Why Korzybski Waned: Some Educated Guesses

As I meditate - even ruminate, at times - on the quandary of climate change, income inequality, the Supreme Court's tragically stupid ruling that money "is" speech, that Trump or Hillary will probably be the next POTUS, etc, lately I've been thinking that, were Korzybski's "General Semantics" (from now on: "GS") taught in schools, or talked about on teevee or lauded in pop kulch, we couldn't possibly "be" in the mess we seem to be in now. I recently re-read Ezra Pound's 1937 essay "On the Immediate Need of Confucius" and thought, "We need Korzybski immediately."

And GS had its moment in Unistat education (c.1938-55 or so); now it's apparently thought of as something from the "fringe." While I constantly re-read the Ur-Text of GS, Korzybski's Science and Sanity, and can always "see" something sort of "wild" in the text, I think it's one of the great underrated books of all time.

I will try to provide a brief, necessarily idiosyncratic and truncated sketch of GS's marginalization. The following ideas, while numbered, represent no particular hierarchy:

1. The late media theorist Neil Postman (d:2003), who was a great student of Korzybski's writings, gave two reasons why Korzybski had fallen out of favor:

"Many academicians do not care for Korzybski - in part because he was not careful, and in part, because they have no patience for genius." - originally in Postman's "autobibliography" in his own book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, but my immediate source is "Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk - Redux," by Martin Levinson, PhD, in Etc: A Review of General Semantics, vol.63, number1, January 2006, pp.67-76

Brief comment by OG: Yes, Korzybski seems at times not-careful (ask me about the jazz irony sometime, for example); also: he clearly seems like an overpowering generalist-genius to me. If academicians have no patience for such a cat, my current main interpretation is that specialization has so manically taken over academe, and someone who writes about - on many pages all-at-once - neurobiology/philosophy/mathematics/biology/anthropology/physics/psychology and chemistry: can't possibly be taken seriously. I see AK's synthesis of what was known by 1933 as astounding.

2. Korzybski was a Polish count, polyglot, and not a bona fide academic, under Western standards. Hence, he was often seen as a cranky weirdo by academics. Not one of "us." Tries to cover too much. Too esoteric and generalistic. Now: many writers in different fields loved Korzybski and wrote interpretations (abstractions?) of his work. One of the earliest popularizers of AK's work was by Stuart Chase, whose Tyranny of Words (1938) was a best-seller. Chase was an MIT social theorist and advisor to FDR.

Brief comment: While Woody Allen's joke about the intellectual class being like the Mafia - "they only kill their own" - is one of my favorites, this seems like an exception.

3. By the late 1950s/early 1960s, AK and his GS was seen by the "responsible" intellectuals as allied with the outre and growing culture later known as "the counterculture." William S. Burroughs studied under AK briefly, and used ideas about GS in a science fiction-y way. (By extension, Allen Ginsberg was influenced by WSB's interest in Korzybski, and so Ginsberg was obviously influenced by GS too. When mentioning Ginsberg in this context, it seems Alan Watts's AK influence need be added.) Indeed, for a while, GS was seen as synonymous with science fiction-thought, with Heinlein being an exponent of AK. A.E. Van Vogt wrote SF novels trying to popularize his interpretations of GS. (Sorry about the initial-stew here!)

4. AK and his GS have gradually become "infected" (my word) by its association with Scientology. Perhaps the richest irony here: an adequate understanding of GS would reveal that a mere association of one group with another does not mean that one groups's idea "infected" the following group. The notion that previously-created knowledge is utilized by many subsequent groups, for their own ends, still seems a pillar of sophisticated thought.

In Lawrence Wright's riveting book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (2013), while science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard was formulating his new religion, Jack Parsons's ex-mistress, Sara Elizabeth "Betty" Northrup, read to Hubbard from Korzybski; and Hubbard, "immediately grasped the ideas as the basis for a system of psychology, if not for a whole religion." (p.60) A further taste:

"Korzybski pointed out that words are not the things they describe, in the same way that a map is not the territory is represents. Language shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can stand in the way of sanity by preserving delusions. Korzybski argued that emotional disturbances, learning disorders, and many psychosomatic illnesses - including heart problems, skin diseases, sexual disorders, migraines, alcoholism, arthritis, even dental cavities - could be remedied by semantic training, much as Hubbard would claim for his own work. He cited Korzybski frequently, although he admitted that he could never get through the texts themselves. 'Bob Heinlein sat down one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever,' he later related. 'I know quite a bit about Korzybski's works.'" (p.60)

Comment: There's no doubt Science and Sanity influenced Dianetics. I feel quite confident that Korzybski (who died in 1950) would disavow such a thing. Is it the fault of a writer if a later writer takes their work and uses it toward entirely different ends? Nietzsche's sister played her brother's work into the proto-Nazi's thought. I also have no doubt Nietzsche would have been appalled by Alfred Rosenberg's use of his thought, not to mention Hitler's bad reading in Mein Kampf. I will not comment on the parade of Christian fascists we've seen in the grand historical sweep.

5. As Unistat gradually took on the character of the National Security State after 1947, there slowly grew an apparatus of apologists for the State (of which I prefer Chomsky's term "commissar class"), and some of these intellectuals appointed themselves as "debunkers" of challenges to scientific orthodoxy. Darkly ironic, and seemingly at odds with the spirit of scientific investigation itself, probably the most famous and enduring Official Debunker was Martin Gardner, a brilliant writer who seemed polymathic in a way that mirrored Korzybski. However, in his enormously influential book Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science (1952), Gardner lumped Korzybski in with flying saucer fanatics, psionics, the Bates theory of eyesight, Atlantis, Bridey Murphy...and L. Ron Hubbard. The zeitgeist and Gardner's formidable writing chops cannot be overestimated here. The chapter, "General Semantics, Etc," gives (to my eyes) a bad-faith ad hominem reading of Science and Sanity. While prefacing that he thinks Korzybski's bad book is not as bad as previously-discussed pillories of Wilhelm Reich and Hubbard (separate chapters are devoted to taking down those guys too), Gardner writes of Korzybski's magnum opus:

"It is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive, repetitious mish-mash of sound ideas borrowed from abler scientists and philosophers, mixed with neologisms, confused ideas, unconscious metaphysics, and highly dubious speculations about neurology and psychiatric therapy." (p.281)

At the same time, Gardner - who for some reason links Korzybski with Jacob L. Moreno, the Rumanian who invented psychodrama - says Korzybski "may or may not have considerable scientific merit." Then he gets down to debunking. If Korzybski ever had a good idea, it was not a new idea. usw.

Comment: At the risk of taking 10,000 words to debunk this debunker, I would merely aver that Korzybski's psychology of perception and individual/societal "making sense" of phenomena is still on very strong ground, and that Gardner should have at least acknowledged this and written, "It seems to me that..." (It is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive...etc). I charge Gardner with ad hominem, but he's canny about it. It seems mean-spirited and underhanded to me, with lots of appeals to authority and almost zero charity. See for yourself: Chapter 23, pp.281-291.

6. Many years ago I was sitting in a very large room on the 5th floor of the hall of justice in Long Beach, California, waiting to see if I would be impanelled on an actual jury. I was reading Korzybski or another book on GS. An older lady stopped and took note: "You're reading General Semantics! I used to teach that." I asked what ever happened to it? How come I wasn't taught it? She said "The business community hated it." She also said she thought the local churches and politicians didn't like it, either. I remember saying this reminded me of Socrates getting busted for "corrupting the youth" of Athens. I recall the older lady saying it was sort of like that, yea.

Comment: I mean this as an endorsement of Korzybski.

                                   A Chomsky diagram: how will this tell you how
                                   "the death tax" really works?

7. In 1957, Noam Chomsky broke radically with a long historic tradition in linguistics, publishing a thin book titled Syntactic Structures. It was so obscure at the time the only place he could publish it was at The Hague. In what myself and many others take to be a prime example of "physics envy" in areas of the academy that were not physics, this book gradually achieved academic cult-status, filled with abstruse diagrams of transformations of sentence structures, as an attempt to get to the "deep structure" (still a potent metaphor, with legs!) of English. The goal was audacious: scrap the entire history of empirical linguistics and, using the latest mathematics and following a Cartesian philosophical rationalism, to eventually show that human language contains Universal Grammar that only humans are endowed with, by...well, not the Creator-creator. Not evolution, either. Oh, he'd deal with that some other day.

Comment: This may be the most underrated reason why Korzybski is now seen as a fringe figure: Chomsky's linguistic work, which now looked as important and impressive as physics diagrams on a blackboard as scribbled by Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, or Feynman, was too seductive to not jump on board if you were an academic who wanted in on the Newest Abstruse Theory. Or: a new, possibly more-encompassing language paradigm, which, if legit, was a real winner. Couple this with Chomsky's tireless humanistic ethics against the State, war, inequality, official lies, Behaviorism, and most of his fellow intellectuals' overweening ambition to serve the State: you have the conscience of the entire Intellectual Class residing in one man's thought. I think Chomsky's odd non-charismatic charisma helped his linguistic program, which was doomed, probably from its inception, to never be able to account for the most important aspect of language: semantics. Intellectual attention space is limited. Chomsky's language ideas and his background as a properly trained academic seemed more impressive. Hence, GS waned. Unistat culture suffered. I now see Chomsky's linguistic gains, over 60 years, to be quite modest considering the declared ambitious grasp in scope. It was a bifuration point, culturally, and to our detriment and for complex reasons, it went the other way...

8. "Popularizations" are not serious reading. This, in the age of Specialization, seems gospel in Academe. Now not only AK but his popularizers are seen as not only "wrong" because non-Chomskyan, but debased, because for the masses. I have on my shelves GS-popularizations such as People In Quandaries by Wendell Johnson; Levels of Knowing and Existence by Harry L. Weinberg; The Language of Wisdom and Folly, by Irving J. Lee; Mathsemantics: Making Numbers Talk Sense, by Edward MacNeal. Oh, and Samuel Hayakawa's Language In Thought and Action, which has proven to be the most famous of GS popularizers. (More about this last book and author below.)

Comment: All of these books consist for me as guides to what might have been. Korzybski's work was so fecund that none of these books are alike. Just one irony among many I could point out here: In Chomsky's Understanding Power, he extolls 1930s leftist intellectuals for popularizing difficult subjects! (see pp.331-333) For more irony, see pp.37-44, where Noam - not doing linguistics but championing human freedom against the State and its violence, gives one example after another of how the State uses Orwellian language against the masses, who are defenseless unless they somehow learn one or another form of "intellectual self-defense," none of which could possibly include GS because that approach is "all wrong."(<----I read an email from Noam forwarded to me by a friend who asked what Chomsky thought of GS)

Popularizations are not to be taken seriously, but we want the public to understand the increasingly opaque world. So: popularizations are no good unless they're good. Since 1930: it looks to me like the Commissar Class doesn't really care if a small minority of the population reads something very truthful about power. As long as more than a "few" don't catch on?

9. In what functions as an update on Gardner, Steven Pinker's popular book The Language Instinct (1994) has an entire chapter showing why Korzybski/GS/Sapir-Whorf "are" all wrong. Pinker has picked up the Chomsky linguistic model and assumed the role of Public Intellectual. When I read his chapter, "Mentalese" from TLI, I get the feeling Pinker has never actually read Korzybski. I emailed him; Pinker never wrote back. In my opinion Pinker contributes to the enormous disservice to the public by making fun of the previous model of how language works. (See The Language Instinct, pp. 55-82 and see what you think?)

10. Regarding S. I. Hayakawa, the most popular popularizer of Korzybski: it's pretty complicated. Because Hayakawa was teaching mostly writers and humanities types, his biographer, Gerald Haslam, has called Hayakawa's GS "General Semantics Lite." Language In Thought and Action is a delightful read, and will make you "smarter" right away. However, if you decide then to look at his source - Science and Sanity - you will probably be STUNNED by all the math and science.

In Robert Anton Wilson's book The Illuminati Papers, there's a page of Erisiana that may seen obscure now. On p.92 (I have the olde And/Or Press issue), there's a jokey-ornate form letter from, among other "groups," the American Anarchist Association. The letter is addressed to someone named S.I. Hayakawa, and cautions the recipient to read another person with the same name, because the other Hayakawa was evidently a sane reader of GS who knew and wrote about  Korzybski well. The recipient of the letter would benefit, because "He might also teach you something about neurosemantic relaxation. In the last photograph We saw of you confronting the dissidents, your entire face, shoulders, and body showed rigidity, neurosemantic 'closedness,' and the general nonverbal message, 'Don't talk to me; my mind is made up.' General Semantics might teach you how to grow out of this infantile and primitive attitudinal set and function as a time-binding and open personality. Please get in touch with the other Dr. Hayakawa an give this a try." - signed by "Theophobia the Elder," a Robert Anton Wilson pseudonym within the Discordian religion.

Some background HERE.

Here's his biographer, Haslam, giving a talk to General Semantics Symposium.

A defense of Hayakawa by his son: Let's remember that S.I. Hayakawa1 is not the same as S.I. Hayakawa2, who isn't the same as S.I. Hayakawa3, etc.

Comment: Hayakawa famously slept in the California Senate. As Haslam notes, it's ironic that this is all people remember about Hayakawa (who was Marshall McLuhan's paperboy in Canada when he was very young!); it seems very unfortunate that his semantic reactions at SF State during the anarchic late 1960s has been used to denigrate GS.

11. Robert Anton Wilson - who turned me on to Korzybski - told interviewer Charles Platt in the early 1980s that there were "defects" in his [Korzybski's- OG] system, but his body of work is something "everybody should grapple with." RAW told me he thought Korzybski could be personally abrasive, and that may be why he fell out of favor. (I forget where I read that some of Korzybski's students said he could be "blasphemously cheerful.") There's an idea that runs through a lot of RAW's heavily-influenced-by-Korzybski oeuvre: that there is a semantic unconscious - which Pound called  paideuma - in which it is taboo to know how power, sex and knowledge "really work." In my opinion, this may be the deepest "reason" why Korzybski waned.

                                           बॉबी कैम्पबेल द्वारा कलाकृति

George Lakoff and Robert Anton Wilson and the Primacy of Metaphors

I've just finished re-re (and maybe even re-?) reading Brian Dean's fascinating article RAW resurgence, comparing these two thinkers, Lakoff and RAW. I highly recommend it for your edification, in case you think you might need some. (Or, as a princely or princess-like act, you might read it for Confirmation Bias that you once again indeed are "above all that"?)

But first, two asides:

I was recently reading about the incredible new tool in genetics called CRISPR, in which we can now edit the human genome like we do an email. And it's cheap. So, like, whoa! Anyway, in the discovery of these clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats found in sequences of genes, it was found that bacteria in dairy products had been invaded by viruses and had developed a way to fight off viral infections. And these viral attacks left a trace. It turns out they leave a trace in our genes too, so one researcher said these genetic read-outs are a biological vaccination card. (Do kids still have these? Or is it all by computer these days? I remember I had a cardboard piece of paper that listed all my vaccinations.)

But Lakoff and RAW (and Vico and Nietzsche and a few others) have conditioned me to spot metaphors. And here was another "reading" of a "text" in the natural world. If you get your genome sequenced - to see what genes will lead to some abominable disease so that CRISPR can go in, snip it out and replace it with something far less nefarious (remember? CRISPR works like editing some text in a digital gizmo?), medical geneticists will not be "reading" your genes in the same way you're reading this right where you are sitting now. It's "like" that, but not the same. What they "see" will not look like the vaccination card I was told to keep with me in case I had to go to the doctor. (I believe I'm dating myself here. Oh, well.) The "vaccination card" in your genes is a metaphor. Cute one, too.

Secondly, I've been trying to get a line on David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics, so I was up way too late in bed recently re-reading in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), one of those books many might find to be "dry" non-fiction, but it's psychedelic to me. In his chapter on language, "The Rheomode: An Experiment With Language and Thought" I happened upon this:

"The subject-verb-object structure of language, along with its worldview, tends to impose itself very strongly in our speech, even in those cases in which some attention would reveal its evident inappropriateness. For example, consider the sentence, 'It is raining.' Where is the 'It' that would, according to the sentence, be 'the rainer who is doing the raining'?" - (37)

If this seems familiar, perhaps you just read it in the article by Brian Dean I linked to in the first paragraph above. (Skip down to "Multiple Model/Frame Semantics") But Brian was quoting Robert Anton Wilson from a 1986 book, The New Inquisition. Did RAW steal from Bohm? I was guessing we'd find the "It is raining" in Benjamin Lee Whorf's Language, Thought and Reality, but after spending a couple hours in that text, I didn't find it. I couldn't find it in Korzybski, either.

Online, I found the "It" in "It is raining" is now referred to by grammarians as a "dummy pronoun." (Chomsky is in line with this idea, which seems like yet another of his epicycles.) I also found some interesting stuff online about "it" "raining" in Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin and then a bunch of semanticists influenced by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (who both Lakoff and Wilson cite as influences), but no "smoking gun."

However, both Bohm's line and RAW's had such a strong whiff of Whorf I push all my chips onto the Whorf number and say let it ride. Why? Well, Bohm is no help at all. In his notes on language he gives no citations. Wilson frequently cited Whorf with regard to how the structure of Indo-European languages - which has the subject-predicate structure in which some subject/noun must be "doing" (verb) the whatever - as conditioning our thought in a way that's not consciously available to us unless we read people like Whorf, or Fenollosa, or Nietzsche or certain Modern poets, or a few others. Or maybe just have some rare intuition and suspicion about ideas that have language somehow mapping onto "reality" in some neat way...

If you've never read Whorf, here's some flavor, from his paper "Science and Linguistics," (1940):

"In English we divide most of our words into two classes, which have different grammatical and logical properties. Class 1 we call nouns, e.g., 'house', 'man'; class 2, verbs, e.g., 'hit', 'run.' Many words of one class can act secondarily as of the other class, e.g., 'a hit, a run' or 'to man (the boat),' but on the primary level, the division between classes is absolute. Our language thus gives us a bipolar division of nature. But nature herself is not thus polarized. If it be said that 'strike, turn, run,' are verbs because they denote temporary or short-lasting effects, i.e., actions, why then is 'fist' a noun? It is also a temporary event. Why are 'lightning, spark, wave, eddy, pulsation, flame, storm, phase, cycle, spasm, noise, emotion' nouns? They are temporary events. If 'man' and 'house' are nouns because they are long-lasting and stable events, i.e., things, what then are 'keep, adhere, extend, project, continue, persist, grow, dwell,' and so on doing among the verbs?"

"On the other hand, in Noontka, a language of Vancouver Island, all words seem to us to be verbs, but really there are no classes 1 and 2; we have, as it were, a monistic view of nature that gives us only one class of word for all kinds of events. 'A house occurs' or 'it houses' is the way of saying 'house,' exactly like 'a flame occurs' or 'it burns.' These terms seem to us like verbs because they are inflected for durational and temporal nuances, so that the suffixes of the word for house event make it mean long-lasting house, temporary house, future house, house that used to be, what started out to be a house, and so on."
-Language, Thought and Reality, Whorf, (215-216)

(note to self: every time I return home, let me see it like this: "a house occurs." then note effects on perception of the atomic swirl of the tao)

I suspect Bohm read Whorf, but he didn't let on in the footnotes or citations or the bibliography.

                                                Robert Anton Wilson

In Wilson's detective novel, Masks of the Illuminati, in which James Joyce and Albert Einstein team up to solve a strange young man's strange problem, we read:

"Much of the universe, alas, is loveless, " Einstein said. "But no aspect of it is lawless."

"So it seems to logic," Joyce said argumentatively. "But logic is only Aristotle's generalizations of the laws of Greek grammar. Which is part, but only part, of the great wordriver of consciousness. Chinese logic is not Aristotelian, you know. Other parts of the mindriver of human thought are totally illogical and irrational. You have shown mathematically, Professor, that space and time cannot be separated. The psychoanalytic study of consciousness is rapidly proving what Sir John and I have discovered in different ways, introspectively: namely, that reason and unreason are also seamlessly welded together - like your two Tar Babies after a prolonged fight...." (229-230)

Wilson has Joyce use Finnegans Wake-ean portmanteaus "wordriver" and "mindriver," which function as poetic metaphors, but not in the foundational sense of ordinary thought that Lakoff is concerned with. "Mindriver" and "wordriver" do give the reader the sense of the dynamic, flowing nature of minds and language, however, no? However, the riffs about Chinese logic and the every-day-ness of the "illogical and irrational" seem quite in keeping with current cognitive science. For example, here's Lakoff on basic cognitive science and our own political views:

(Lakoff says there are two broad "common misunderstandings" about our reality tunnels, only he uses the term "worldviews," because he's an esteemed and tenured academic at Berkeley. We are only concerned with the first misunderstanding here):

"The first is that many people believe that they are consciously aware of their own worldviews and that all one has to do to find out about people's views of the world is to ask them. Perhaps the most fundamental result of cognitive science is that this is not true. What people will tell you about their worldview does not necessarily accurately reflect how they reason, how they categorize, how they speak, and how they act. For this reason, someone studying political worldviews must establish adequacy conditions for an analysis, just as we have done. As we shall see, the kinds of things that conservatives and liberals say about their political worldviews do not meet these conditions of adequacy. If you ask a liberal about his political worldview, he will almost certainly talk about liberty and equality, rather than a nurturant parent model of the family." - Moral Politics (36)

                                                  Prof. George Lakoff

As Brian Dean suggested, readers of both Wilson and Lakoff could compare and contrast Lakoff's very deep metaphors that govern political thought: the liberal "nurturant parent model" vs. the conservative "strict father" model, with Wilson's liberal values as "oral-matrist" and conservative values as "anal-patrist." (See Ishtar Rising) Both thinkers emphasized these were Idealized Types and most of us swing more toward one of the other, but we all "have" or deeply understand aspects of the other type.

I remember Lakoff talking in a packed-to-the-rafters space in Berkeley about these models; we liberal types have the circuitry for understanding the Strict Father moral system because we've lived in a world where this commonly exists. As he put it, if you didn't have these neural pathways you'd watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger film and go, "What did any of that mean?" 

Lakoff's basic metaphors for morality and politics stem from our embodiment as certain types of beings, and from what feels good to us, forms of biological well-being being nonmetaphorical morality. I find his ideas - scattered through a number of books, but here I'm mostly thinking of Moral Politics, The Political Mind, and the seminal (yet another "dry" academic non-fiction book that puts me in a psychedelic head-space), Metaphors We Live By. This last was considered in its time (1979-80) to be "experiential linguistics" according to Randy Allen Harris in his book The Linguistics Wars. Slowly, this school of cognitive neurosemantics has, in my view, supplanted Noam Chomsky's overly formal and far-too-Cartesianly "rational" school of linguistics (which Lakoff eviscerates in The Political Mind), mainly because Chomsky was never able to account for semantics. This is my opinion, of course, but I think history will show this view not inaccurate.

Brian Dean found, as far as I can see, the best example in Wilson's writings - in the first chapter of The New Inquisition - to compare RAW's ideas about metaphor as essential and basic to everyday human thought, to Lakoff's. As far as I know, Brian Dean is the first to contrast and elucidate these two disparate writers.

RAW saw "framing" as basic to learning. Where the passages Dean cites seem more about pointing out the unconscious ("hypocognitive"?) aspects metaphors and the structure of language have on what we take to be "reality," Wilson also sees the potential of new media (as of 1991) to force us into new "reality tunnels" and see them for what they are, so we can consciously and selectively switch from one to another. Dean uses the term "metaphorical pluralism" as isomorphic to Wilson's "model agnosticism" which in turn looks as the same genus as Lakoff's "frame semantics." I see this too. Any way we "frame" it, practice of these meta-modes of thought can, as Dean writes, possibly depolarize political debate and invigorate media critiques. But because metaphors are to us something like water is to fish, we must first "see" these metaphors for what they are, then, as Wilson puts it in Buddhistic terms, detach ourselves from fixed beliefs:

"The most important discovery of modern neuroscience, I think, consists in the discovery that every 'reality' we perceive/create has emerged from an ocean of more of less random signals, which our brain has edited, organized and orchestrated into what social scientists call 'glosses' or 'frames' - reality tunnels, in Leary's language. As Korzybski noted over and over, it is only due to the speed of conditioned reflexes that we do not even notice our role as co-creators of these reality-tunnels [...] Learning a new art or science requires what psychologists call 'reframing.' Abandoning a fallacious dogma and accepting new facts requires 'reframing.' The cure of any neuroses or compulsion requires 'reframing.' To grow means to reframe, or to change reality-tunnels. But we cannot do this if we have a conditioned attachment to conditioned perceptions and conditioned frames or glosses. We all want 'liberation' but we rarely notice how conditioned reflexes make us our own jailers." - Cosmic Trigger vol II: Down To Earth, (258-259)(italics in original), excerpted from the chapter, "Cyber-Space and Techno-Zen."

The "ocean of more or less random signals": Lakoff would emphasize that yes, but within the constraints of human embodiment, which is no small thing. EX: When we describe someone as "warm," it has to do with being held by mom or dad, way back: this was how we first knew "warmth." Warm is good, because it felt good, and my friend is "warm" because it feels good to be around her.

Obviously, RAW sounds a lot like Lakoff here with the emphasis on "framing," but there seem to me some crucial differences.

Cosmic Trigger II came out in 1991, but I doubt he'd read much of Lakoff. When he cites "frames" he's probably thinking of the circles around wonderful sociologist Erving Goffman, who started using the term in the late 1960s/early 1970s, as Lakoff points out. Lakoff also says the AI pioneer Marvin Minsky used "frames" by 1974. Wilson was interested in AI too. The late Berkeley linguist Charles Fillmore, a Lakoff mentor who perhaps did more to help Lakoff break away from Chomsky than any other thinker (my guess, I will ask Lakoff about this for confirmation), is "the founder of frame semantics, and has studied frames in more detail than anyone else." - Political Mind (250). Wilson's audience seems to be the stoned intelligentsia; Lakoff's seems to be other academics or the intelligent lay public. Lakoff goes into very fine detail about the neurobiological basis of our frames and has read an enormous amount of the literature by and for people whose politics he disagrees with, in order to fully understand them. Wilson advocated doing this too, but as an exercise for the mind/body in order to see how many reality tunnels are out there. Wilson was a freelance writer and developed a very entertaining style and was one of the last truly great generalist intellectuals. Lakoff is a tenured academic at the top public university in Unistat; Lakoff seems, for an academic cognitive scientist, profoundly generalistic, but whether he's writing books on math, anthropology, poetry, politics, or embodied cognition, it's always grounded solidly in his cognitive science framework. (Lakoff might be considered an academic generalist? This fits well with cognitive science's original goals: for specialists in one of these to be well-versed in the others: Anthropology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Psychology.)

The passage I quote from Cosmic Trigger vol II seems to be about learning though, learning to decondition ourselves from one "true" fixed belief in a Buddhistic move towards detachment and therefore liberation; and Lakoff's political work is an extension of his own political values and he wants those of us who have progressive and liberal views to be able to able to articulate them well in the political sphere. He's written popular manuals on how to do this. He said at a talk I attended in Berkeley in mid-2007 that Obama had at least one of his books on his desk. However, this work of making our reality tunnels into reality labyrinths, articulating our frames to activate the neural pathways in our listeners that will want less violence and more empathy in our politics? It's not easy. As Wilson says:

"The known techniques for curing the problem - reframing, deconditioning, getting rid of the spooks, detaching from fixed ideas - have all had major drawbacks that notoriously prevent popularizing them. Most of the effective techniques take hard work." (italics in original: CT2, 259)

Notes
1. Brian Dean's engaging blog is NewsFrames. I thank him for inspiring my above blogspew. (This one.) Certain readers of Lakoff might have a blast giving a close reading to Wilson's The New Inquisition, pp.3-29; if still interested/amused, see Prometheus Rising pp.99-100, on metaphors and Euclidean space; a Wilson historical novel, The Earth Will Shake, p.207, for Vico-based ideas on metaphor, myth, and The Keys of Solomon; and actually: Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, pp.513-521. (Wilson was very open about discussing his influences. If he had read Lakoff, I think we'd know, yet he never mentioned him that I know of.) If you read these 8 pages you'll think he HAD to have read Lakoff. But the truth is, 90%, if not all of this was written before Lakoff and Johnson released Metaphors We Live By; I do think the potent ideas brewing around frame semantics at Berkeley filtered into the nearby neighborhoods and percolated into the general intelligentsia there, c.1975-79. I think RAW got his Lakoff second or even thirdhand, and of course he'd be receptive, being thoroughly steeped in Whorf, Fenollosa, Korzybski, Nietzsche, and Vico.

2. Although Lakoff cites Charles Fillmore, Erving Goffman and Marvin Minsky for the "frame" meta-metaphor, I note from Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, p.130, that Fillmore himself noted that Goffman derived his idea of "frame" in 1974's Frame Analysis (see p.7 there) in which Goffman says he derived the term from Gregory Bateson.

3. It seems a commonplace, at least in Unistat, to look at Lakoff's work on politics and assert he's the Left wing version of the Right's Frank Luntz. Which is fatuous. The profound scholarly robustness of Lakoff's total body of work makes this claim embarrassing to he who utters it. Lakoff works with a vast community of scientists and scholars, and his work is embedded down to the neuronal level. See his Berkeley colleague Jerome Feldman's From Molecule To Metaphor and/or How We Think, by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.

4. If a reader of this blog knows of a pre-1980 use of the example of "It is raining" and the lack of referent for "It" as an example of how the Indo-European structure of language can condition thought, please chime in in the comments! Wilson had joked that possibly "It" referred to Zeus, which would be yet another example of Wilson riffing off his reading of Vico, or as just another example of how archaic patterns of thought can reside in our language habits.

5. Re: the "vaccination card" read in our genes: for archeological, linguistic, geological and DNA traces as "texts" to be "read," see an amusing take in On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail, pp.46-48

6. The monistic view of nature among the Noontka of Vancouver Island I quote from Whorf? That seems to be what David Bohm wants, all the while - I guess - we humans would be in full realization that our human world - the Explicate Order - emanates, or is constantly unfolding, from the truly unified quantum realm, the Implicate Order, which demands capitalization, by my view.

7. AN UPDATE: I asked Prof. Lakoff via email, and he claims he'd broken with Chomsky by 1963. So, I was off by 12 years. I believe the main reason I was off by so much was my reading of the marvelous book by Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars.

                                           graphic by Bob Campbell

Pound Notes: (Ezra), Paideuma and You

I just finished re-reading 1992's Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity and the Resacralization of the World, a collection of far-out-there "trialogues" between the chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, the late hyperarticulate psychonaut Terence McKenna, and the arch-Heretic of Biology, Rupert Sheldrake. These conversations about eschatology, climate crisis, morphological fields, comparative religion, discarnate entities in world history, wellsprings of creativity, educational reform and metaphors about "light" - among other things - seemed ancient. With the acceleration of information and experienced time, I revisited this book that I'd read soon after it came out. I had forgotten how NeoPlatonist all three thinkers were. One riff that runs pretty much through all these conversations - held at Esalen - was: what do we need to do to re-think what got us into this predicament? And they all seem to agree we need an updated archaic revival: of partnership society (not patriarchy), of getting back into nature and connecting in a deep way with plants and life. We need to find ways to lessen our own toxic egos, dissolve boundaries between each other, and sex is really healthy and good. Psychedelic mushroom use was one thing they all agreed was a potentially powerful way to catalyze all this.

                               this photo of Pound seems to have originally appeared in the 
                               New York Daily News with the caption: "Jew Hater"

By 1939, Pound had gone over the edge. He'd lost his center, but he didn't know it yet. He had been driven...mad? into paranoid antisemitic conspiracy thought? into deep delusions? It's up to The Reader to decide. Having a great number of artist-friends killed in the 1914-1918 World War...for what? The Poet - who, let's face it: was probably born an extra-ordinary person - decided to investigate the ultimate reason(s) this war happened. And he soon got into economics: money, banks, bankers, usury, and...oy!

Ezra Pound thought pretty much the same things about an "archaic revival" as the three Wiggy Thinkers I mentioned above (except for the drugs, which about which, later, below): In 1939 Pound wrote:

What we really believe is the pre-Christian element which Christianity has not stamped out. The only Christian festivals having any vitality are welded to sun festivals, the spring solstice, the Corpus and St. John's eve, registering the turn of the sun, the crying of "Ligo" in Lithuania, the people rushing down to the sea on Easter morning, the gardens of Adonis carried to Church on the Thursday.

Soon after, Pound wrote:

Paganism included a certain attitude toward; a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium. The other rites are the festivals of fecundity of the grain and the sun festivals, without revival of which religion can not return to the hearts of the people.

["Ligo" here is not to be confused with the recent news that Einstein's gravitational waves have finally been found by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Waves Observatory. Pronounced "leegwa," Ligo here is the summer solstice as celebrated in Latvia and Lithuania; it's like their xmas.]

Put blood simple, Mad Ol' Ez was for the sex goddess Aphrodite, and Helios: the sun god. Fucking outdoors in Nature: that's the true religion for those of us in Europe and the West. It gets to the heart of Pound's idea of paideuma, which was the semantic unconscious of a people; the deep tangles of ideas that form a culture and make it unique.

 I've been reading A.David Moody's third volume of biography of Pound, Ezra Pound: Poet Vol III,  and it's magisterial. I've long regarded Pound's life as the most compelling, dramatic, spellbinding, weird and tragic of all 20th century artists. This bio covers "the tragic years 1939-1972," to Pound's death. Moody confirms some of my ideas about the inexhaustible Ez. It extends almost all of my ideas about the guy who edited The Wasteland. It's the sort of biographical subject-writing that a street intellectual who maybe had only "heard about" Pound might still thrill at reading. It's almost like Pound was "made up" by some other Mad Poet-Genius, in order to compete with a figure like Faust. But Ez wuz real!

Around the time the Trialogues book came out, Ray Muller produced a fantastic documentary film about Hitler's favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, called The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Pound's life was at least as wonderful and horrible as Riefenstahl's.

The term paideuma was coined by Leo Frobenius, who I wrote about HERE.

In her terrific book on lost writings by Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings, Maria Luisa Ardizzone has a long footnote about Pound and his understanding and use of Frobenius's term which is worth repeating here:

Pound's idea of culture as Paideuma is crucial for understanding his virulent anti-Semitism from the 1930s onward and for his treatment of aesthetics. Frobenius's idea that there is a connection between, for instance, the form of a bed which certain people make and use and the kind of economy (agricultural and sedentary, or nomadic)(see Frobenius, Anthology, 9) is crucial for Pound's idea that an economy of usury will influence art: "form." Pound summarizes this idea in a single assertion, variously reiterated: "The form of objects is due to CAUSE" In Guide to Kulchur, 57, Pound explains the meaning of "Paideuma" as follows: "To escape a word or a set of words loaded up with dead association Frobenius uses the term "Paideuma" for the single or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period." In "For a New Paideuma" he writes, "The term "Paideuma" as used in dozen German volumes has been given the sense of an active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal, reaching into the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time." (Selected Prose, 284; emphasis [Ardizzone's]. I have stressed the importance of the word "complex," which in Pound's work belongs to the idea of a unity that is one and plural. - pp.44-45, note #45, Machine Art

[Quick observation: I agree totally with Ardizzone about Pound's desire to see a paideuma as a unity that is plural. Pound had metaphors for aesthetic growth and movement in culture before World War 1, such as "the vortex." His Imagism was a deliberate attempt to revolutionize Modern Art. Hell, all of his aesthetic manifestoes and books sought Rev. The plurality within a unity metaphor seems isomorphic to Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, which are invisible fields that carry memories of both themselves and other morphogenetic fields. It's similar to Leibniz's "monads" and Jung's collective unconscious. It also bears a family resemblance to the sociology of "ideologies" which have a public face of claims to rationality, and to being above the fray of power and politics yet are quite likely a special interest. All of these ideas have often been presented as a unity with much plurality "carried" within. Sorry for the digression!- the OG]

So: Pound fell in love with this invention by Frobenius and sought to extend it. But for a "sick" mind such as Pound's what it meant had to do with what got us into WWI: war profiteering, banking crooks, and bad ideas that Pound saw were complexly rooted in an alien paideuma: the Semitic one. It had infected Europe and his United States. He needed to wake us all up to this invisible but deeply rooted menace.

Quick Glance Into Pound's Paranoia: Drugs
I wrote above that Pound was not in line with McKenna, Abraham, and Sheldrake about drugs. And this gives a hint. Moody tells us that Pound said he "knew" since 1927 the Commies were drugging us as a political weapon. Yep: "drugs" - no delineation between mescaline or cannabis or amphetamines, just "drugs" - were being used by Jew-Commies to corrupt and destruct the goys. Get a load of this, Ez in a letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, August, 1954, Pound in the loony bin at St. Elizabeth's in DC:

heroin is pushed/ and the negro attendant knows that big chews are back of it...AND the kikes go for the WHOLE of the more sensitive section of the younger generation/ 'all' jazz musicians on marijuana/which 'is not habit forming' and leads to heroin/ and 'Benzadrine is harmless, they give it to aviators'/ so that after carpet bombing they will go on with some drug habit or other. - Moody's vol 3, p.317

[Brief comment: talk to Mezz Mezzrow, a jew-turned black about marijuana among jazz musicians!]

On with it...

Now, because I could go on for another 2000 words but won't, I want to end by floating out this idea: If we look at Frobenius's life: he was proto-fascist, but was one of the first Modern Europeans to raise up Africa as filled with brilliant and genius traditions, or as Frobenius's biographer Janheinz Jahn wrote, Frobenius gave to German people a counter-idea about Africa: an "insignia of nobility: human dignity, culture, art, literature, and history...it helped Africans and Afro-Americans to find a new consciousness of themselves within the African tradition." - from a short bio titled Leo Frobenius: The Demonic Child

Now: inventing the notion of certain geographical areas as living organisms and works of art and ideas seems fine on the surface, but it's an old trap, innit? If WE are one thing, THEY are another. And we may see beauty or value in the OTHER, but reading history for the last 30 years: far too often: THEY are simplified into a threat. "They" become demonized...

And there are other ideas like paideuma floating around out there. I guess the trick is to see the human race as one family (actually, we are: see "Everyone On Earth Is Actually Your Cousin" and note any changes in your consciousness after you've understood it). We're all in this together, the world is getting smaller and smaller, eh?

And THEN let's think about the human collective unconscious, or paideuma, or mazeway, or whatever you want to call it. It's an idea seemingly tailor-made for Generalists. What are your preliminary diagnoses? Where did we get the idea we must always be armed to the teeth? Why do men rule over women? Why must "my" version of the Sky-God have a bigger dick than your Sky-God? What about money? What about ownership of land? Please feel free to add ones that puzzle you.

See what you can make of it before we realize what Pound thought had already happened: he thought we'd made a "botched civilization." How do we use our imaginations to get out of this? Take your time, even though we sorta are pressed, no?...

                                           art: Bobby Campbell

Robert Anton Wilson's "Jumping Jesus Phenomenon": Fugitive Notes

Prelim
I've been reading with plentious enjoyment John Higgs's recent alternative history of the Roaring 20th Century, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, and it's obvious that Robert Anton Wilson influenced Higgs, almost throughout, although RAW is mentioned only in the bibliography, with Robert Shea and their Illuminatus! Trilogy.

I'll review Higgs's book in good time, but it's gotten me thinking about the semantic unconscious and what drove us into the vast unintelligible weirdness of the 20th c, and I kept thinking about attempts to quantify acceleration of information in history. I've run across a number of fascinating models, but my favorite one remains RAW's model, which he dubbed "The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon" in one of his choicer ludic moods.

For the uninitiated, check out these links; all others feel free to skip down:
"The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon by Robert Anton Wilson Updated by Bob Pauley" (the gist, pithy)

A short excerpt from RAW on this topic, first paragraph HERE, from his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now.

Here's a YouTube clip on Jumping J and The Singularity (you get to see RAW here). It will take 2 1/2 minutes of your sweet accelerating time. I'm pretty sure it's an excerpt from a 2006 Belgian documentary called Technocalyps.

             A Ray Kurzweil graph showing how Everything will lead to the Singularity by 2045
                      and then everything will be just ducky.


Influences
RAW states in the YouTube video that he first got turned onto the idea when reading Alfred Korzybski. (There seems to be far more about this idea in Korzybski's 1921 book Manhood of Humanity than in his 1933 magnum opus, Science and Sanity.) Other influences were Buckminster Fuller, Henry and Brooks Adams, Adrian Berry, Claude Shannon, Theodore Gordon, Carl Oglesby, Timothy Leary, Unistatian writer/biographer John Keats (died: 2000 CE), and many others. Wilson had one of the great capacious, compendious and generalist minds of the 20th c, so his model of acceleration of information in history must be considered something of a "meta" model. When he noticed later thinkers and ideas that seemed isomorphic to his model, at times he incorporated these new ideas, and in the last 15 years of his life sounded sanguine about Ray Kurzweil's models of acceleration, just to give one example. He also - in both his books and articles - frequently cited his immediate influences for a given idea.

It seems likely that, while RAW had been fascinated by the idea of info-acceleration and its effect on societies and human nervous systems, it was the reading of a 1979 book - RAW was 47 in the year 1979, if you're keeping score at home - on another of his enduring preoccupations, the prospects for human immortality, titled Conquest of Death, by Alvin Silverstein, that first got the Jumping J jumpin'. (See pp.134-141) Silverstein had found a 1973 study by economist Georges Anderla, for the OECD, that attempted to quantify knowledge acceleration in history.

Here's a slice of Silverstein:

Let us assume that by the year A.D. 1 we had accumulated an arbitrary single unit of knowledge. Fifteen hundred years later (A.D. 1500) the sum total of human scientific and technological knowledge had about doubled. At about this point the scientific revolution had begun, welding the natural curiosity of humanity to disciplined scientific techniques and quickening the pace of progress. It required only 250 years (through the age of Newton and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century) for the store of data to double once more, to four units. With the rise of new secular academic institutions, science had a "workbench." The next doubling took only 150 years: by the year 1900 humanity had eight units in its "knowledge bank." (pp. 135-136)

The article Silverstein had drawn from was from an OECD publication called Information In 1985, though Anderla's paper was written in 1973. Silverstein uses "units;" RAW uses "Jesuses" after the scientist-derived nomenclature practice of naming a unit of measurement after one of their own. Since Anderla's arbitrary single unit begins very near the time of the person named Jesus the Christ was born, RAW thought it would be ironic, hip and catchy to re-name the unit a "Jesus."

It's a MODEL
Note in the Silverstein quote: it's technological and scientific knowledge, presumably because that's easier to quantify than a conception from my favorite model in the sociology of knowledge, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's thesis that "the sociology of knowledge must concern itself with everything that passes for 'knowledge' in society." (The Social Construction of Reality, p.14-15)

Also: presumably there's a much more unwieldy problem lurking here: the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. In "The Neurogeography of Conspiracy" in Right Where You Are Sitting Now RAW includes a footnote on one of these elements:

No statement is made or intended about wisdom, which is private, not public, and somewhat more mysterious. (p.90)

In reading Wilson's numerous takes on his Jumping J Phenom we see the idea linked to vast historical migrations of world centers of wealth. When there's lots of wealth there's lots of ideas/data/new techniques/mathematical progress/information/knowledge. Because this meta-conceptualization is a map made by a human (RAW) from reading ideas about this topic from others, it's an intensely social project. Further, because Wilson is not a Platonist, human nervous systems make these models of models of models. Hence, the migration of wealth over the globe over the longue duree was called a "neurogeography" of wealth migration. Indeed: to remind us that (presumably) ALL of our studies are human and not given by the gods, even mathematics might be thought of as "neuromathematics."All of our maps and models of "reality" must first filter through the nervous systems of Beings like ourselves who live on this planet, in a gravity well, orbiting a Type G main-sequence star. There might be other intelligent Beings elsewhere with different systems for mapping "reality." Hilariously, RAW pointed out that, in reminding ourselves of this, we must think of the discipline of neuroscience as neuro-neuroscience. Was he fucking with us? Probably...

Being a generalist dunderhead, I can't begin to offer the distinct features that delineate data from information. Or info from knowledge. The more intrepid New York intellectual Daniel Bell, in his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), gives us:

1. data or information describing the empirical world
2. information: organizing the data into meaningful systems such as statistical analysis
3. knowledge: use of information to make judgements.

Which...alright. Not bad.

Some of the best writing I've seen on this clusterfuck of ill-defined terms comes from David Weinberger. See his Everything Is Miscellaneous on the radical pace and change in the way knowledge is structured these days/daze, due to the digital supernova we're all experiencing right where we are sitting now. (See esp. pp. 100-106, op cit). For some golden passages about today's world and knowledge to the social construction of meaning, see the same book, pp. 199-230. But I digress...

In James Kaklios's The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics he compares the quantification of energy doubling versus information doubling: it did not occur at the same pace, because energy storage must obey the properties of atoms. "If energy storage also obeyed Moore's Law, experiencing a doubling of capacity every two years, then a battery that could hold its charge for only a single hour in 1970 would, in 2010, last for more than a century." (Anyone heard of a battery in the works that promises to last 100 years? I wouldn't be surprised if we get one of those in the next few years.)

I lump in energy doubling to screw with our already muddled minds, and 'cuz I get a heady buzz off this stuff. The great anthropologist Leslie White had attempted to quantify social evolution via a measurement of the energy through-put of a particular society.

We could model all this as Jumping Jesus vs. White's Law vs. Moore's Law, but that would be simplifying things far too much, in my estimation. Even Jumpin'J AND White's Law AND Moore's Law seems too simple.

By which I also mean too complex. At this level, logic breaks down for me. Pardonnez-moi, mais il me semble être plein de merde.

Moore's Law
In 1965 Gordon Moore of Intel, said the number of transistors would double every 18 months to two years, and therefore nothing will stay the same, that no technology will be safe from a successor, that computing costs would fall while computing power would increase exponentially. The idea of a personal computer was hatched in the 1960s, but was as yet unfeasible. Yet Moore's Law was like the governing religion in Silicon Valley/San Francisco/Berkeley; it was widely assumed that this rate of exponential growth applied not only to technology, but business, education, and even culture. Of course, Wilson loved this idea (not as a religion though). The visionaries of the sixties knew they only needed to wait a few years and the personal computer would arrive.

I had been trying to keep up with Moore's Law for years. Just when it looked like it would slow down, somebody figured out something, and it kept going. Then, for the last few years, it looked like it had slowed from its exponential pace. Then, last month I read this article. Ok: a marriage of electrons and photons to fit 20 million transistors and 850 photonic components (whatever that means) onto a single 3x6 millimeter chip? Greater bandwidth for less power. "Ultrafast low-power data crunching." And it's quickly scalable for commercial production. It's clear from the article that it's going to be good for the environment (barring the Law of Unforeseen Consequences). But I wondered how this related to Moore's Law. Was Moore's Law even a "thing" anymore? So I emailed the lead researcher at Berkeley about this. Here's Dr. Vladimir Marko Stojanovic's response:

Moore's law has definitely slowed down. Even Intel postponed their 7nm process this year to next year - something that hasn't happened the last fifty years.

Also, the process nodes below 45nm are not really any faster and hardly denser, just more energy-efficient due to mobile demand.

Then Stojanovic wrote a sentence that was way over my head, but asserted this new breakthrough goes "beyond Moore's Law." I guess I'll take him at this word. Hey, why not? Stranger than we can imagine?

Stranger Than We Can Imagine

According to RAW's Jumping Jesus model, we had accumulated 8 Jesuses by 1900, right around the time Higgs's book is concerned with. Higgs covers the 20th century, in which information doubled again by 1950 to 16 Jesuses, by 1960 to 32 Js, by 1967 to 64, by 1973 128 Js...and then things get out of hand. I'm not sure anyone understands it.

It could be that once we got to 8 Js, human society begins to produce knowledges it had no idea what to do with. Or at least: it had a very difficult time trying to come to grips with this hot mess of items like the Id, genocide, chaos mathematics (which plays a big part in forecasting futures), quantum mechanics and relativity, climate change, postmodernism, psychedelic drugs, and existentialism. Well, clearly we have not come to grips with any of these Ideas yet, eh?

A Few Quotes

The "investigative"poet/chronicler/counterculture historian and Egyptologist Ed Sanders said in 2000CE that our era is "data retentive." (post-Snowden: who can possibly say Sanders was wrong?)

The UC Berkeley information theorist Peter Lyman, who wrote How Much Information? and who died in 2007, said, "It's clear we're all drowning in a sea of information."

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
-T.S. Eliot, "The Rock"

Eric Schmidt said that from the dawn of civilization until 2003, humans had produced five exabytes of data. He said that we now produce that every two days, and it's accelerating. I don't know his source(s). I have no grasp of an "exobyte." I'm not really even sure how this was measured or what it could mean, but Schmidt seemed excited by this. I gleaned it from This Will Make You Smarter, ed. by John Brockman, p.305 Of course, cultural evolution, being Lamarckian, occured pre-Jesus. Who knows when time-binding began? (My guess was on a Tuesday, probably rainy, may as well stay in the cave all day and...write something?) Vico says, "The Greek philosophers accelerated the natural course of their nation's development." (paragraph #158, New Science)

"The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially." - Marshall McLuhan

"I suspect or intuit that this ever-accelerating info-techno-sociological rev-and-ev-olution follows the laws of organic systems and continually reorganizes on higher and higher levels of coherence, until something kills it." - Robert Anton Wilson brainmachines.com Manifesto

"Along the way to knowledge,
Many things are accumulated.
Along the way to widsom,
Many things are discarded."
-Lao-Tzu

In a 2004 interview, RAW makes it clear how crazy it is to try to be a generalist these days of accelerated info. This interview is included in the book True Mutations: Interviews On The Edge of Science, Technology and Consciousness, by R. U. Sirius:

NF: Is there anything specific that you can think of that you feel has been superceded?

RAW: I can’t think about it right now. You can’t be a generalist in this world. So many things I’ve written about have changed by now I don’t know how out-of-date I am. I just know I must be out-of-date.

                                            art/graphic design by Bobby Campbell

A Haunting Frame For Generalist Intellectual Types in 2015

The optimist says, "The glass is half full."
The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty."
The rationalist says, "The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."

A general problem for insatiable readers and writers of journal articles, non-fiction books, novels, poetry, sociologies of science, histories of ideas, essays on arts, rants and diatribes by marginalized figures, economic ideologies, radical thinkers, etc: Let's let this dude sum it up for me:

"It requires in these times much more intellect to marshal so much greater a stock of ideas and observations...Those who should be guides for the rest, see too many sides to every question. They hear so much said, and find that so much can be said, about everything, that they feel no assurance about anything."

This is John Stuart Mill, in his diary, 1854. And for Robert Anton Wilson fans, how many Jesuses ago was this? 32? 64? 256? Oh wait: forgot to carry the three....several thousand J ago, arithmetically in fact.

                                         Emile Zola, apparently in self-portrait, trying to
                                         come off as a magician of some sort?

It's fairly well-known that, for a long time, intellectuals on the "humanities" side have wanted to foment revolution, and most-times a non-violent one. Some on the technical intelligentsia side have too. And the "intellectual" as well-known category traces only back, according to a popular intellectual riff, to the Dreyfus Affair. Emile Zola - a damned novelist so what the hell gives him the right to question?! - led the charge against the French military, and was hounded out of the country. But Zola and his fellow "Dreyfusards" were right: Dreyfus was innocent, and being persecuted largely for being a Jew. This story was resolved only 109 years ago.

And while the technical intelligentsia - specialist intellectuals in the physical sciences, to be brief - are a quite young group, maybe only 140 years old, the Humanist intellectuals go back perhaps 3000 years, if you include religious radicals, or just Old Men Who'd Read Everything.

The Haunting Frame
The dream of making a war-less, border-less and much more equitable and human political state of affairs perhaps had a window, briefly open, now closed. How so?

Well, for one thing, the class of State-supported scientific intellectuals have won. Oh sure, the economy is bad enough that even their newly minted PhDs are having trouble finding work, but it's nothing like what's going on for the Humanities PhDs. (Bing "adjunct professors") Moreover, another quote to suit my dire thesis:

"In this tremendous contrast with previous revolutions one fact is reflected. Before these latter years, counterrevolution usually depended on the support of reactionary powers, which were technically and intellectually inferior to the forces of revolution. This has changed with the advent of fascism. Now, every revolution is likely to meet the attack of the most modern, the most efficient, most ruthless machinery yet in existence. It means that the age of revolutions free to evolve according to their own laws is over."

That's Franz Borkenau, from his 1938 study of the Spanish Civil War. He's talking the military and police state apparatus, which will, it seems, always protect the interests of what's now called "the 1%." He had no idea about digital technology or the NSA, much less television. Even the Stasi were far in the offing.

What Were the Functions of Generalist Intellects?
I've seen a lot of answers, from the New York intellectuals themselves talking about their own powers and knowledges. I've read the lamentations in Russell Jacoby's book The Last Intellectuals. I've read just about everything Chomsky has to say about how his colleagues have used their knowledge and privilege to throw in their lot with the Owners of the country. (In this he's a lot like what Julien Benda said about his own class - in 1927! - in his The Treason of the Intellectuals. For those who see the irony here and like to savor it, please do so.) There is no end of books on intellectuals, if only because this "New Class" is so zealously protective of its own rights and privileges.

Whether from New York or London or Paris, or Hollywood's Hitler-inspired Jewish intellectual diaspora, or wherever else, a literate public saw how ideas hung together, how stylish sentences about important matters could revivify the mind, how discrimination among ideas could take place, how a writer could make something that you thought was not interesting was au contraire: quite a kick. Via wide-ranging intellect, the idea of a vibrant and informed popular culture was possible.

I think this may be all over. Not that there aren't still overweening weirdos who live for this stuff. But this one has to get All This off his chest. Possibly because I hope I'm wrong. Maybe because it's some sort of misery loving company thing. Or, you just like reading bookish jagoffs throw their erudite hissy fits; my misery loves your company. Could be I'm in a 30 Year Funk. Maybe I'm like the guy who just realized he got rooked by mega-unwisely investing in a chain of Foto-Mat booths, nationwide, in this year Our Lady of Eris, 2015.

It could be that, via some sort of magickal working, I confess my haunting frame here - many of you may be well ahead of me on this, I know, I know - so that it will ameliorate things and somehow cause them to go in the opposite direction. But this last "maybe"? I don't feel it. I know the words but not the tune. It feels flat. More's the pity.

Know Thy Enemy/Due Diligence
For me, it was a few solid years of feverish reading of the rise of Public Relations, and tangentially related areas. Such as the 1947 National Security State, which has never left us, only gets stronger, a Behemoth of untold proportions, one of its favorite moves being to make Itself invisible to almost everyone, all the while suctioning the sustenance from its own citizenry.

The signal fact about public relations experts - who Antonio Gramsci called "masters of legitimation" - is that they were so out in the open about what they did and why. Now? Not so much. But check out Harold Lasswell - or is it Edward Bernays? my notes are old and unclear; I had no idea I'd be blogging, and indeed, Internet wasn't really a Thing when I crashed on PR - anyway:

"The spread of schooling did not release the masses from ignorance and superstition but altered the nature of both and compelled a new technique of control, largely through propaganda..." He goes on to say this is the best means of controlling the proles because it's cheaper than bribery or outright violence.

It took a long time for me to not be struck by how arrogant these Mandarin intellectual officials were, or how gleefully subservient they were to the Captains of Industry and War. (And the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, et.al) I was stunned by the disparity between what experts in legitimation for the Owners of the country think versus  all the patriotic "we're all Americans" "in this together" and "freedom" and "democracy"hokum I got in my own indoctrination camps (9AM to 3PM public schooling, minimum of 12 years served).

Some of these pricks just gave it all away. You think Lasswell (Bernays?) was crass, check out one of the fathers of the Neo Conservative movement, Irving Kristol:

"It has always been assumed that as the United States became more managerial, its power more imperial, and its population more sophisticated, the intellectuals would move inexorably closer to the seats of authority -- would, perhaps, even be incorporated en masse into a kind of 'power elite.'" (origin of quote unknown to me due to bad note-taking, but found again in George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For?, p.7)

If I had to pick two of the most egregious of these legitimators of State power today in Unistat, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman could easily lead the pacifist writer of this blogspew to punch either in the mouth, were I to come to within fist-shot of either. Talk about "treason"...

What intellectual on our side is seen talking about political ideas on the teevee in Unistat? Lemme see...Glenn Greenwald. (And you can only guess what multi-millionaire former head of the taxpayer-funded NSA Keith Alexander thinks about Greenwald: he ought not exist. Let's not even bring up Edward Snowden. Anyone got anyone I missed?)

Yea, But The Science Guys Can Come Around, Right?
Not likely. That's not to say there aren't physicists, chemists, biologists and engineers on the side of the huddled masses yearning to be free, or at least make their rent. Clearly there are many out there. But they still want their jobs. They're addicted to solving abstruse technical problems, then heading home to the spouse and kids. Compared to the average certified Humanities person, the physical science guys are apolitical. (In general.)

There's a heady literature (if you dig and have a library card) about the political commitments among the technical intelligentsia. Most of the best ones are about the morality of their commitments. My favorite among the minority of books that question those commitments from a libertarian position is a guerrilla ontological book, jocoserious, satirical and pissed: The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and The Citadel of Science, by Robert Anton Wilson. RAW has all the generalist chops of any New York intellectual, but rarely did one of that storied group take on the scientific elite. A golden passage here, and realize the book was published in 1986, but keep in mind Unistat's straddling of the globe with its military, and why Islamic militants are at such wit's end of desperation they're cutting off heads of journalists, knowing a drone could likely obliterate them with zero foreknowledge tomorrow afternoon, after having a piece of baklava:

"The late J.B. Priestly often animadverted among what he called The Citadel - the scientific-technologic elite which both supports and is supported by our military-industrial alpha males. The Citadel, in most countries, gets millions of pounds for every twopence doled out to the humanities, the social studies or the arts; it devotes most of its time and intellect to the task, as Bucky Fuller used to say, of delivering more and more explosive power over greater and greater distances over shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people. For this reason, The Citadel increasingly frightens most of us and there is a vast,  somewhat incoherent rebellion against it all around the world. The rebellion takes the form, most of the time, of return to some earlier philosophy or reality tunnel (hello ISIS and al-Qaeda! - OG), although within the scientific community there is also a rebellion which is seeking a new reality-tunnel, which is usually called The New Paradigm." - pp.20-21 of my tattered, pages-falling-out copy

RAW goes on to say Citadel personnel are intensely territorial, including in ideology, and they're proud of their atheism. He's appalled by death-centered nature of this well-educated group, but makes it clear his book is not an attack on the Citadel's moral grounds, but rather its violations of what he sees as the right of free speech and for every scientist to report any finding, even if it's in violation of the current paradigm(s). He particularly loathes the inquisitorial doings of the Citadel's ideological protectors in persecuting scientific heresy, as this simply should not take place in a supposed Free Society. Although RAW uses a rhetoric that at times seems outlandish in The New Inquisition, I think his thesis is very strong and ought be heeded. The academic version of his approach to the philosophy and history of science would be found in Paul Feyerabend, in a work such as Against Method, and possibly in Imre Lakatos's work. Bruno Latour's application of ethnomethodological-like inquiry to practices in actual scientific labs seems to bolster RAW's more Swiftian/Nietzschean/Fortean rhetorics. I also see a family resemblance in Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

However, I don't need a weatherman to know blah blah blah, and I guess we will just have to see if "Reality" can deal us a surprisingly good hand. Meanwhile, we do what we can.

Whither the University in General?
This deserves a few other blogspews of its own, but student debt is now well over $1,000,000,000,000 and mounting fast, and not only do young people "graduate" with a "degree" but they seem to not be able to think all that well for themselves. But then there aren't any jobs for them anyway. Meanwhile the highest paid public servant in most states is the head football coach, and that entire system stinks to high heaven. Go ahead, lift the lid and take a whiff. It's sulphurous-rotten and the older, comfy alumni say "Let's go all the way this year!" Their best players don't get educations and barely have enough to eat. If they're lucky they won't suffer brain damage by the age of 45 from too many violent blows to their inadequately helmeted heads. And undergraduate costs have vastly exceeded inflation (gee...why?), and your freshman is largely being taught by "adjunct" professors who make less take-home pay than a head manager at Burger King. Try to tell me how this is sustainable. Meanwhile, Obama seems to think  it's of the utmost importance to keep sausage-grinding-out "college graduates." So they can...monitor robots?

Well, The Citadel does need a plentiful supply of STEM students. Fuck the Humanities bastards, with their questioning of the political economy and values and all that.

It should get pretty interesting. I can't help but imagine the increasing numbers of very bright, hyper-educated Humanities types, and their degrees and their debt and the increasingly fucked job market. Will they get political knowing the NSA might be tracking their every move?

The entirety of scenario(s) above constitute a mere model, or frame. Since I'm not a modeltheist, I don't think I'm presenting "the Truth" here. I merely affirm it might have some weight and heft, and that I don't exactly consider the model as anything close to a felicitous state of affairs. I've tried working myself into a lather about the cup being twice as big as it needs to be, but it's not taking.

I will leave us there, to escape back into my comic books.

                                    image by Bobby Campbell