation hospitals he started two decades ago. A spokesman for Mr. Scrushy said Mr. Scrushy had given money to Guiding Light, but he declined to specify how much. "He has always supported the churches he attends," the spokesman, Charlie Russell, said.
It is not uncommon, of course, for someone in the public eye who has fallen from grace to migrate to a house of prayer. But Mr. Scrushy's new emphasis on his ties to Birmingham's large black population and his churchgoing ways have many people in this city asking, is it all part of his defense strategy? About 70 percent of Birmingham is African-American, and of the 18 jurors and alternates at his trial, 11 are African-American.
The danger is that Mr. Scrushy's very public moves could backfire, especially considering that inside the courtroom his lawyers are following a different, and decidedly uncharitable, strategy. His legal team has been aggressively seeking to tarnish the reputations of Mr. Scrushy's former employees who are testifying against him. In fact, in late January, one lawyer, Jim Parkman, of Dothan, Ala., accused a former HealthSouth executive of being a heavy-drinking philanderer.”
The article goes on:
“These actions have astounded some former associates of Mr. Scrushy, who was known around Birmingham for the conspicuous display of his wealth before his problems with the law. According to a list of assets drawn up by federal prosecutors, Mr. Scrushy owns two Cessna jets; a Lamborghini Murcielago and a Rolls Royce Corniche; three Miros, two Chagalls and a Picasso; and several multimillion-dollar homes.
"In all my visits to the executive suite at HealthSouth, I never saw a black person there, not among the executives, the doctors or the secretaries," said Paul Finebaum, a radio talk-show host and former business associate of Mr. Scrushy. "The first time I heard religion and Richard Scrushy mentioned in the same sentence was when I read about him going to Guiding Light Church. I think he must be running out of options."
Somehow, we love it…
If the Bush administration’s embrace of both unilateralism and third world deficit financing really does signal the twilight of the American era – and if projections of the budget deficits to come are accurate, it is hard to see post Bush America as anything more than a much bleaker place – one wonders what happens after the hegemon self destructs?
There’s a story in Fortune this week by Vivienne Walt about the deals being made between the Iranian government and China’s businesses that might be a small indicator. A little background music, maestro.
The U.S., pursuing its cordon sanitaire around Iran, long ago set itself up for a Persian Gulf policy that was completely at odds with reality. Of course, the Bush people, exemplary nitwits, have been the enthusiastic gravediggers of that policy, going from an unnecessary invasion to a war crime studded occupation to the current narcotized superfluity as patrons of the coming Iraq Islamic Republic. Always trust these people to turn stupid policies into disastrous ones, paid for by more borrowing. We would be more up in arms at this site about, say, the asset stripping going under the name of “social security reform” if it weren’t for the thought that every dollar borrowed to put into the pockets of the super-rich is another dollar that won’t go towards the WMD of hegemony.
Having successfully rendered the U.S. more vulnerable to the attacks of the intact Al Qaeda, and committing the U.S. to a failing policy in which another thousand or so American kids will be pointlessly slaughter, while they themselves are encouraged to pointlessly slaughter, the Bush people have been feeling their oats lately, which is why the beady eye has been cast on Iran. Yet as the world knows, the U.S. can’t afford to invade Iran, since it has neither the manpower nor the money. It can come up with both. However, to come up with both would mean alienating the Snopes set, who solidly support Bush only to the extent that he provides inspiring occasions for Snopesian national anthem singing and tax cuts to disguise the coming encroachment on inkind benefits. To actually snatch Snopesian kids and have them die pointlessly in advancing on Teheran might actually interrupt the wet dream, thus sharpening the Snopesian eyesight for the rip off of any hope for their own retirement, and the increasing costs of keeping the old folks in chicken wings and arthritis pills.
Here’s the key graf from the Fortune article:
“Under the gas agreement reached last October, China will import more than 270 million tons of natural gas over the next 30 years from Iran's South Pars field in the Persian Gulf, the largest natural-gas reserve on the planet, which Iran shares with its tiny neighbor Qatar. That will bring Iran about $70 billion in hard currency. And that's just the start. The two-part deal also gives Sinopec a half-share in one of Iran's most important new discoveries, the Yadavaran field, an energy-rich area in southwest Iran, allowing the company to explore for oil over the next few decades. With the field's oil reserves estimated at about 17 billion barrels, China's operations could be worth another $100 billion.”
Interestingly, the market opened up by China has interested India, as well. Feelers are out from India to Iran. We have no doubt that, as these deals congeal into infrastructure, it becomes much more risky for the U.S. to bomb the place.
One of the monuments of the Bush era – its elevation of hypocrisy to the golden rule – is embodied in no Southern entrepreneur so much as Richard Scrushy, erstwhile head of HealthSouth. For amusement’s sake, we urge our readers to take a gander at the NYT article about him. Scrushy is a piece of work – cut from the same cloth, actually, as his fellow entrepreneur, Bush, but without the family connections that made it possible for the latter to climb unscathed out of the hole of petty corporate crime. Scrushy, our readers will remember, provided much amusement for LI in the first denuding wave of corporate melt-downs back in 2002.
Here are three grafs which somehow give off a whiff of Karl Rove:
“Mr. Scrushy, 52, began attending Guiding Light not long before his indictment in 2003 on charges of overseeing a $2.7 billion conspiracy to defraud shareholders of HealthSouth, a chain of rehabilitation hospitals he started two decades ago. A spokesman for Mr. Scrushy said Mr. Scrushy had given money to Guiding Light, but he declined to specify how much. "He has always supported the churches he attends," the spokesman, Charlie Russell, said.
It is not uncommon, of course, for someone in the public eye who has fallen from grace to migrate to a house of prayer. But Mr. Scrushy's new emphasis on his ties to Birmingham's large black population and his churchgoing ways have many people in this city asking, is it all part of his defense strategy? About 70 percent of Birmingham is African-American, and of the 18 jurors and alternates at his trial, 11 are African-American.
The danger is that Mr. Scrushy's very public moves could backfire, especially considering that inside the courtroom his lawyers are following a different, and decidedly uncharitable, strategy. His legal team has been aggressively seeking to tarnish the reputations of Mr. Scrushy's former employees who are testifying against him. In fact, in late January, one lawyer, Jim Parkman, of Dothan, Ala., accused a former HealthSouth executive of being a heavy-drinking philanderer.”
The article goes on:
“These actions have astounded some former associates of Mr. Scrushy, who was known around Birmingham for the conspicuous display of his wealth before his problems with the law. According to a list of assets drawn up by federal prosecutors, Mr. Scrushy owns two Cessna jets; a Lamborghini Murcielago and a Rolls Royce Corniche; three Miros, two Chagalls and a Picasso; and several multimillion-dollar homes.
"In all my visits to the executive suite at HealthSouth, I never saw a black person there, not among the executives, the doctors or the secretaries," said Paul Finebaum, a radio talk-show host and former business associate of Mr. Scrushy. "The first time I heard religion and Richard Scrushy mentioned in the same sentence was when I read about him going to Guiding Light Church. I think he must be running out of options."
Somehow, we love it…
Friday, February 18, 2005
LI was reading a paper by a philosopher, Alexander Bird, the other day. The paper defended the view that scientific progress is measured by the accumulation of knowledge – on the Baconian scheme – rather than measured by its generation of true statements, as the semantic philosophy of science would have it. It is coming out in Nous.
So far, so good. But then we came across this counterfactual:
“Imagine a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs. These true beliefs are believed solely because they are generated by M and they do not have independent confirmation. Now imagine that at time t an Archimedes-like scientist in this society realises and comes to know that M is weak. This scientist persuades (using different, reliable 4 methods) her colleagues that M is unreliable. This may be that society’s first piece of scientific knowledge. The scientific community now rejects its earlier beliefs as unsound, realising that they were formed solely on the basis of a poor method.
“On the semantic view this community was making progress until time t (it was accumulating true beliefs) and then regressed (it gave up those beliefs). This, it seems, contradicts the verdict of our intuitions about this episode. The acquisition of beliefs by an unreliable method cannot be genuine scientific progress, even if the beliefs so acquired are, by accident, true. Far from being a regressive move, giving up those unreliably produced beliefs, because of a now well-founded belief that they were unreliably produced, is positive, progressive step. So the semantic view yields a description in terms of progress and regress that conflicts with what we are intuitively inclined to say.”
We don’t mean to pick on Dr. Bird, but this is a rather neat demonstration of what we call the fallacy of the epistemologically deviant condition. The counterfactual only gets off the ground once we suppose “a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs.” The last sentence gives us, as a sort of axiom, the framing epistemological conditions that will allow us to judge the Bird’s counterfactual.
However, the last sentence is actually a historically contingent statement, even though it is be treated as an axiom – something that is true a priori. Since it is historically contingent, the fact that it is true entails a story about the discovery that makes it true. Such a story would necessarily overlap with the example it is supposedly framing. This means that the story of how, by some fluke, a community’s irrational beliefs, M, were also true beliefs would entail an investigation, if true, that would be formally equivalent to the investigation mounted by the Archimedes like scientist in the story.
The epistemologically deviant condition is a form of begging the question. It is, unfortunately, all too common in analytic philosophy. My friend Alan and I have been arguing, on his site, about Chalmers, the consciousness-man. Chalmers has a weakness amounting to addiction for epistemologically deviant conditions. His most famous argument, which revolves around postulating a zombie human double that can cogitate, speak, and behave like a human being, but doesn’t have conscious experience of being like a human being, violates the conventions of framing in exactly the same way Bird does, above. It is for this reason that these arguments never work.
However, I am less interested in their implausibility than in their motivation. These philosophic fictions share a frustration with the more artistic fictions of novelists and film-makers: how to pack all the information the author has into the story. The voice-over in a film is a perfect example of the kind of artistic compromises that emerge in the struggle between the creator and the material. The voice over doesn’t really have a logical place. Is it supposed to represent the Still-Sprache going on in the head? Is it supposed to be the filmic equivalent of the inaugural moment in first person stories – the fiction that some “I” has sat down to write a story? Oftentimes, the voiceover presents itself in the conventions of written fiction’s first person. Anybody who writes fiction knows the frustration of sticking with the person of the teller – including the frustration of third person telling, which is always about the writer’s calculated interference in the angle and unrolling of the story.
ps -- because I'm an incompetent logician, and because, frankly, nobody cares, I usually don't bother with the technical side of my arguments. But in this case, the technical side would go something like this:
Given a framing condition, S, containing a fact, s, that entails an argument, z.
And given a counterfactual, T, such that S frames T, containing a fact t;
If t entails z, then I'd call the counterfactual badly formed.
There's nothing here, really, except another self reference paradox. Usually, this is disguised by suppressing the epistemological source of s -- in other words, suppressing the answer to the question, how do we know s? It has been my experience that counterfactuals involve assumptions that usually render them either superficial or badly formed. Why? Because, on the one hand, if we can mount a straightforward argument for the framing facts, then we don't need the counterfactual; and if we can't, and have to fall back on the counterfactual, then it is illegitimately prior in the line of argument to itself -- in other words, we have the problem of the vicious circle.
For those few and hardy souls who've actually reached this point in the post, congratulations. Most of you have justly fled -- but I'm not going to do this kind of thing too often.
So far, so good. But then we came across this counterfactual:
“Imagine a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs. These true beliefs are believed solely because they are generated by M and they do not have independent confirmation. Now imagine that at time t an Archimedes-like scientist in this society realises and comes to know that M is weak. This scientist persuades (using different, reliable 4 methods) her colleagues that M is unreliable. This may be that society’s first piece of scientific knowledge. The scientific community now rejects its earlier beliefs as unsound, realising that they were formed solely on the basis of a poor method.
“On the semantic view this community was making progress until time t (it was accumulating true beliefs) and then regressed (it gave up those beliefs). This, it seems, contradicts the verdict of our intuitions about this episode. The acquisition of beliefs by an unreliable method cannot be genuine scientific progress, even if the beliefs so acquired are, by accident, true. Far from being a regressive move, giving up those unreliably produced beliefs, because of a now well-founded belief that they were unreliably produced, is positive, progressive step. So the semantic view yields a description in terms of progress and regress that conflicts with what we are intuitively inclined to say.”
We don’t mean to pick on Dr. Bird, but this is a rather neat demonstration of what we call the fallacy of the epistemologically deviant condition. The counterfactual only gets off the ground once we suppose “a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs.” The last sentence gives us, as a sort of axiom, the framing epistemological conditions that will allow us to judge the Bird’s counterfactual.
However, the last sentence is actually a historically contingent statement, even though it is be treated as an axiom – something that is true a priori. Since it is historically contingent, the fact that it is true entails a story about the discovery that makes it true. Such a story would necessarily overlap with the example it is supposedly framing. This means that the story of how, by some fluke, a community’s irrational beliefs, M, were also true beliefs would entail an investigation, if true, that would be formally equivalent to the investigation mounted by the Archimedes like scientist in the story.
The epistemologically deviant condition is a form of begging the question. It is, unfortunately, all too common in analytic philosophy. My friend Alan and I have been arguing, on his site, about Chalmers, the consciousness-man. Chalmers has a weakness amounting to addiction for epistemologically deviant conditions. His most famous argument, which revolves around postulating a zombie human double that can cogitate, speak, and behave like a human being, but doesn’t have conscious experience of being like a human being, violates the conventions of framing in exactly the same way Bird does, above. It is for this reason that these arguments never work.
However, I am less interested in their implausibility than in their motivation. These philosophic fictions share a frustration with the more artistic fictions of novelists and film-makers: how to pack all the information the author has into the story. The voice-over in a film is a perfect example of the kind of artistic compromises that emerge in the struggle between the creator and the material. The voice over doesn’t really have a logical place. Is it supposed to represent the Still-Sprache going on in the head? Is it supposed to be the filmic equivalent of the inaugural moment in first person stories – the fiction that some “I” has sat down to write a story? Oftentimes, the voiceover presents itself in the conventions of written fiction’s first person. Anybody who writes fiction knows the frustration of sticking with the person of the teller – including the frustration of third person telling, which is always about the writer’s calculated interference in the angle and unrolling of the story.
ps -- because I'm an incompetent logician, and because, frankly, nobody cares, I usually don't bother with the technical side of my arguments. But in this case, the technical side would go something like this:
Given a framing condition, S, containing a fact, s, that entails an argument, z.
And given a counterfactual, T, such that S frames T, containing a fact t;
If t entails z, then I'd call the counterfactual badly formed.
There's nothing here, really, except another self reference paradox. Usually, this is disguised by suppressing the epistemological source of s -- in other words, suppressing the answer to the question, how do we know s? It has been my experience that counterfactuals involve assumptions that usually render them either superficial or badly formed. Why? Because, on the one hand, if we can mount a straightforward argument for the framing facts, then we don't need the counterfactual; and if we can't, and have to fall back on the counterfactual, then it is illegitimately prior in the line of argument to itself -- in other words, we have the problem of the vicious circle.
For those few and hardy souls who've actually reached this point in the post, congratulations. Most of you have justly fled -- but I'm not going to do this kind of thing too often.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Impatience as politics
In an essay on Turgenev, Isaiah Berlin cited the review of one of his first novels, On the Eve, by a radical Russian critic, Dobrolyubov:
" 'If you sit in an empty box, and try to upset it with yourself inside it, what a fearful effort you have to make! But if you come at it from the outside, one push will topple the box."... Those who are truly serious must get out of the Russian box, break off every relationship with the entire monstrous structure, and then knock it over from the outside."
This is our feeling about the U.S.A. at the moment -- although it alternates, every day, with other feelings. What American writer, after all, can afford to be out of the box? But what American writer can afford not to dream, at least, about climbing out and giving it a splendiferous kick? So one ends up half in and half out of Dobrolyubov's box.
This is the awkward state that has prompted LI to examine our impatience, exhibited at large on this site, at least since the start of the Iraq war. In the last post, with the help of the Gospels, we analyzedimpatience from the situational perspective. But what about total impatience? What if the obstacle in one’s way seems to be a total, encompassing structure -- a box, if you will. Or a coffin. What if the jab of passion -- Jesus' hunger, the barfly's thirst -- is not provoked by any one momentary need, but the sum total and onslaught of all one’s needs? What if my lungs are filled with the debris of the million media meditated stupidities that circulate around in the very air of this country, getting in one's pores? It smells like America, every day. What if one wakes up in a catacomb, and is assured that it is the homeland?
Questions which occurred to me reading Chekhov’s The Duel, which Chekhov wrote in 1891, after making his trip to the penal colony of Sakhalin Island. In our first post about this, we said that if we were to teach history class about Lenin, we would certainly assign Chekhov. Reading Chekhov in the age of Bush, which is making Lenins of us all, gives us a renewed sense of two intellectual responses to an era that deliberately wallows in its own ignorance, that deliberately and viciously tears down the characters of its best and most intelligent members while lavishing admiration on its brutes, its monied, its vacuous: resignation and impatience.
In our post about the image of Bolshevism that Cold War ideologues claimed to derive an from Dostoevsky’s analysis of nihilism, the claim received its plausibility from the idea that Stalin’s crimes demonstrated the truth of the Dostoevskian dictum, if there is no God, everything is permitted. In choosing Chekhov as our literary lens, we want to paraphrase that dictum, exchanging it for something like: if there is no God of love, then love is not permitted. In one way, it is easy to see how we can move from the desire to blow up the bonds of affection that tie God to us and us to God to the fear that this means pulling the rug out from under all social bonds of affection. If the love of God is an interested illusion, the projection of an emotion upon an imaginary object – one begins to wonder about the supposedly real objects of one’s affections, and about the very process of that projection. The future of an illusion – isn’t it to be smashed? And that, we think, is the disturbing thing about The Duel.
In an essay on Turgenev, Isaiah Berlin cited the review of one of his first novels, On the Eve, by a radical Russian critic, Dobrolyubov:
" 'If you sit in an empty box, and try to upset it with yourself inside it, what a fearful effort you have to make! But if you come at it from the outside, one push will topple the box."... Those who are truly serious must get out of the Russian box, break off every relationship with the entire monstrous structure, and then knock it over from the outside."
This is our feeling about the U.S.A. at the moment -- although it alternates, every day, with other feelings. What American writer, after all, can afford to be out of the box? But what American writer can afford not to dream, at least, about climbing out and giving it a splendiferous kick? So one ends up half in and half out of Dobrolyubov's box.
This is the awkward state that has prompted LI to examine our impatience, exhibited at large on this site, at least since the start of the Iraq war. In the last post, with the help of the Gospels, we analyzedimpatience from the situational perspective. But what about total impatience? What if the obstacle in one’s way seems to be a total, encompassing structure -- a box, if you will. Or a coffin. What if the jab of passion -- Jesus' hunger, the barfly's thirst -- is not provoked by any one momentary need, but the sum total and onslaught of all one’s needs? What if my lungs are filled with the debris of the million media meditated stupidities that circulate around in the very air of this country, getting in one's pores? It smells like America, every day. What if one wakes up in a catacomb, and is assured that it is the homeland?
Questions which occurred to me reading Chekhov’s The Duel, which Chekhov wrote in 1891, after making his trip to the penal colony of Sakhalin Island. In our first post about this, we said that if we were to teach history class about Lenin, we would certainly assign Chekhov. Reading Chekhov in the age of Bush, which is making Lenins of us all, gives us a renewed sense of two intellectual responses to an era that deliberately wallows in its own ignorance, that deliberately and viciously tears down the characters of its best and most intelligent members while lavishing admiration on its brutes, its monied, its vacuous: resignation and impatience.
In our post about the image of Bolshevism that Cold War ideologues claimed to derive an from Dostoevsky’s analysis of nihilism, the claim received its plausibility from the idea that Stalin’s crimes demonstrated the truth of the Dostoevskian dictum, if there is no God, everything is permitted. In choosing Chekhov as our literary lens, we want to paraphrase that dictum, exchanging it for something like: if there is no God of love, then love is not permitted. In one way, it is easy to see how we can move from the desire to blow up the bonds of affection that tie God to us and us to God to the fear that this means pulling the rug out from under all social bonds of affection. If the love of God is an interested illusion, the projection of an emotion upon an imaginary object – one begins to wonder about the supposedly real objects of one’s affections, and about the very process of that projection. The future of an illusion – isn’t it to be smashed? And that, we think, is the disturbing thing about The Duel.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
“He was inadequate, certainly, even laughable at times, but he was a thinker and not a dictaphone, and when he blew his brains out he did the job thoroughly. – Eleanor Clark
First, to brag: We notice that Juan Cole today quietly proposed the analogy to Mehdi Bazargan we floated last week. Hey, LI is, in its own eccentric way, sometimes ahead of the game.
...
LI is growing increasingly snappy about the multitude of political imbecilities against which, as a citizen of the Leviathan, we have to strive. Mentally, at least. There was a meme on the ‘sphere a week or so ago about how liberals can express their love for America. Apparently, the thing to do at the moment is to find lyrical words to match the catch in the throat and the heart whenever Old Glory goes by. LI wants to know – how does America love us? We want a little return glow. We want America not to try to kill us, rob us, or send the cops and the taxmen to club us in order to extract the uber-tithe now demanded by the wealthy. There’s a certain battered wife pathology that comes out of all these liberal cries of amorous passion, like Olive Oil weeping for her Brutus.
The fact is, we don’t love America, and our creed is that love of country, in some utopian future, will attenuate to the vanishing point throughout the world. It is the usual Imagine-Lennon-hippie-shit thing. However, we do like America. Like it since our bones and gristle formed here, our heart first went thud thud thud here, our tongue shapes English as only an American can, and we could no more imagine ourselves exiting in this world without America than we could imagine ourselves existing without oxygen. We would like America even more if a few changes were made around here…
So – to hook up by such awkwardly indirect means to an earlier post – we were talking about how Chekhov’s The Duel explained something about Lenin. We never exactly explained what we meant. This post is still going to differ the moment of interpretation, because we want to first say philosophical things about our snappishness. Or, more generally, about impatience. To leap frog ahead, there’s a certain politics of impatience that was all over European culture in the first quarter of the twentieth century. And we’ve noticed that impatience has become our own primary mode of understanding American politics under the current regime.
Now, onto Mark 11.
.....................................................................................
Advertisement
(Thanks to Gadflybuzz for carrying this advertisement)
Check out RWG Communications.
We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
Write rgathman@netzero.net for details.
End Advertisement
..................................................................................……………
A little exegetical work, here. In Mark 11, we are told of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. This is interwoven with a story that is seemingly minor and rather shocking – it seems to have been interpolated from a book about a sorcerer, since it recounts something that is more like a magic trick than a miracle. But it was noted. The Gospels are many things, but one thing they aren’t is garrulous. What is noted there is significant.
Jesus, then, is hungry. “… seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.
And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever.”
Another story then is told: Jesus going to Jerusalem and throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. He leaves the city, then, with the author implying that he felt some threat from the Pharisees. And then we get the end of the story of the fig tree:
And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots.
And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.
And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.”
So, here is a template for an inquiry into the Sources and Nature of Impatience. What is impatience? The above story has always been rather shocking to the pious, since patience is considered a virtue, and the exemplary son of God, Little Lord Fauntleroy on the cross, is supposed to display all the virtues and good table manners too. Instead, he here displays the spoiled behavior of a prince in a fairy tale or gossip column.
A few notes:
1. Interesting that impatience should be thought of as something secondary to patience – as though patience were our primary attitude to time and the resolution of our wants. That’s a rather utopian turn for the language to take. Is it justified? One shouldn’t take language’s word for the way the world is – a mistake that philosophers make who think the royal road to the conceptual is through the etymological. At no point in its history does a word have any more semantic power than it has at any other point – I take this as a given. Still, we can take the word’s word for it that, to our society, in the vulgar conceptual schemas which web us about, there is something derivative, on the face of it, about impatience. And this would seem to indicate that patience is the thing to research, to find out about, if we want to find out about impatience. That the normal state is patience. But is the normal state felt as patient? Don’t we become conscious of our patience only in those instances in which it is called upon?
2. Mark’s story begins with hunger. Jesus is hungry. There’s a clue here, about impatience. If it is a perceptual transformation of an underlying patience, what is the stimulus to that transformation? Surely hunger, lust, need – the sharp end of the passions, scaling up from my urgent desire to urinate to the more complex desire to bring to some resolution my sexual attraction to some x. Impatience, in fact, bears the slight impress of that ritualization it achieves in fucking that we can see it in the corporal dance of impatience – the tapping foot, or the repetition of various meaningless sounds – some people hum, some people whistle, some people sigh to show impatience. Also, the angularity and jerkiness that comes over people who have reached a certain expressive point in their impatience.
3. The next element in Mark’s narrative is elegant: “And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.”
It is not, Mark carefully notes, the fig tree’s “fault” that it bears no figs. It is a healthy tree, and the time of figs was not yet. In a country where figs are common, one would imagine that the season at which fig trees bear figs was known to every adult. But the time for each tree varies. In any case, having no figs, the tree presents itself not as a medium to satisfy hunger, but as an obstacle to the satisfaction of hunger.
Now, this is the great hallmark of impatience. The fig tree isn’t actually an obstacle. It is a tree. It has its times. But impatience is projective and transformative – the hunger becomes equal to the lack of figs, and the lack of figs becomes intentional. Among other things, when impatient, I make the objects in the world intentional. Which implies that patience is an acceptance of the non-intentionality of things. Incidentally, in terms of the narrative itself, there’s some cognitive dissonance in the moral Jesus draws from the withering of the fig tree. On the one hand, there is the undoubted reference to patience in believing – to believe that what one says shall come to pass is the prophetic function. Jonah waiting outside of Ninevah for the walls to tumble is a proverbial instance. It is the condition of the catastrophe foreseen by the prophet that he can await it. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly the magician subtext – the idea that you, too, can do tricks just as good if he follow what I say. This dissonance reflects, perhaps, the conflict between the instrumental time of need, and the prophetic time of patience. One is reminded that the story of the fig tree sandwiches the story of the throwing of the moneychangers out of the temple – a fatal act of impatience on Jesus’ part.
Well, enough sermonizing for one day.
First, to brag: We notice that Juan Cole today quietly proposed the analogy to Mehdi Bazargan we floated last week. Hey, LI is, in its own eccentric way, sometimes ahead of the game.
...
LI is growing increasingly snappy about the multitude of political imbecilities against which, as a citizen of the Leviathan, we have to strive. Mentally, at least. There was a meme on the ‘sphere a week or so ago about how liberals can express their love for America. Apparently, the thing to do at the moment is to find lyrical words to match the catch in the throat and the heart whenever Old Glory goes by. LI wants to know – how does America love us? We want a little return glow. We want America not to try to kill us, rob us, or send the cops and the taxmen to club us in order to extract the uber-tithe now demanded by the wealthy. There’s a certain battered wife pathology that comes out of all these liberal cries of amorous passion, like Olive Oil weeping for her Brutus.
The fact is, we don’t love America, and our creed is that love of country, in some utopian future, will attenuate to the vanishing point throughout the world. It is the usual Imagine-Lennon-hippie-shit thing. However, we do like America. Like it since our bones and gristle formed here, our heart first went thud thud thud here, our tongue shapes English as only an American can, and we could no more imagine ourselves exiting in this world without America than we could imagine ourselves existing without oxygen. We would like America even more if a few changes were made around here…
So – to hook up by such awkwardly indirect means to an earlier post – we were talking about how Chekhov’s The Duel explained something about Lenin. We never exactly explained what we meant. This post is still going to differ the moment of interpretation, because we want to first say philosophical things about our snappishness. Or, more generally, about impatience. To leap frog ahead, there’s a certain politics of impatience that was all over European culture in the first quarter of the twentieth century. And we’ve noticed that impatience has become our own primary mode of understanding American politics under the current regime.
Now, onto Mark 11.
.....................................................................................
Advertisement
(Thanks to Gadflybuzz for carrying this advertisement)
Check out RWG Communications.
We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
Write rgathman@netzero.net for details.
End Advertisement
..................................................................................……………
A little exegetical work, here. In Mark 11, we are told of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. This is interwoven with a story that is seemingly minor and rather shocking – it seems to have been interpolated from a book about a sorcerer, since it recounts something that is more like a magic trick than a miracle. But it was noted. The Gospels are many things, but one thing they aren’t is garrulous. What is noted there is significant.
Jesus, then, is hungry. “… seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.
And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever.”
Another story then is told: Jesus going to Jerusalem and throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. He leaves the city, then, with the author implying that he felt some threat from the Pharisees. And then we get the end of the story of the fig tree:
And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots.
And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.
And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.”
So, here is a template for an inquiry into the Sources and Nature of Impatience. What is impatience? The above story has always been rather shocking to the pious, since patience is considered a virtue, and the exemplary son of God, Little Lord Fauntleroy on the cross, is supposed to display all the virtues and good table manners too. Instead, he here displays the spoiled behavior of a prince in a fairy tale or gossip column.
A few notes:
1. Interesting that impatience should be thought of as something secondary to patience – as though patience were our primary attitude to time and the resolution of our wants. That’s a rather utopian turn for the language to take. Is it justified? One shouldn’t take language’s word for the way the world is – a mistake that philosophers make who think the royal road to the conceptual is through the etymological. At no point in its history does a word have any more semantic power than it has at any other point – I take this as a given. Still, we can take the word’s word for it that, to our society, in the vulgar conceptual schemas which web us about, there is something derivative, on the face of it, about impatience. And this would seem to indicate that patience is the thing to research, to find out about, if we want to find out about impatience. That the normal state is patience. But is the normal state felt as patient? Don’t we become conscious of our patience only in those instances in which it is called upon?
2. Mark’s story begins with hunger. Jesus is hungry. There’s a clue here, about impatience. If it is a perceptual transformation of an underlying patience, what is the stimulus to that transformation? Surely hunger, lust, need – the sharp end of the passions, scaling up from my urgent desire to urinate to the more complex desire to bring to some resolution my sexual attraction to some x. Impatience, in fact, bears the slight impress of that ritualization it achieves in fucking that we can see it in the corporal dance of impatience – the tapping foot, or the repetition of various meaningless sounds – some people hum, some people whistle, some people sigh to show impatience. Also, the angularity and jerkiness that comes over people who have reached a certain expressive point in their impatience.
3. The next element in Mark’s narrative is elegant: “And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.”
It is not, Mark carefully notes, the fig tree’s “fault” that it bears no figs. It is a healthy tree, and the time of figs was not yet. In a country where figs are common, one would imagine that the season at which fig trees bear figs was known to every adult. But the time for each tree varies. In any case, having no figs, the tree presents itself not as a medium to satisfy hunger, but as an obstacle to the satisfaction of hunger.
Now, this is the great hallmark of impatience. The fig tree isn’t actually an obstacle. It is a tree. It has its times. But impatience is projective and transformative – the hunger becomes equal to the lack of figs, and the lack of figs becomes intentional. Among other things, when impatient, I make the objects in the world intentional. Which implies that patience is an acceptance of the non-intentionality of things. Incidentally, in terms of the narrative itself, there’s some cognitive dissonance in the moral Jesus draws from the withering of the fig tree. On the one hand, there is the undoubted reference to patience in believing – to believe that what one says shall come to pass is the prophetic function. Jonah waiting outside of Ninevah for the walls to tumble is a proverbial instance. It is the condition of the catastrophe foreseen by the prophet that he can await it. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly the magician subtext – the idea that you, too, can do tricks just as good if he follow what I say. This dissonance reflects, perhaps, the conflict between the instrumental time of need, and the prophetic time of patience. One is reminded that the story of the fig tree sandwiches the story of the throwing of the moneychangers out of the temple – a fatal act of impatience on Jesus’ part.
Well, enough sermonizing for one day.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...