Summer of Lovecraft: I'll Sleep When It's Over

[My blog colleague and benefactor Tom Jackson of RAWIllumination.net wrote very recently about "Extraterrestrial Gargoyles On Medieval Scottish Church," which actuated the following blogspew.-OG]

One should not act or speak as if he were asleep. - Heraclitus

Earlier last month, in H.P. Lovecraft's Providence, the largest congregation yet in honor of HPL was held: the NecronomiCon, of course. It's good to see HPL's name finding ever-larger recognition.  The Washington Post even had a story about it. (See "Fans To Celebrate Horror Writer H.P. Lovecraft With NeconomiCon Gathering.") Michelle R. Smith notes that in HPL's "creations and works [...] they influenced might be better known than the man himself." Aye. It seems that for many of my favorite writers this is the story. Why? I don't know. We're reminded of the mental illness in his family and in HPL, and his 80,000 letters and his social networking with other writers. And he died in 1937.

Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi is quoted twice: "For (HPL), the most terrifying thing that could happen is to defy our understanding of the known laws of physics." Later in the piece Joshi says he thinks "we're finally getting to the era where horror fiction can be looked at as more than just something to scare you." And I wonder and ask: If true: why? Whatsit about "today" that allows a re-evaluation of a former "pulp"writer, someone the eminent critic Edmund Wilson wrote out down as a "hack" and "bad taste and bad art."?

Tom Jackson had noted before the NecronomiCon how the city of Providence was starting to honor its native son, HERE. Why? Hey, I love HPL. But why the building burgeoning ballyhoo? What's changed?

                                              I love this rendering of HPL. Who knows
                                              the artists's name?

In June the Guardian noted how quickly Kickstarter money for a life-sized bust HPL came in for the Athenaeum Library, and wondered why such a "terrible" and "execrable" writer was so famous, especially a racist one with the "bleakest worldview." Like that last is a bad thing? I tend to side with Luckhurst in his addressing of HPL's racism: not only was HPL mentally unwell...not exactly, as Prof. Carlin would say, "A happy guy," but he was provincial to an absurd degree, and his two years in multicultural New York were probably shocking to a man who fancied himself a scion to a bygone New England type. (There's a larger problem of why so many of our literary geniuses held to some sort of fascist politics, but I'll have to essay that some other time.)

My favorite quote from this article is by Elizabeth Bear, who, when asked why HPL was still such a big deal despite being a racist and all that, answers: "Because authors are read, and remembered, not for what they do wrong, but for what they do right, and what Lovecraft does right is so incredibly effective. He's a master of mood, of sweeping blasted vistas of despair and the bone-soaking cold of space. He has at his command a worldview that the average human being, drunk on our own species-wide egocentrism, finds compelling for its sheer contrariness."

That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die. - Abdul al-Hazred

Joshi's idea that we may be able to look at horror in a new way in the present epoch may have something going for it, and it's not just the plethora of games and films and graphic novels and iconography and just sheer depth of Lovecraft's influence. And yes, there are Baby books with the HPL Cthulhu mythos as themes. This from a man who once wrote, "I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page, or deals with the horrors unnameable or unaccountable that leer down from the external universes." 

I mean, what baby can't get on board with that? And now academics are getting on board, too.

                                     whiskey-tango-foxtrot??? (see the ET-gargoyles
                                     in the link to HERE) If this Thing mated with a
                                     gila monster, it might all make sense!

Whatever we see when awake is death; when asleep, dreams. - Heraclitus

The growing popularity among intellectual types of Lovecraft's work may be testimony to this. In a review of a collection of HPL titled Classic Horror Stories in the prestigious Los Angeles Review of Books, Jess Nevins reviews the extensive introduction and exegetical chops of the editor, Roger Luckhurst, and Nevins says Luckhurst's explanatory notes on HPL's style, allusions, and inventions are "exhaustive." I'll have to see for myself. The aforementioned Joshi and other scholars of HPL such as Dan Clore may have something to say here, but nonetheless, the most interesting thing to me, the aspect of HPL that seems to have opened the door toward some semblance of academic acceptance and canonicity is the trope that he's not strictly a "horror"writer or even "science fiction." Rather: he's "Weird." And elements of the Weird are given as "concerns with liminal things, in-between states, transgressions always on the verge of becoming something else." For Luckhurst this places HPL in a tradition that goes back to the 1880s and Coleridge, up to today's China Mieville. On the face of it, this doesn't wash with me, as I'd read Lovecraft's own analysis of his tradition in the long, tremendous essay, Supernatural Horror In Literature, and he sees his antecedents and influences as going back to around 1810, with the more extreme Gothics. Luckhurst obviously knows this essay well, but would rather argue that what makes HPL worthy of respect by the cognoscenti is those aspects of the "Weird."

It's cool that maybe a few thousand MA and PhD theses will be written on Lovecraft, but for me: Contra the common claim of critics that HPL's style was "execrable," I love his baroque catachreses and mixed metaphors, his obscure words and borrowings from science and Egyptology and late 18th/early 19th century archaisms, his psychedelic mixture of factual content with the speculative and eldritch bizarre imaginings. If academics see fit to worm Cthulhu into canonicity, fine, but trying to assert that he's not tainted by "being" a science fiction or horror writer (declared declasse and out-of-bounds among the Highly Learned long ago) and rather his classification is now respectably "Weird" like someone in, I don't know...the French Academy respect? This for me does not fly. His overall vision and style seems enough to be taken seriously.

And with the new neuroscience of unconscious workings and neurolinguistics, there seems much to bring the multi-diplomaed to a long study of HPL. His transcendently cosmic and gnostic horrors prefigure the feelings citizens may be having in the sort of State we live in now. Or maybe: the subconscious stirrings that give rise to an anxiety that maybe the march of technology has indeed taken over, that the machines are running us, that They have augmented our sensoria as appendanges and managed to convince us that we are still in charge, when it's Them. We are merely a way for Them to make more of Themselves. Okay, maybe I'm getting carried away and the strain of sativa is really good. Perhaps I should've gone more towards an indica. But suffice: the gnostic idea that we've learned enough to know that we are not in charge, but that we must repress this, in order to preserve our species's sanity?As if coming to terms with us not being, as Hamlet said, "the paragon of animals" is too ghastly to live with? That some massively indifferent but - to us - malevolent force is Out There? Doesn't this tap into the still-living imaginations of the children within all of us? (For a more nuanced, detailed and learned exegesis see - well, just about anyone who's written on Lovecraft, really - but I would point to Erik Davis if I had to pick one person. Maybe have a look at "Calling Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft's Magickal Realism," as found on pp.114-136 of Davis's stellar collection of occulture criticism and Nomad Codes.) But that's just me. Robert Anton Wilson has some wonderful takes on HPL as well.

"I suspect Dan Brown has as much sense of humor as me, but chooses to hide the fact. I'd like his books better if the professor came from Miskatonic instead of Harvard." - Robert Anton Wilson, in an interview in Secrets of Angels and Demons, p.8

Which takes me to a piece I ran across in The New Republic, a title I semi-stole for this blog: "This Is The Summer of Lovecraft," by novelist Walter Kirn. The opening paragraph hits a Lovecrafty tone and seems worthy of a film, but Kirn's writing about his actual life, lately?: he was "friends" with a sociopathic (psychopathic?) person named Clark Rockefeller - a likely name! - and has realized that for a full ten years he was duped by this guy, but not as bad as Rockefeller duped others. Worse than deception, Rockefeller is an impostor and convicted killer. Think of how you'd feel if you realize your "friend" was a monster all along. If you're like Kirn, you spend all day in "depressing, sedentary hard-labor" teasing out the ways and "methodologies" by which Kirn pulled off his deceptions. Worse: all of this takes place against a backdrop of the advent of what I call The Snowden Era: PRISM, secret FISA courts, the suspicious death of Michael Hastings, the President's private Kill Anyone I Want List. Writing in early August, Kirn doesn't get to Obama itching to bomb Syria because of alleged chemical weapons use. I hope Walter is hangin' tough.

Kirn answers his own question: Who are the winners this summer? Answer: Kafka, Orwell, Huxley, and Philip K. Dick, who suddenly becomes much clearer now to some of us.

It's a short piece and you ought to read it entirely, but don't miss the bits about how Clark Rockefeller used "Persona Management" (and the NSA does too): you invent fake identities online, then win the confidence of others, mine their data, then exploit them. Here's Kirn:

"In one case that I know of, he employed one fictional alter-ego to give a character reference to another. The victims didn't uncover the ploy until I alerted them to it, fifteen years later, and they only believed me when I pointed out that the Managed Persona they'd been scammed by bore the name of a villain from a popular novel."

Keyser Soze LIVES! (?)

What was that fragment from Herclitus? "Things are in the habit of concealing themselves?" (No, you idiot; try this: Nature loves to hide. (Frag 123)

Quick like a bunny: What has a single anterior nucleus embedded in a robust protruding axostyle, and an interior bundle flagella that emerge slightly sub-anteriorly and have a distinctive beat pattern?

If you answered, "Cthulhu Macrofasciculumque and Cthylla Microfasciculumque then you're fucking FREAKIN' ME OUT, dude! If you skipped the day we covered this, see HERE.

Finally, check out these Lovecraft-ish sea creatures that actually inhabit our world, now. I think television nature-channel editors must have seen these guys and thought, "The sponsors will abandon us if we show these demonic looking beasts! Forget it! Let's go with another segment of dolphins or chimps!" I would have been MUCH more interested in Biology in 9th grade if I'd been turned on to just about any one of these dudes. RAW fans: watch the video about the Sarcastic Fringehead, keeping in mind the 2nd circuit and the average hardcore fan of Fox News.

As I write in this, our Summer of Lovecraft of 2013 CE (summer in the No. Hemisphere) is down to its last three weeks. Even less. It's not too late to get to the library and finally read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. It'll prime you for October! O! The magnificent mind-spaghettifying horrors that await us for our enjoyment!

Neomedievalism as Metaphor, and a Plethora of Our Discontents

For anyone who's paying attention, Obama's conducting of the "global war on terror" seems Pentagon-run, and coterminous with the Bush-Cheney years of utter barbarity and horror. The war in Afghanistan, if it already seemed endless to you (it certainly does me), in truth, will be going on at least another ten years, no matter what happy-talk you hear in the mainstream electronic media or the corporate newspapers. The Obama Administration? Forget it. Here are some of the moves Obama's made that make him no different from the Neoconservatives that got us into this mess:

• Patriot Act extended: no reforms have been made from the Bush/Cheney era
• Warrantless wiretapping? Obama just signed an extension for five more years
• increased secrecy, repression and restriction of releases from Gitmo, let alone that it hasn't been shut down
• a new scheme for indefinite detention on Unistat soil
• a new theory of Presidential assassination powers, even of Unistat citizens
• Miranda rules diluted

I could go on and on, but I'll tell you the truth: I'm weak of heart when it comes to such things, and I just get depressed. Why do you think the OG usually writes about seemingly everything but this shit?

"The voice of history of often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery." - Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

You may have heard that Unistat is getting out of Afghanistan at the end of next year. Last month the Pentagon's top lawyer said we should see the Afghan war as "finite" but clearly, that was for the consumption of dupes and starry-eyed wishers. There's every reason to believe Unistat will be in Afghanistan for 10 more years, possibly forever. We are not "exiting" at the end of 2014. If you believe that, I know a Nigerian Prince who has some money he wants to share with you. The devil is in the semantics of the thing. And O! what semantics. You want semantics? I'll give you semantics.

"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." - George W. Bush, on 9/16/01, to the press, South Lawn of the White House

                                                        Hedley Bull

Medievalism/Neomedievalism and Neoconservatism
In 1977, British political theorist Hedley Bull published The Anarchical Society: A Study of World Order in Politics. Considered a "realist" thinker in International Relations, Bull was concerned with the rise of non-state and post-state actors in a field of thought that was governed by Cold War nation and state-based approaches. Bull's book has since become a classic in the field, and apparently every textbook in foreign relations now includes sections on neomedievalism.

Here's some of what Hedley Bull was onto in 1977. He had the foresight to see non-state and post-state actors on the world scene as playing a big enough role that we must begin to think in new ways. But first: who or what are "non-state actors"? Some would be: international terrorists, corporations and their own paramilitary squads, drug cartels, NGOs, and, even though he didn't mention them - because they didn't exist then, but he probably would have included them - computer hackers.

Some alternative paths, or solutions for world order with the rise of non-state actors, for Bull:

• world government 
• "solidarity of states" (probably a strengthening of the UN)
• a disarmed world
• ideological homogeneity among existing states
• a modern medieval model

There are other alternative paths; I have only skimmed Bull and have been greatly aided in this intellectual area by texts that comment on Bull, the best being a slim title, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, by Bruce Holsinger a prof. of English (specializing in the medieval era) and Music at the U. of Virginia. Holsinger points out that Bull devoted a scant few pages to  a neomedieval path to a new world order, but it looks like the NeoCons took that section of the book very seriously indeed...or so I infer from reading Holsinger reading Bull...

                                              Bruce Holsinger, defending the good 
                                             name of Medieval Studies, defending well

Holsinger, whose field of Medieval Studies covers roughly the 5th-15th centuries, includes the rise of Islam, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, Charlemagne, Mohammed, the Koran, courtly love, the Book of Kells, the English kings Shakespeare would immortalize in plays such as Richard III  and Henry IV, Marco Polo, Petrarch, St. Francis of Assisi, the Aztec Empire, Dante, Chaucer, feudalism, the Jin dynasty, Hildegard of Bingen, and Genghis Khan; Holsinger objects to the appropriation and semantic use of "medieval" by the post-9/11 Unistat political regimes. In one place he admits it's now so pervasive that the word "medieval" may not recover from its new meaning, but that his Medieval Studies colleague, Carolyn Dinshaw of NYU, tongue in cheek, proposed starting a group Concerned Medievalists For Peace, in the wake of 9/11.

The Holsinger book is - to me - the most interesting work on the deeper political workings of the Pentagon, neoconservatives, and the utter disasters of Unistat foreign policy since I read Nicholas Xenos's slim book, Cloaked In Virtue, on the cult of neocons that emanated with Leo Strauss, and how he taught a secret inner "true" reading of philosophers like Hobbes, to his initiates. The great irony, since I became aware of the Neo Cons (after Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind came out), was that Strauss was one of the many great Jewish intellectuals imported from Europe during the rise of Hitler.

(short article, not by Xenos: "Leo Strauss's Philosophy of Deception")

"History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of ideas." - Etienne Gilson

What Holsinger does is show how the rhetoric of "medievalism" has been applied by NeoCons to get us into this mess. The infamous "torture memos," for instance. I've read some maddening things on how the lawyers inside Bush's White House twisted semantics in order to override the Geneva Convention III (the POW issue) to redefine prisoners of war as "enemy combatants" which overrides Geneva, all International Law, and even human rights. Obama has gone along with this.

                                            Glenn Greenwald: if you want to know more 
                                            about the truth - as I see it - of Unistat foreign
                                            and domestic policy: read him!

Because the terrorists were stateless, or from "failed states" they aren't recognized under law. They are separated from us not only by religion and region, but by time: they are medieval. Therefore, modern ideas about law don't apply to them. Let us write the laws for them.

Holsinger goes on to show, in remarkable detail for such a short book, how the semantics of "medieval" has been used to circumvent...any semblance of sanity or humanity. In the name of "security."

What a terrific little book Holsinger has written. I just have one basic difference with him. On pp.15-16, Holsinger writes that Plato's Gorgias has "one of the great critiques of the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism in the Western tradition [...] In the words of Socrates to Gorgias, a professional rhetor, 'the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the people that he has more knowledge than those who know."

This has always been true and always will be true. It's up to the citizens (or post- or non-state actor) to educate themselves so rhetors (in this case, anyone from the Unistat State Dept) will not believe them, and seek better ways to live on the planet with "medieval" people. I'm impressed with Holsinger, but I don't believe he knows "the truth." And I don't believe Socrates or Plato knew "the truth," either. I think Gorgias was pointing out something that Plato didn't like (and I would guess, Socrates didn't like it either, but what about his schtick: The classic "I don't know anything; I'm just askin' you" routine?) and preferred to not think was "the truth": that no one has a privileged fulcrum point from which to see The Truth, with no occlusions having to do with historical accident, class interest, personal interest, psychological disposition, etc.

(These "medieval" people are people who happened to use a money-transfer scheme - hawala - that eluded all of our ultra-sophisticated computer-tracking efforts, because they knew about our computer systems. Yea: they're "medieval." They used cell phones and shredders and FAX machines. They just want us OUT OF THEIR PART OF THE WORLD. Is that so difficult to understand? Also they're pissed we support Israel so one-sidedly; they despise us, not for "our freedoms" - you have to be a total imbecile to believe that! - but because we propped up vicious tyrannies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Also they know we backed Iraq in the seven year Iran-Iraq war, that the CIA got rid of Iran's democratically-elected Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the brutal Shah and trained his secret police-killers, SAVAK. I could go on. They hate us for our policies. Some of these medieval people subscribe to a strain of radicalism that led to 9/11. But by no means all. All of this is "the truth" as I see it.)

Meanwhile, Unistat grows more and more medieval, in debt, the Robocop to the world, having lost its moral standing in the rest of the "free world," and seems intent on carrying out a neomedievalist foreign  (and, in some ways, domestic) policy that looks more and more like the Catholic Church trying to run the globe, circa 500-1450. And thus we drift ever closer to catastrophe.

Glenn Greenwald, from a week or so ago, in The Guardian. Germane to this rant.
Wolfowitz Doctrine
Late 2010 interview with the co-author of The Death of Neoconservatism
Five Ways Obama is Just Like George W. Bush
Monopolizing War: It's what we do best
Americans Are The Most Spied-On People In World History (Even the East Germans under the Stasi!)

Another Promiscuous Neurotheologist Post (But This One Gets Shanked Into the Chomskyan Rough)

Go ahead and skip this video of Harvard Professor Marc Hauser, but if you do you'll miss out on a bit of Irony. It's 3 minutes, 40 seconds:

Getting back to trying to figure out how religion came about and how it related to moral thought, Hauser at Harvard and Prof Illka Pyysiainen (don't even ask about pronouncing his name) of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (and their teams) worked on this problem. The posited positions seem to have been that 1.)We can either think of religion as an adaptation that solved the problem of cooperation among non-genetically related peoples when the tribe got big enough; or 2.) Religion evolved as a by-product of pre-existing cognitive capacities.

Position #1 and its adherents seem to think that the Cooperation Model means there is no morality without religion, although there seem to be a few who like the Cooperation Model but shy away from this "hard" position about "morality" as we know it today.

Position #2 and its adherents see religion as merely one way of expressing one's own moral intuitions.

Note that both assumptions make religious experience a brain experience solely and do not address the existence of any sort of Gaseous Vertebrate of Astronomical Weight and Heft (or: gee ohh dee).

My "intuition" says that, if I'm forced to choose one of the two positions, I'd go with #2, because I grew up irreligious and yet seem to have a modern Industrialized World adult's view of morality that fits in well enough that I'm not ostracized or shunned or forced into exile. I have friends. I'm kind to strangers and my loved ones know I love them. I'm not writing this from a SuperMax prison, where I'm doing Life plus 900 years for some cartoonishly heinous act, like taking over a kindergarten and slitting the throats of all the bunny rabbits and making the kids watch it, and then raping Ms. Schoolmarm in front of little Francine and Billy and Jared and Sally. Or masterminding a secret terrorist bombing of Cambodia.

[Oh wait a minute: that second thing really was done by a guy who's not only not in prison, but he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about Irony!]

Actually, I have no dog in that fight. I think all that will come of it are speculative narratives couched in as much social scientific study as the researchers can muster, the result being, depending on your proclivities, Just-So stories, or Edifying Discourse. I remain agnostic about the origin of religion but enjoy reading the attempts to travel in time to find the Origins. I take a pragmatist's view: what do I find good to think about?

A short precis of the Hauser/Pyysiainen paper appeared HERE. The paper was originally published in Trends In Cognitive Sciences on 8 February, 2010. Pyysiainen and Hauser looked at some plenitude of  studies on moral intuition and were impressed that people from many diverse religious backgrounds, and some people with no religious upbringing or affiliation? They all had no trouble in making moral judgments when faced with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. Ipso facto: people don't need a particular religious background in order to make sound moral judgments. And Hauser/Pyysiainen go to the position I'm guessing they had when they went in: religion emerged from pre-existing cognitive modules.

I thought Pyysiainen was appropriately conciliatory towards religion in his quote from the article in Science Daily: "However, although it appears as if cooperation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilizing cooperation between groups."

Hey, that's why these guys get the Big Bucks, eh?

The Kicker
Marc Hauser published this paper with his Finnish colleagues while, it turns out, Harvard was doing a five-year investigation on him, for charges of various academic frauds. Around six weeks ago, Harvard finally wrapped it up: Hauser - once an academic star, a favored lecturer at Harvard, prolific publisher, and one of John Brockman's Third Culturalists - was found guilty of scientific misconduct. He fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and "conducted experiments in factually incorrect ways." He's no longer affiliated with Harvard. (See HERE for Harvard's findings, and HERE for Hauser's response to the Federal Office for Research Integrity's findings.

For a long and insider's fascinating take on this whole episode see Charles Gross's piece from The Nation from late last year. It seems a fairly rare event when the grad students helping the star Professor turn the Prof in. When they do, it often taints the grad students and makes their life as future scientific researchers very difficult, but this time it does not seem to have harmed the students.

                        Professor Chomsky, most influential linguist of the 20th century, and
                        I think, a bad influence on now-fallen Marc Hauser. Chomsky's
                        reaction to Hauser's resignation, which happened long before
                          Hauser was convicted of academic fraud, is HERE.

The Chomsky Connection
Even though I copped to picking the Hauser/Pyysiainen of the two choices (due to no formal religious upbringing), when I read the piece and saw Hauser's name attached, I had already read he was under a long investigation. And, to be honest, I had become quite biased against his stuff - which ranged over an impressively large biological/philosophical/psychological terrain - because I'd followed him initially as a Chomskyan, who believed in Cartesian rational modules in the mind that get tripped by being in this world and then Do Whatever.

(No talk about neurons or neural circuits or the embodied brain, that's for damned sure! Although, to be fair, I think Hauser would've loved to have seen Chomsky go for more neuroscience...or at least be more open-minded to primatological findings, but he simply could not. Chomsky would not. Why? Because then the syntactical walls come a' tumblin' down, the whole Idealized Universal Grammar schmeer gets canned when you must deal with The Continuum of chimps and birds and singing Neanderthals to neurons and real stuff. Not diagrams.)

Indeed, Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch appear to have talked Noam into co-publishing a paper on the origin of language when, after a lifetime of dodging the issue, Chomsky put his name to a paper on the subject, if only to stop the charges that Chomsky appeared to think that Language arose in an instant, like the Big Bang or Yahweh saying "Let there be light."

A large chunk of Hauser's now-gone academic career seems to have been to extend the Chomskyan model of thinking about linguistics to the realm of Evolutionary Psychology. Indeed, Hauser seems to have been quite gung-ho about Edward O. Wilson's "consilience" project, but claiming it for a sort of Cartesian/Chomskyan intellectual empire.

Now obviously, I've veered way off course from the topic of neurotheology and into the politics of academia, but I couldn't help it: the Irony was too much. Forgive me?

I could could on and on about Hauser and what I consider the 18th century view Chomsky has infected some of academia with (and longtime readers of the OG know I've typed a lot on Noam and I actually love the Man), but to suffice and for further delvings: see George Lakoff's talk on "Philosophy In The Flesh" and then some of his Third Culturalist's responses to Lakoff's 21st century ideas about the embodied human mind. This goes back to March of 1999. Notice Hauser's response, then skip down to see how Lakoff (Chomsky's bete noir in Linguistics; they loathe each other) responds to Chomsky acolyte Hauser's non-understandings.

[For some other blogspew: it could be argued that John Rawls has as much to do with "Nativist" ideas in academia as Chomsky does.]

One of Hauser's books was titled Moral Minds and I have not seen any data about his publisher removing the book from bookstore shelves, as was done to Jonah Lehrer when it was found he'd fabricated quotes about Bob Dylan in his book Imagine. But Hauser still plans to go on and publish in the field of evolutionary psychology/cognitive neurobiology. One article has his next book being titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste For Being Bad, and it should be...interesting. (NB: I refrained from using "Ironic" yet again!) In an article on the Hauser debacle in USA Today, of all places, I noted big-time primatologist Frans de Waal's worry that maybe much more of Hauser's data was cooked than what the investigators looked at. De Waal accuses Harvard of covering up too much for Hauser, possibly damaging the field of animal behavior...

A Head Test: How is Hauser different from Lehrer? And does knowing Hauser made up stuff, etc: does that change how you think of this particular paper on the origin of religion?

Going Out With Hauser
I will let Hauser's quote on morality from Science Daily carry this one out:

"It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we discuss in our paper, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence."

Amen, Hauser. And have a good life.

The Cosmic Schmuck Principle and Some of Its Family Resemblances

The Cosmic Schmuck Principle
Robert Anton Wilson minted the term "Cosmic Schmuck" in a similar spirit to Murphy's Law. The Cosmic Schmuck Principle seemed aimed at greater ethical behavior among the educated classes; I see this impetus in RAW as an influence from Ezra Pound and Confucius, and also Alfred Korzybski. Also: RAW wrote a lot about hearing and reading formulations like this while growing up:

An X (person or group) appears to have done something lousy.
Therefore all people who seem like Xes are suspect or bad or dangerous, or might do something lousy.

This formulation leads to incivility, bad ethics, injustices, violence, and even genocide. (Think of Hitler making the above statement, and replace X with Jews.)

Yes, but what is this thing called The Cosmic Schmuck Principle? It has to do with pretending to a level of certainty or knowledge that you are unlikely to have, and so you're acting like a schmuck. Oh, but let's have a concise statement from RAW:

The Cosmic Schmuck Principle holds that if you don't wake up, once a month at least, and realize you have recently been acting like a Cosmic Schmuck again, then you will probably go on acting like a Cosmic Schmuck forever; but if you do, occasionally, recognize your Cosmic Schmuckiness, you might begin to become a little less Schmucky than the general human average at this primitive stage of terrestrial evolution. - p. 21, Natural Law: Or Don't Put A Rubber On Your Willy

HERE is the text of this incredible little anarcho-libertarian pamphlet on epistemology at Scribd.

Another website excerpts more from the page(s) with the quote I used above; I link to it in the interests of context. I don't know who the man is in the photo. It is not RAW.

Nota bene and what I find very lovable in the Cosmic Schmuck Principle is that it's heavily implied that we are all schmucks, to some degree. And RAW would've acknowledged his own schmuckiness at times. This dovetails really well with the ideas about Wrongology from Kathryn Schulz, who I write about near the end of this piece...

One of the main tropes that runs through Wilson's entire oeuvre is the embracing of uncertainty; one reason being that, in his epistemology, given our nervous systems and how we're wired, coupled with what we've found in quantum mechanics, cultural anthropology, genetics, perception psychology and neuroscience, linguistics, and a whole host of other disciplines, we cannot know anything but the most trivial things for certain, and maybe not even these trivial things. And secondly, this is something to be embraced, not because it is inevitable and seems to have been built into the fabric of the weirdness of "reality," but because it enables us to live with a sense of deep wonder, which he once said was "all the religion we need."

It could be that Pyrrho the Skeptic was the first to advocate for something along these lines (after encountering some "naked wise men" in India?); there seems much to dispute here.

Other ideas that seem to bear a family resemblance in the Wittgensteinian sense: fallibalism, aspects of the sociology of knowledge, Eric Hoffer's "True Believer," and many other forms of social epistemology. I want to discuss - and maybe even elucidate - a few others here.

Richard Rorty and "Knowingness"
One of my favorite academic philosophers of the late 20th century (Rorty died in 2007 at the age of 75), Rorty thought the educated classes, especially via too much theory, had fallen into a trap he called "knowingness," which he may have gotten from someone else, possibly the literary critic Harold Bloom? Anyway, when I first read about knowingness in Rorty's sense it knocked me on my ass, and a definition has stuck in my neural circuits:

"Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe."

Think of the 23 year old grad student who thinks he's "seen it all." He hasn't. Not even close. He "knows" too much. A 23 year old grad student has hardly seen anything, but he is under the illusion he's seen it all. He has been trained to think analytically, and possibly over-analyzes everything, so that nothing is wonderful anymore. This seems born of a deep-seated fear, because another part of himself knows he hasn't experienced much of the world yet. Academics up to the age of 80 have been known to have fallen deeply into the slough of knowingness. It's pretentious to us, but for them, they have defended their knowledge in learned paper after learned paper. Who reads these papers? His colleagues and hardly anyone else. He lives in an academic bubble of knowingness, and many of his fellow academics are hyper-theoretizing and caught in the mire of knowingness also. Females are just as liable to this trap, this "state of soul," as men. It seems a lot like the Cosmic Schmuck Principle, but I seriously doubt Rorty ever read Wilson. They ran in different intellectual strata. But I think it would be a safe guess, were someone to have asked Wilson (who also died in 2007) if Cosmic Schmuckiness prevented  a shudder of awe, he'd say yes.

Likewise, I easily imagine Rorty, after reading his books and seeing interviews with him, that he'd embrace the idea of recognizing when you were pretending to know when you really didn't. His theory of truth - which was not a theory - was that truth was something that happened to an idea. And it happened because it was found to be good, pleasurable, helpful. When you're on that track - what helps you get through your days and nights with more humanity - I hazard that you're bending towards less schmuckiness, less knowingness already...

Rorty was often labeled a "neo-pragmatist." I think the Cosmic Schmuck Principle fits into the pragmatist (accused as "anti-philosophy" by some) project snugly.

When I read online about criticism of people between 18-30 who are thought of as "Hipsters," I get a vague whiff that their critics think the Hipsters have too much knowingness, or are Cosmic Schmucks. But because I'm still not sure what truly constitutes Hipster-hood, I will neither defend Hipsters nor join in the scorn. But above all, I don't want to play in the formulation near the top of this article ("An X appears to have done something lousy..."), as it's NEVER fair or just to do so. Moving on...

                        A hedgehog. This one is probably smarter than Thomas Friedman?

Hedgehogs
Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953 a famous essay on types of intellectuals, "The Hedgehog and The Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History," and he drew upon the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In Daniel Kahneman's recent - astonishingly erudite, endlessly worthsomewhiles - book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he expounds on the Hedgehogs in our midst, the "experts" and (worse, to my eyes) the "pundits."

Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics (a fascinating story in itself), is the go-to guy for insight into our own biases, and how to stop acting like a sucker or Schmuck...even though it appears we're wired to fall into schmuckiness (not the word Kahneman uses!) by evolution.

"As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening, as they offer convincing accounts of the day's events. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future." - p.218

Kahneman illustrates the role of chance in 20th century history: in very minute sections of time, the fertilized eggs that went on to become Mao, Hitler and Stalin had around a 50/50 chance of becoming females. And around 47 million people were murdered because of this chance. (My estimates, based on a few moments rustling around in some history books; Kahneman does not come up with a number in the text.)

[I may have taken tremendous liberty with this past example; I may have made something along the lines of an egregious error. If anyone would like to point it out, I would be happy to hear what that error might consist of. In other words: was I being a Cosmic Schmuck there? Or not? Or does my writing this bracketed paragraph somehow exonerate me from any Cosmic Schmuckery I may have been guilty of in the above paragraph? Are we in a Strange Loop right now?]

Daniel Kahneman then discusses Philip Tetlock's 20 year project of doing massive interviews and questionnaires with "experts" - pundits who forecasted about political and economic trends - and how these experts panned out, with hindsight. The results, which should be far better known than they are, show that these pundits performed, as Kahneman writes, "worse than they would have if they had assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes." (Tetlock got 80,000 predictions for very many questions that had respondents pick whether they think the status quo would remain, there would be more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of those things. Tetlock's book is Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about this very thing, quite amusingly, in The Black Swan: quite often, instead of asking your stockbroker for tips on how to invest in the market, you can ask a taxi cab driver and you'll end up with the same amount of money. Similarly, Tetlock is quoted: "In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals - distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on - are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in 'reading' emergent situations."

Tetlock falls back on Berlin's "Hedgehogs" when talking about "experts" and why we listen to them. Most of the pundits we see are not foxes - who know a lot of things - but "experts" who are loathe to admit when they were wrong, but when forced to admit their wrongness always have many ready-made excuses. They are dazzled by their own brilliance (to my mind the worst of the worst in Unistatian electronic corporate media are Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, not that you'd asked), and they're led astray not by what they believe but how they think. They have a coherent model of the world, and they worship that model. Robert Anton Wilson called this "modeltheism." If you show them they have been wrong in their predictions, they get angry and say they were off by a little bit, or the timing was a tad askew. As Kahneman writes, "They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, makes for a good show." (p.220)

These Hedgehogs seem like cousins to the Cosmic Schmucks (look at the astounding level of schmuckiness attained by a guy like Rush Limbaugh!), and they seem far too knowing also, eh?

The take-away message? Take the punditocracy with a massive salt-lick, and be a Fox. (Or a non-overweening generalist?)

                                 Kathryn Schulz, who has a lot to say about being wrong

The Pessimistic Meta-Induction From The History Of Science
The wha? Get it straight, kids, from the sexy intellectual Kathryn Schulz. This same article is collected in the recent book This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts To Improve Your Thinking, pp.30-31. Most of the theories of the past have fallen by the wayside, so why do we, as Schulz says, grant ourselves "chronological exceptionalism"? When I ran across this bit in the book, I was reminded of John Horgan's book The End of Science, in which he asks very many of the biggest names in science whether we know about 99% of what there is to know, or maybe it's closer to 1%? Fascinating book, wonderful on the sociology of scientific intellectuals and the hard-to-pin-down field Horgan calls "limitology," and it's quite readable, with an ending that, for me, had a twist and was surprising. (Horgan's attitude toward his own question.)

I liked what blogger Roger E. Breisch had to say about the Pessimistic Meta-Induction From The History Of Science, and other of Schulz's ideas from her own book, Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margins of Error.

In my own reading of classics, I think I've seen variations of all of the above family members in the writings of Montaigne, and earlier, Lucretius. And still earlier, Epicurus. But I refuse to dogmatize about any of this and would rather declare that I think I've detected more than enough Cosmic Schmuckery in my own thinking and utterances lately...


Here's Kathryn Schulz, Wrongologist, talking about many of the ideas above. It's 4 mins and 19 seconds.

Chomsky Updates One of His Best Pieces

Noam Chomsky has written The Responsibility of Intellectuals, this time "Redux." And just in time for the 10th anniversary of the September 11th incidents. Only one shopping day left. Do you have enough coals for the barbecue? Make sure the kids have sunscreen on. And just think: college football is starting too!

Oh but yes: Noam Chomsky. His updated essay.


You can read the whole thing here. 


I have blogged about my own "Chomsky Problem" here, here, here, here, here, here, and (sorta) here. But this recent piece by Chomsky seems only tangentially related to my attempts to provide a solution to my own version of Paul Robinson's "Chomsky Problem."

Rather, this represents the Chomsky I most admire. (Actually, I admire him, period. I find him a fascinating thinker and the "Chomsky Problem" is an attempt to get at what I think is his major flaw, and I'm afraid I never really resolved the "problem." Please! Someone else: do a better job than I did!)

In 1966 Chomsky published a now-famous essay titled "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." When I read it first, around 1985 or so, it made total sense to me. It still does. And Chomsky's recent 9-11 "anniversary" redux-update makes as much sense to me. Any given reader of this blog who also reads Chomsky on intellectuals will come to their own conclusions. I'm giving myself away here: in this area of thought, I am right there with Noam, although I am not a privileged academic.

And, all of this aside for a moment to add something that pretty much went unsaid in all that Chomsky Problem blather I posted: what I perhaps most appreciate about Chomsky's critiques of The State and its crimes is his unique and very basic form of immanent critique: not so much in this essay, but almost all of his political writings he cites a State Department official or some other highly placed person in the State apparatus, and juxtaposes what was said with what was actually done. And he cites copiously. His style is fairly stripped-down academic, no fancy rhetoric. A notable lack of jargon. An odd tone of cold street-fightin' level rationality. As I understand it, immanent critique in its most basic form is something like, "You said X. But you did not-X, but Y, Q, and Z. How do you account for this?"

His many detractors - when they aren't crudely making stuff up about Chomsky - attack him for cherry picking his facts. But I have read Chomsky very closely, and while all of us are biased according to the sociology of knowledge, I think his basic method and citation-work is very sound, and always adds up to a penetrating and persuasive critique of state power.

Regarding intellectuals, Chomsky's work seems to me invaluable because his stance is so robust that, even if you disagree with him, you may learn much about your own stance towards the roles of intellectuals, or even what or who constitute the Intellectuals.

Where the New and Improved "Redux" essay really gets interesting, for me, is after the picture of John Dewey, where Chomsky points out that bin Laden actually achieved quite a lot of what he set out to do, and the oh-so predictable knee-jerk dullards who attack Chomsky (see the comments) need to realize Chomsky is not the only one here: do you think Michael Scheuer is a traitor too? Probably. "Murrrka Number One! Love it er leave it!" <yawn>

So enjoy the bunting and your flag and the endless TV specials about how the greatest country God ever saw fit to create is still strong and just filled with resolve, how we're all one and blah blah blah-dee fucking blah.

And if you hate Chomsky for saying what he writes (Just who do I think I'm writing to here? Only intelligent people read this blog, so I guess I'm blowing off steam over what I see as - laffingly - political reality), why don't you read Dana Priest and William Arkin's latest book, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State and tell us all how great the 9-11 response has been? There's $4,000,000,000,000 (that's TRILLION, friends and Fellow Murrrkins) we'll never see again. Funny how (really) no one in Congress has been harping on this, what with the Goddamned Deficit.

And Cheney, Bush, Rummy, Rice, Wolfowitz...are all running free.

Happy faux holiday. I'm sure the Patriot Act is keeping you all "safe."

A Non-Definition of "Generalist"

My starting a blog was fairly whimsical; for a long time people had been telling me I really "ought" to blog. I'm the type of person, it seems, for which blogs were invented, it was hinted. One of the types. Since I started, I have noted there are a few other blogs that have taken as their center of interest Generalist thought, and I hesitate to read too much in those (a couple really terrific ones!), for fear of being too influenced by the ideas there. I hope, after 30 posts or so, to have added something to the conversation. And truly, like you, I largely write to (l)earn...

It seems the idea of being a person fascinated by very many areas of thought is not new. But the idea of self-description as a "generalist" seems fairly new. And that's probably because of specialization, which is clearly still in its ascendancy. Why is specialization such a big deal? Probably due to the demands of the technocratic State, its attendant mushrooming  bureaucratization of bureaus, the seeming ad infinitum compartmentalization of compartments, the demands of "efficiency" in business and government, the clamor for constant technological innovation, and the ever-acceleration of information.

Aristotle was a staggering Generalist of the synthesizing variety, it seems to me, but in his time it seems there was no dichotomy, and we just look at what existed before him, and then see what he produced and say, "What a compendious mind he had." True. Not only compendious, but creative...Did he at times "specialize" in, say, Logic? Oh my yes, but hey: no one was really doing it that extensively at the time, so he...generalized in all his areas of specialization? (Riffing on the false - because reified - polarities of generalists vs. specialists can lead one down a path of reductio ad adsurdum. O! the perils!)

In our age, it seems that some academics are Generalists, but probably most are not. The demands of the academy probably foreclose on a life of freewheeling Generalism. But academics are Knowers. It's difficult to get your Ph.D, obviously. One must specialize like mad these days. But most Ph.Ds I've known have a few side-interests in which their knowledge is extensive. We will find some tremendous Generalists within the groves of academe.

For quite a long time now intellectual artists not affiliated officially with any institution have been at odds with their more well-paid (salaried) knowledge specialists within the universities and think-tanks. One common notion (of some substance): Academics, seeking tenure, are overworked and bogged down with minutiae and endless papers, but have a class standing (pun semi-intended?) and relative material comfort. They are "responsible" professionals. They see their Generalist cousins as dilettantes or wide-eyed lovers of speculative thought or naive autodidacts unwilling to commit their minds to a prolonged discipline, pun most definitely intended. Or as weird polymaths who couldn't hack the Academy due to some unfortunate eccentricities. Or as cranks with overweening Big Ideas and too many novel Theories of Everything, etc.

The idea of a taken-for-granted solid class status for the academic seems in a state of flux recently, for reasons too various to dig into here.

The Generalists are often ironists, often with advanced degrees but disdainful of the inherent conservatism of academic life. (I am not saying academics are political conservatives, although very many are, despite what a person like David Horowitz "thinks.") Their economic lives are more precarious and they must hustle and create to pay their rents (I'm of course generalizing wildly here!). In his recent book, The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (one of our great Generalists, and when will I quit capitalizing that word?), says:


"No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing." (p.45)


Another: "The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail." (p.47)


This 2010 book by Taleb consists of Taleb's aphorisms, and it's at times too delicious for our tastes; I cannot help but throw in one more quote:


"The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and nonperishable - work within institutions." (p.79)


Ahhh: scholars vs. academics. 


Taleb, in his book The Black Swan seems to consider the term "erudite" used as a noun, as highly desirable. 


Then there is a fantastic case of perhaps the most visible intellectual in the world (as of 2011 falling behind Dawkins?), Noam Chomsky, an academic who, since the early 1960s, has consistently and famously attacked intellectuals for kowtowing to State power. 

We have some obvious problems with a taxonomy of "intellectuals" here...

Perhaps my favorite modern intellectual genius-crank, Ezra Pound, constantly railed against academics, who toiled not in universities but "beaneries." Here's a choice bit of Pound vis a vis these topics: "the mentality of bureaucracy and beanery":

"1. Desire to get and retain job.
2.  That many scholars write under a terror. They are forced to retain a pretence of omniscience. This leads to restricting their field of reference. In a developed philological system they would have to know 'ALL' about their subject. Which leads to segregation of minute proportions of that subject for 'profounder' investigation. With corollary that any man who knows where the oil well is, is considered superficial." - Guide To Kulchur, (1938, p.70)


So, no definition of "Generalist," but rather a walk around the dark periphery of the subject as posited. More later? Your thoughts? Any aid towards clarification?