Cosmic Schmucks: Addenda in Rhetoric, Metaphor and Digression

Just a few items and then I'll let you get back to your porn. But first, if you'll permit me:

Addenda on Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Schmuck" Principle
I recently read a summary of academic philosopher and specialist in argumentation theory Daniel H. Cohen's TED talk (linked in this article). The most interesting thing to me was that, in the "argument as war" metaphor, the "winner" of the argument wins ego strokes, maybe some prestige, or maybe a firmer conviction that s(he)'s "right." What does the "loser" get? The loser learned a better way to think about an idea. (I am bracketing those who are truly interested in thinking better about topics from those who, when admitting the other has a much stronger argument nevertheless revert - everyday perversity? - to their comfortable positions.) The "war" metaphor presupposes "losing" as "learning." That's wonderfully wrong, it seems to me. I love Cohen's idea here. (My bias, stated outright: learning seems much more like "winning" something than the feeling of "losing.")

The monstrous and firmly-embedded "war" metaphor in our culture isn't going away soon, although Cohen has a vision of how we can improve on the quality of arguments, and move away from the structure of "I win/You lose" ugliness. Which I'll get to shortly (or you can watch his 9 minute spiel on a TED stage and skip ahead; the porn's tapping its toes).

Cohen doesn't mention George Lakoff or Mark Johnson, who, very early in their landmark 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, show how "argument is war" is a basic assumption in our culture, built into the fabric of our metaphors we subconsciously think with, viz:

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
-p.4, op. cit

Prof. Cohen also cites two other argument structures: argument as proof, which seems much closer to deduction and therefore more collaborative-in-agreeing-upon-principles or axioms. And then there's the argument as performance, which seems underrated to me, at least in the sense I imagine Cohen means and definitely in the senses that I imagine. But the argument as war (equality of the sexes, whether utilitarianism is the best ethical philosophy, whether we ought to let the poor starve, etc, etc, etc), is the most common and in Cohen's words, "deforms" our thinking because it accentuates tactics over logic, magnifies the differences between "me" and "you" and "us" and "them," and glorifies winning while encouraging the idea that the loser has been an abject, embarrassing failure in "defeat." (But the "loser" is the one who gets the "cognitive gains," remember?)

[But first: Let me get this out of the way: I've played the argument as war game far too many times. More than I can remember. Quite often I think I probably pretended to "know" more than I actually did, and so I was being a Cosmic Schmuck...which, by the Principle, makes me a little less of one by admitting it, just so you know I've fully internalized the meta-game rules of the Cosmic Schmuck Principle.]

What is it with all this pretentious chest-thumping in our culture? Do we secretly feel we're at sea, afraid we're clueless, so we become as much the Prosecuting Attorney as possible to force our fears back down, and keep up the Game that we're "right" on the Tough Questions? Prof. Peter Berger, one of the gods of late 20th/early 21st c. Sociology, wrote much on what he called the "epistemological elite," who were high-ranking intellectuals in institutions such as the church, psychoanalysis, Marxism, economics: these people were the masters of sectarian knowledge in their domains: "Any epistemological elite, religious or secular, must develop a system of cognitive defenses to defend its claims against outside criticisms but also, very importantly, to assuage the doubts harbored by insiders."
(see p.37 Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist)

The argument as war "winner" would seem to be heavily concentrated within the epistemological elite, although no doubt every street gang and sports team and gang of white collar business criminals has one of these guys too...

Maybe the worst aspect of argument as war is, according to Prof. Cohen (and I very much agree with him here), that it pretty much forecloses on deliberation, negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. (I'd add there seems to be something utterly antagonistic about the argument as war mode of thought and the ludic, fun-loving beings most of us want to "be.")

                                             Kenneth Burke, who changed the field of
                                             Rhetoric from an idea about literary and
                                             oratorical devices to basic human 
                                             communication, which seeks largely to
                                             persuade.

I think Robert Anton Wilson wanted much more of all of that (deliberation, negotiation, collaboration, compromise, playfulness) in his thinking that actuated the Cosmic Schmuck Principle. Why? Well, for one: the need to be "right" all the time seems linked with being repressive and Authoritarian. RAW used a term he attributed to Mike Hoy: "Correct Answer Machine": this is an assumption deeply embedded in out culture, so we take it in, seemingly, with mother's milk: that we must have The One True Answer to any question, as if there were a little machine in our brains that always knew the "correct" answer to everything. Wilson thought this was basically the same as an ideology, but an authoritarian one, almost always based on Aristotelian two-value logic, with no room for the Excluded Middle. Wilson called it "robot circuits in our brains." (see Email To The Universe, p.135) This seems cognate with the I Am Right You Are Wrong problem that Edward Debono wrote so engagingly about. Let's have more arguments using "water" logic and less having "rock" logic. Here! Here!

Wilson thought, somewhat Dao-istically that, from the most elemental forms of energy and life systems on up to inter-accomodative systems in nature and society: cybernetic feedback loops, unhindered by rigid and artificial stumbling blocks, were a key aspect of freedom and evolution. I simplify his views far too much here, but suffice: the need to consult a stupid-making Correct Answer Machine (installed when? by your daddy or the priest at age 13?) led to human misery. Open systems in nature, open minds in society: we go with the best we know, we make "gambles," but it's always contingent; we ought always be ready to take in new forms of information in order to hone our thought, and to never decide one day we needn't do this any longer, for we Have Arrived at The One True Way...

So: the need to be "right" is a big problem.

For another: "reality" does not seem to conform to the structure of our Indo-European sentences of SUBJECT +(linking verb) + PREDICATE all that well at all, at all. Not as well as we seem to assume. Especially those sentences with the troublesome linking verb forms of BEING (am, is, are, was, were, be), which tend to hypnotize us into going along with a static eternal Thing-ness to abstract nouns and ideas. Also: these linking verbs tend to make us forget the thousands of other "things" an idea could stand for. That's why he advocated for the use of E-Prime, or English without "is" forms in it, as a tool for improved communication and to root out bullshit in one's own thinking. (See any comments by Eric Wagner left on this blog for examples of E-Prime.)

I use E-Prime only some of the time, mostly because I "am" lazy, but I think some forms of "be" or "is" in sentences, while ontologically misleading according to D. David Bourland's standpoint, my language becomes stilted. I have not learned to use it in a consistently eloquent way. Finally: I am more impressed with ideas about how metaphor and rhetoric actually function in our nervous systems and culture, and the Big Names that have influenced me here are: Vico, Nietzsche, Cassirer, I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, and George Lakoff. I see E-Prime as a valuable tool for exploration as of this date.

As a way of making my way toward some sort of detente and the ethical problems around subtly hypnotizing others into possibly false artificial ontologies ("Xs are Qs" or "P is Y, and at times W and V"), notice any sentence I use with the form of "be" in it and "be" just a little bit suspicious of my intentions, okay? If I write, "What the NSA is doing will be found in any history of totalitarianism; with the Obama administration's blessings, Obama's being a fascist now," E-Prime would put it as, "From the reports I have read about what the NSA has done, this reminds me of my understanding of what gets labeled 'totalitarianism' in books and other discourse, and Obama seems to have over-rode the Constitution, which reminds me of certain historical examples often called 'fascism.'" Say what you will about the stilted style, but don't I sound a lot less know-it-all-ish in the E-Prime version?

Take away: stay vigilant about the OG's use of "is" "am" "was" "be" "being" "were." (This seems another way for me to lessen my Cosmic Schmuckitude.)

Back to Prof. Cohen: I loved his idea of changing the argument as war assumption in our culture with changing how we perceive the role of arguer. What he idealizes goes something like this: with deliberation, negotiation, compromise and collaboration (and I'd add our ludic nature), we enter into an argument as an arguer, but also as an audience member to that argument. The goal would be to arrive at the endpoint of an argument and have the participants (including any audience members) saying, "That was a satisfying argument!" So: even if you "lose" you feel no shame. And the "winner" feels a sense of accomplishment in bringing about an invigorating aesthetic experience for all. (I might be reading into what Prof. Cohen wants here, so these observations can be considered as Cohen/OG ideas, but let's give Cohen the kudos; I don't wanna come off as some Cosmic Schmuck!)

Prof. Cohen's ideas about improving the quality of argumentation remind me of a similar sort of idea that I first ran across in the journal Etc: A Review of General Semantics, when Edward MacNeal used the term "grokduel" on p.270 of vol.63, #3, July 2006. Apparently he coined the word in 1999, and here's a definition:

grokduel: a contest in which two or more parties vie to see who best understands the positions of the others.

MacNeal quite likely got the "grok" aspect of his coinage from Robert Heinlein's 1961 mindbending cult novel Stranger In A Strange Land. The idea plays out in my mind, somewhat ideally, as very much like what Prof. Cohen would want in new argumentative forms. There seems a sort of possibly ironic chest-thumping aspect to MacNeal's "grokduel," but I do think much mirth and learning could take place during such experimental arguments.

Back to Cosmic Schmuck: You know who's a quite a lot less of a Cosmic Schmuck these days? Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a very charming and handsome TV Doctor, who admitted recently - and quite publicly - that he'd been duped by anti-cannabis government propaganda. He - finally! - actually looked at lots of evidence for himself and concluded he'd been wrong, wrong, wrong. (I assume most readers of the OG wonder why anyone would believe what the government said in the first place!) And I barely know who Gupta is, but Unistatians love him, so his play within the game rules of the Cosmic Schmuck Principle (which no doubt he's never hoidda!), with regard to the subject (cannabis prohibition and the efficacy of marijuana for health reasons), makes his recent lessening of Schmuckiness quite a felicitous thing, aye?

So: get to grokdueling, my fellow schmucks! And lessen your schmuckiness a tad for the day! And then: on to porn! (829 gadzillion troglobytes of new porn went up while you read this...stuff you haven't yet seen! Have fun!)

                                     computer scientist Lofti Zadeh, who developed a 
                                     fuzzy logic that admitted a very large number of
                                    values between 0 and 1, but Zadeh took great pains to 
                                    distinguish his logic from probability theory.