Robert Anton Wilson: Missing Books

I've just finished reading Patton Oswalt's book Silver Screen Fiend:Learning About Life From An Addiction To Film (2015) and it was of course very hilarious and entertaining: it's Patton Freaking Oswalt. But I had had no idea he'd haunted the New Beverly Cinema as I had. LA's greatest revival house for film, it had and has a cult following of film freaks and the book is dedicated to Sherman Torgan, who ran the place while Oswalt saw gawd only knows: probably 400 films there over a four year period, 1995-1999. The Appendix (pp.189-222) lists all the films, so I guess I could count but I'm too lazy... Yea: Patton Oswalt saw hundreds of films in movie theaters in those four years, he lists them all: date/film(s)/venue, and it's a lot like my own lists, only his manic phase of crashing the canons of film seemed deeper and more intense than mine. Torgan's programming easily convinced me he knew what films were worth seeing. I knew that if the New Bev was showing it it was probably worth seeing, it didn't matter if I hadn't heard of the film, or if it was from a genre I don't strongly gravitate toward (musicals and gorefest, anything with Doris Day in it). There's a hilarious chapter where he details the unhinged drive to see 12 Hammer Horror films in two days, and eventually, from sleep deprivation and insane film gluttony, the Hammer films begin to run together in his mind with other classic Hollywood films he'd seen recently...he's having a bad hallucination trip while awake, hilariously described, like something out of Alexander Trocchi, while in the theatre supposedly watching another film. A fellow film weirdo asks him if he's okay. Yea. (Noooo.)

I think I started driving from San Pedro up the Harbor Freeway (to the 10) to that predominately orthodox Jewish neighborhood of LA (near the corner of La Brea and Beverly Blvd) around 1996. I drove that stretch a lot. From one corner of the metropolis to another. I think I was aware of Oswalt as a stand-up comedian, and I may have seen him there, but I saw a lot of familiar screen faces there. I remember one night I took a seat in the dark moments before a double feature of Jeunet et Caro: Delicatessen (one of my all-time favorite films), and City of Lost Children. When the delicatessen owner asks "Have I got something right here?" the crowd erupts in laughter (as it should: one of the great anarchic comic moments in cinema history), and I look over at a guy cracking up and note I'm sitting next to Doogie Howser's, best-friend Max Casella.

I remember dragging my wife to see a John Frankenheimer double feature, because Seconds was the second film. Seconds totally slays me. Always. It was a Friday night - date night, when young, well-educated hipsters invaded the New Bev, usually to see the first film, then leave for - their actual lives. They all saw the admittedly great and famous 1962 Manchurian Candidate then left, despite my leaning into the aisle and telling twentysomething strangers filing out: "If you thought that was good, wait till you see Seconds," and no one would even make eye contact with the Scary Old Guy.

                                       a bit from Seconds (1966): Rock Hudson rocks!

Anyway...After Sherman Torgan's death (and Quentin Tarantino publicly standing up for film freaks all over LA by saying "As long as I draw breath, the New Beverly will remain open"), Oswalt attends a "sloppy, spontaneously organized 'wake'" inside the not-too-far-away Egyptian Theatre. (Everyone agreed it wouldn't be right to do it inside the New Bev). Oswalt tells the anecdote about the night Lawrence Tierney walked into the middle of Citizen Kane and sat behind Oswalt and started talking out loud to the screen for about 15 minutes before his handler finds him and ushers him out. Tierney had never seen the film, but the stuff he says, like the best DVD commentary ever - as remembered by Oswalt, coupled with what we know about Tierney's history and that voice - a shimmering anecdote in a book filled with them. (see pp.94-98) (I wonder how many RAWphiles that know of Tierney and his work think of him as a classic 2nd Circuit type as I do.)

After the wake, Oswalt programmed an entire month of fantastic, non-existent films for the New Beverly in Heaven, just for Sherman. Oswalt writes that he got the idea from Neil Gaiman's storyline in  The Sandman books, of "Brief Lives," where there's a "dream library" of books that famous authors never got around to writing, like Raymond Chandler's Love Can Be Murder, or Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures on the Moon. I for one would drop everything going on in my life to go see every one of these dream films, which includes Orson Welles's 1942 Heart of Darkness and Orson's 1944 Batman: Riddle of the Ghoul, starring Gary Cooper as Bruce Wayne/Batman. "And leave it to Welles to populate his movie with six of Batman's cast of villains: Lee Marvin as Two-Face, Edward G. Robinson as the Penguin, Ella Raines as Catwoman, Dwight Frye as the Riddler, Everett Sloane as the Scarecrow and, towering imperiously over the whole mad feast, Welles himself as Ra's al Ghul. The Richard Widmark cameo, at the end, as the newly scarred Joker, leaping toward the screen from the smoking ruins of the chemical plant, still makes people scream. The costumes that longtime fans wear to midnight showings only add to the chiaroscuro carnival." (p.174) I see the great RKO noir Director of Photography, Nicholas Musuraca, doing the lights and camera here, with Orson, of course.

Oh yea: how perfect is this?: In some alternate universe/Torgan's Heaven that Hal Ashby directed A Confederacy of Dunces? John Belushi played Ignatius in a miraculous performance without ever having read John Kennedy Toole's novel. With Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin. Oswalt goes on with this, an invention of 29 films. Hey! I just noticed the blogpost that forms this chapter of "dream films" is HERE! (<----In the blog there, you only get the names of the nonexistent films; you have to get hold of Oswalt's book to read the synopses.)
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Reading this bit from Patton Oswalt's film addiction book reminded me of the Books Missing From Robert Anton Wilson's Oeuvre. Many of us have discussed what RAW's Tale of the Tribe would have been, but he died before he could write it. We got a precis, tantalizing to the utmost, at the end of TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution, pp.203-213. If we could pool the no-doubt thousands of pages of notes from RAWphiles on what RAW was hinting at, we might be able to cobble something together. But it wouldn't be RAW.

Now please bear with me: I've gotten hold of some...well...let''s just say I've gotten lucky and was able to obtain a hot underground tryptamine drug made by the Disciples Of Shulgin (DOS). Psychonauts have been reporting that at the half gram dosage level, they've had very pleasant glimpses of other possible worlds, but only those worlds the person had been daydreaming or thinking about in their ordinary, non-stoned lives. I took some after thinking of RAW's books and, for whatever it's worth, here's what I've come back with:

The Shea Correspondence Course: Letters Between Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea (2017): RAW finally collected the vast trove of letters received from his friend Robert Shea, and via excessive volunteer wrangling by RAWphiles, found well over 40 long type-written letters he'd sent to Shea. All of the letters from both men had been dispersed, scattered among numerous friends and collectors of literary ephemera. Interviewed by NPR about the 423 page tome, RAW says from his home in Capitola that he was surprised how much he'd forgotten about how Illuminatus! eventually coalesced, but was grateful such a large number of the letters had shown up after an Internet call-to-arms from his fanatic readers. NPR seemed most interested in the fervor of glee among the cultish readers of Wilson over the publication, long awaited and thought at one time impossible. Why the word "course" in the title, NPR asks? Wilson said his friend Robert Shea was the sort of person whose anarchic intelligence always made him think, and re-reading their letters before publication he realized how much he'd learned. Shea died in 1994. Reviewed at BoingBoing: "I've never seen a correspondence that was so funny and at the same time brimming with endless ideas. Even when they seem to have a simmering feud over some idea or another, you can always tell they loved each other."

Hollywood Notes (2012?): The long-awaited chronicles of RAW's first-hand experiences seeing his books Masks of the Illuminati, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, and the midnight movie Reality Is What You Can Get Away With made into films and the sausage-factory behind the scenes. RAW agrees with Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald: if they want to pay you for the rights, best to just take the money and leave Hollywood. But RAW's too interested in the machinations of filmmaking and while he has grave problems with the liberties directors, editors and script "doctors" took with his material, he seems pleased by the results, all in all. My favorite part of the book is RAW's anecdotes about the film community party scenes in the hills above Hollywood.

Heretic: How Timothy Leary Foresaw the "New Teleology"(2025): This short tome is a surprise hit with academics who had been trying to forge the "New Synthesis" sometimes called the "New Teleology," since the rise in prominence of Sheldrake, epigenetics, CRISPR techniques that helped to rapidly cure most diseases and food shortages. Other texts had emphasized the rapid falling out of favor of "selfish gene" ideas as the main motors of evolution. RAW traces the history of self-organizing life to cosmic panspermia notions and the long list of scientific "heretics" who emphasized latent "systems" inherent in the human nervous system. This book argues that Leary's ideas about the brain and evolution were far ahead of his time (Leary died in 1996), that Neo-Darwinism was always a big chunk of the puzzle, but that scientific visionaries - once marginalized as "crackpots" or "mystics" such as Bruno, Reich, Lamarck, Sheldrake and Leary - are now seen, retrospectively, as victims of a sort of mass hubris and "Mind-Forged Manacles" of working prole scientists/old paradigm adherents (RAW loves to quote the poet Blake). It was said that the philosopher Thomas Nagel was a fan of this book, but this can not be substantiated at the moment you're reading this. At 225 pages and good humor, this one's on many a college syllabus and wins RAW a National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

New Age Sewage (2016): RAW seems to be channeling George Carlin here in his non-fiction satire on anti-vaxxers, Randroids, supply-siders (these last two not New Age per se, merely bad ideas), New Earthers, "race-ists," orthorexics, those fearful of taboo words, and fundamentalists of all sorts. Perhaps surprisingly, the book receives very good reviews from those Skeptics that RAW lampooned in many works. RAW at his most polemical, this book is at least the equal in tone and logical vigor as The New Inquisition and Natural Law.

Life Plus 3000 (2030): RAW's immortality book, which in the Preface he says he'd radically revised at minimum 32 times because of the "Jumping Jesus Phenomenon." A very old version had a working title Death Shall Have No Dominion. I found it most impressive that RAW doesn't gloat here: he'd been writing about longevity and immortality since the 1970s and was scoffed at by New York intellectuals. When the worm began to turn most decisively around 2023 he decided to wrap it up. Now he's been proven "correct" for the most part, but rather than name his fairly "wrong" (and mostly forgotten) detractors, he seems more in awe of Nature than ever.

Collected Writings on Joyce (2014): Joyce scholar Fritz Senn was the impetus behind this. He thought young European readers needed an introduction to Joyce by an intellectual non-academic Joycean. I had no idea RAW had written this much, in such detail, on Joyce. Lovers of RAW's book Coincidance will want to graduate to this text, many of the ideas of which were once too "far out" but have now made it inside mainstream Joyce scholarship.

Robert Anton Wilson's Book of Black Magic and Curses (2007): A rollicking book of humor about domesticated primate hypnosis and words, psychoneuroimmunology, the omnipresence of metaphor, a vindication of Vico and Korzybski, and "How To Tell Your Friends From the Other Apes." One reviewer blurbs on the back cover: "A linguistics book sui generis if I ever saw one. Highly recommended." RAW scholars can now see what Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words was supposed to be, before the editors took out all the most interesting parts. Or, as RAW put it, "The editors at Playboy Press, like most editors, want to pee in the soup before they let go of someone else's work."

Bride of Illuminatus! (2019) Long-awaited. Carries his (and Shea's) saga of certain families and ideas through the Age of Surveillance. The plotlines developed with Edward Snowden vs. Dick Cheney (under disguised names, for this is one long True Shaggy Dog Story) makes this Trip worth reading over and over.

Babylon L-5 (2021) One of the best of the sixty-some-odd books preparing humanity for space colonization. Said to have cheered Elon Musk, who, after reading it, redoubled his efforts to get LaGrange point communities going for industrial production in zero-gravity, followed by his (and others') move to make Project Exurb a reality. Meanwhile, space travel impact on human physiological systems are being solved almost weekly. RAW keeps up on this stuff.

Untitled Epic Poem on Evolution: So far: no publisher. He's said to still be working on it, although over 100 chapters exist in the version that passed through my hands. Seemingly influenced by both Pound's Cantos and Joyce's Finnegans Wake as well as the wildest, most outre ideas about baby universes, brane theory, black holes, and self-organizing Taoist cybernetic feedback loops within loops, the loose-leaf copy I had was over 1700 pages of "holographic poetry" and seemed to fuse in equal measure hardcore-scientific, poetic and mystical ideas. The work functions as an encyclopedia of history and hard science, while reading as poetry. One strain of poetic rumination, about a divine feminine and repressed aspect of history, coupled with - believe it or not - the history of economics (!) makes a bracing case for universal liberation and "true freedom" for all "sentient beings" and a freedom from fear, want, and State and other Gangster coercion, based on communication, humor and massive cybernetic feedback loops of information so dense...well, I just want you all to be able to get hold of a copy some day, as this is a true Terran Archive and "Blueprint For Humanity" (<-----the name of one of the poems.) There were references and allusions enough to support the argument that this might truly constitute RAW's Tale of the Tribe. Difficult and psychedelic. Readers new to Wilson are advised to study his works from 1959-2005 first. Another helpful idea, until the work is finished and published: RAW includes an annotated bibliography that in itself was over 200 pages and quite cosmically hilarious, I thought.

That's all I can remember until I take that particular tryptamine again. If any of you have similar access and find something out about RAW's nonexistent-in-this-world oeuvre, please report back here in the comments!

                                           graphic art by Bob Campbell

On Gossip

I once worked in a music store that was owned by a good Christian family man who had been arrested for molesting children (or so the allegations held). His name appeared in the paper but he never went to prison. This was a long time ago, and I remember finding this out, thinking of my previous moments with the guy (who seemed pent-up but like a decent guy), and wondering how to know more without appearing that I knew more: what Robert Anton Wilson calls the Burden Of Nescience in a hierarchical social system. I was merely one of many music teachers in the guy's store; I made enough to pay my bills and eat, and buy my girlfriend (and myself) drinks. I couldn't afford to know too much.

However, over the years, I certainly heard a lot. I had soon decided to just doubt everything I heard about him. Why? Well, he was never going to get near any of the kids I taught, but the area I lived in was filled with middle-class christian right wingers and I'd read books like Satanic Panic: rumormongering can really get out of hand. In the end I guess I sorta thought, "If he really is doing this and he keeps doing this he'll get caught and won't be able to buy his way out of it and he'll go to jail and the store will either be run by the family or it'll close down and I'll be out of a job. I won't worry about it until then. And besides: what if he's not guilty?  What if there's something else going on and he has enemies who are trying to ruin him? I'd rather give him a part of the benefit of a doubt and remember no jury heard the evidence and convicted. Imagine what it would be like to be unfairly charged."

That's sorta how I feel about Woody Allen right now: he has a very well-known enemy. I, unlike the normally decent Katie McDonough of Salon, will not convict Woody based on what appears to be hearsay.

I've been thumbing through a bunch of books on gossip: Joseph Epstein's Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (appeared pre-Snowden Era), philosopher Emrys Westacott's The Virtue Of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness and Other Bad Habits (also appeared pre-Snowden), and a few others.

Two Alleged Etymologies For "Gossip"
1. It comes from "god-sibling" and originally pertained to the talk between two god-parents of a child, the talk having to do with the child's well-being.

2. George Washington told his spies to "go-sip" by infiltrating Brit troops and drinking with them, trying to learn of military maneuvers.

                                          Anthropologist Robin Dunbar

Problems With Semantics
The Bible has some line about how "Gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret." It's somewhere in the prequel to The New Testament. How many of us have had unpleasant moments when we found out a friend said something that arrived back at us, thinking our secret was held in confidence? Two years ago I said something that I either didn't know was supposed to have been in confidence, or had forgotten because it seemed trivial, or I was drunk on red zinfandel when hearing that which was supposed to have been confidential. And I later heard about it; I got an earful. I felt like an asshole. The information I had conveyed to a third party was gossipy about the good news of a friend's love life. I could go into why I thought it shouldn't be a secret anyway, but all of this feels catty.

In 5th century BCE Athens, once a year, the citizens could vote to not only ostracize but send into exile anyone who seemed to have too much dirt on others, or anyone who seemed potentially too tyrannical or possessed with the idea of power over others. We don't do this anymore, but should we? (Or do we still do the exile trip, but in other ways? We shall see...)

Eleanor Roosevelt is usually credited with saying that great minds talk about ideas, average minds events, and small minds talk about other people. How can gossip occur if it's about ideas? I can see certain events having gossipy possibilities. Many of the sections of books and articles I've read on gossip attest to how it's not only unavoidable, but FUN!

Okay, in what sense is it "fun"? At Staffordshire University a study suggests that gossip can be good for our self-esteem, but we need to be nice. Here's how to test it: Say positive things about a fictional person to someone else. Or - but be careful - say nothing but good stuff about a real person. Then note how you feel. Then say a bunch of unsavory things about another fictional person and note how you feel.

In studies about gossip conducted at Berkeley and Stanford, it's suggested that spreading true info about bad actors prevents exploitation, maintains social order, and even lowers stress levels of the gossipers. The researchers emphasize that the content of the gossip in the controlled studies be about "reputational information sharing" and not about petty nitpicking, hearsay unverified, or malicious rumors. The gossip must be reliable. Participants in the study were tested beforehand to determine their relative levels of altruism or selfishness, then they played an online game having to do with economic trust. When it was learned that players can spread gossip (or "knowledge"?) about how another player tends to cheat, the games became more fair, and the most-impacted players were the ones who had scored low on altruism and high on selfishness: knowing that other players know about you and can easily spread info (gossip) about you tended to put you on the straight and narrow.

How does gossip lower stress levels in the gossiper? Answer: Witnessing cheating raised the heart rate; telling someone else about the cheater lowered it.

I read a few articles on the Berkeley-Stanford gossip studies and found them interesting but from what I gathered about the assumptions behind the methodology, it all seems far too artificial and overly-rational. I mean: only "reputational information sharing" was considered gossip (actually: "prosocial" gossip) in the studies? Okay. But in real life, in situ: school, workplace, etc: gossip in more traditional semantic senses can seem fairly malicious. Picking on a kid because he's "weird." Or not beautiful. Or too smart. Or let's all make fun of Helen in Accounting because of that dress. And kids and adults seem perfectly happy to be rumormongers and spread all sorts of malicious hearsay. 'Cuz it's fun! And we're still fairly tribal beings...

Lines from Stephen Burt's poem, "Rue", in which he seems to be replaying his own high school years about The Ramones, what kids wore, how they wrote on every surface, what we all saw going on in the back of the bus between him and her, etc:

Gossip in school makes a kind of electrical storm,
or else
             a medium of exchange:
once you share what you know, then you learn what you can.
-p.42, Belmont

This rings true on a certain anthropological level, and indeed Robin Dunbar's 1997 book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language made quite the splash, the ripples still visible.

So:
Good gossip: spreading true information about actors in a situation
Bad gossip: everything else thought of as "gossip"?

"It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's own back that are absolutely and entirely true." - Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Other Possible Goods From Gossip
My sources allege that a mild slamming of one's friends and loved ones is understood as "normal" and not egregious. Snobbery has its own occult rules for propriety, to be found out with experience. Snobbery seems related to gossip, but I'm not sure how to delineate it. Rudeness likewise. But: many sources seem to stick up for the salutary aspects alleged by researchers at Berkeley: it could lessen bullying, counteract secrecy, strengthen human relationships, be emotionally cathartic, infuse justice in power structures, and even be a part of Socrates's "examined life."

Or at least that's the buzz around here, lately. This is strictly on the down-low, but the scuttlebutt on gossip is that, if you're relaying true information about good and bad behavior of others in the local environment, it's a socially powerful thing.

I do wonder about the epistemology problems. How does someone know they're relaying something true? It may be called "reputational information sharing" by scholars, but how does a gossiper actually know what they're perceiving is the truth? Perhaps that's beyond the scope of both the researchers' and my own inquiries, but I tend to assume I'm probably missing some information when I engage in this sort of behavior, so I tend to hedge.

Finally here: this business about relaying information that results in salutary outcomes: what of Assange, Snowden, Kiriakou, et.al? If the sort of research results coming out of Berkeley are correct, how does it reflect on The Whistleblowers? Just a thought...

Dishin' It
So...you know the great playwright Arthur Miller? He had a child who was disabled so he dumped the kid in an institution for life, yea. Oh yea. And not long ago I read the wild memoirs of some guy who ran around 1940s-60s Hollywood, and Spencer Tracy? I'd never heard he was gay! (I forget the name of the book, but I could dig it up for you...) Fidel Castro fucked Kenneth Tynan's wife, wow. What do you make of that?

Really: how do you feel when you read that stuff, to whatever degree of truth was there? I feel oddly childish just typing it. And yet: it sort of...seems...kinda...fun. Stanford neurobiologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky enjoys talking about People magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People issue, because he says it shows how we're just like the baboons he's spent decades studying in the wilds of Africa: they are intensely social, like us. They have status hierarchies, like us. And they like hanging with their friends, like us. But when two baboons get into a fight? It's just like the rubberneck session on the freeway: everyone must slow down to gawk at the carnage, the primate-drama of it all.

I Hear This Site Is Really Something To Look At
Hell, I have looked at it. And you probably have too. Frank Warren calls his PostSecret.com  site the "largest advertisement-free blog in the world."

Internet Trolls and Malice of Forethought
Much of the latest "gossip can be good for us" research points out that the scads of heinous, vicious, stupid and downright disturbing comments on the Net are due to anonymity. When there's no price to be paid - from gossip? - viral hatred has free reign. Point well-taken. It's a problem and we're working on it.

Ian Leslie's piece in Aeon
It's here. Why do we overshare online? Because this Net thing caught us evolutionarily off-guard. For most of our existence as hominids we had no walls. Although our saner minds on this issue say we have an instinct for privacy, the evidence shows we have almost no sense of how privacy works on the Net. "Every day, embarrassments are endured, jobs lost and individuals endangered because of unforeseen consequences triggered by a tweet or a status update." Indeed, when I read Leslie's piece it reminded me of a haunting and criminally underrated (so far!) book called Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, that does a fairly thorough job on this phenomena. I found it a page-turner of a non-fiction book, but like a real-life horror-story, seeing as how Niedzviecki wrote it before the Snowden Era and I read it while the Era was giving birth to itself. Sobering as all get the fuck out...Indeed, Leslie in his Aeon piece has a line about the type of person at the NSA who's supposed to be monitoring us that fits in with Niedzviecki's thesis that we're all already spying on each other anyway.

Daniel Kahneman
In another semantic sense of "gossip" the Nobelist in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow freely uses "gossip" as something he wants to encourage: the vocabulary about unconscious biases and their mechanisms that he and his colleague Tversky found and named? He wanted this vocabulary to worm its way to the "water cooler" at work. He thinks it's all gossip-worthy stuff! (And I agree with him. I just wish it actually played out more than it seems to...) (See index or even just pp.3-4)

Wilson's Jocoserious Use of Gossip
Humans' "instinct to gossip" shows up in Robert Anton Wilson's work in a few places. In one of two footnotes on p.302 of his novel The Widow's Son, the 'patapsychologist and "theo-chemist" de Selby has advocated for the flat earth "on the grounds that nobody has 'encountered and endured' a spherical earth (which is a theory generated by 'the instinct to gossip.')" In a piece titled "The Persistence of False Memory," encountered and endured in Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology, RAW argues that the "instinct to gossip" is AKA public opinion, and falls under the rubric of Preposterous Perception as found in 'Patapsychology, and seems similar to the role of Nietzsche's "will to power" in his books and "the Id" in Freud's books.

Wilson makes us wonder how much of "reality" - our everyday, taken-for-granted assumptions about what is unquestionably "real" - how much of this was generated by gossip? If we keep talking about stuff we can't see, smell, taste, hear, touch, or even detect with any manmade instruments...how "real" is it?

Last Word: Prof. Carlin
Here's something I never knew. Prof. Carlin simply drops this tantalizing hint on p.57 of Napalm and Silly Putty: "At one time there existed an entire race of people whose knowledge consisted entirely of gossip."

I wish he's elaborated, but he was wily that way, even cryptic. But I want to know more. Heck and golly: Enquiring minds want to know.

Euclidean Quotidian: 90 Degree Angles and the Semantic Unconscious

Ten Scattershot Ideas, One For Each Finger and Two Thumbs

1.) Supposedly the medieval Europeans thought Euclid's works were the same as the one we know as Eucleides of Megara, so olde books about geometry in Europe were by "Megarensis." They weren't the same dude: "Megarensis" was a contemporary of Plato; the great Euclid of high school geometry was closer to being contemporary with some of Plato's early students.

The Arabs got hold of Euclid and thought the name was made of ucli (the key) and dis (measure). At any rate, his Elements was the model of rationality ne plus ultra, and I'm writing this piece after pondering Euclid's influence on two philosophers, Vico and Spinoza, who were not the first to mimic the potent rhetorical form and structure of Euclid.

2.) In Peter Thonemann's review of three books for the TLS, note the story of the Malawi girl, who charged with learning how to set a dinner table English-style, experienced a steep learning curve, because the world she grew up in was curvilinear; there were no right angles. We had to learn the "order of things" we take for granted as "the way things are done."  I also thought it interesting that  with the Romans rolling through the peoples of Europe, they brought right angles and rectangles and ideas about straight lines and order with them, the Irish being the last to "convert," and it went along with Christianity.

There's a question of the "reading" of artefacts from the long-dead: if they built with right angles, was their social structure more authoritarian? Some think so. Others think what matters is the initial posit and then iterated forms that grew from there. Mikhail Okhitovich, Soviet sociological thinker of the 1930s, asserted that right angles originated with private land ownership, then extended to architectural forms, and represent a non-communistic mode of thought; because of this curvilinear forms in architecture were the best and most egalitarian form.

Before rigid hierarchical forms of State, what was often found were circular forms, which have a center but seem to resist hierarchy...on some level. Do Euclidean forms give rise to a form of thought that permeates a culture, and if so, is this idea mostly unconscious, part of the paideuma?

Many non-communist Left-ish thinkers have assumed that dwellings based on rectangles and 90 degree angles were somehow metaphors for artificiality, non-organicism, or simply convention, and living in "boxes" tended to encourage conformist social ideas and a stifling of creativity. Look at any fat book on great 20th century architects and buildings. Look at Buckminster Fuller.

3.) A pop kulch example of a leftist strain in American thought is found in this folk song: "Little Boxes." Boxes and conformity. Boxes and restraint. Boxes and the suburbs, Levittowns.

4.) The distaste for "boxes" runs in countless intellectual and aesthetic fields. While Nietzsche lays out with this probe: "Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude," and we are left to wonder, our contemporary Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his Bed of Procrustes, "They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; the go to what is called 'work' in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking 'outside the box'; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidean, smooth boxes." (p.31)

5.) Art critic Jed Perl wonders about the state of painting and painters in today's art world. At one time the rectangle frame of the painting was a given. The artist played an outre role in society. But now practically all competing media are either rectangle shaped (iPod/iPad/iPhone?), or text is read within a rectangular-ish frame (the screen you're using now?); further: images in the most popular media are dynamic inside a rectangular frame: TV, films, the camera frame. Could it be that the "degree of stabilizing supremacy of that rectangle has been undermined by the technology that surrounds us?," Perl asks. He knowns painters. It's his milieu. And Perl asserts that today's painter, because of the static image inside a rectangle, has been forced to go on the defensive or offensive, which presents a new hindrance. At the same time, Perl asserts that painting is not dead.

6.) In what appears to be an untitled poem, Tony Quagliano:

I read this poem about geometry
or shadows
or was it poetics, or
some analogy among the three---
that sounds right
a poem about science and art
itself some artful connection
opting for the poem of course (being a poem) slyly
saying math's impure
or at least not pure enough
for one geometer not impressed by Euclid
or more impressed by non-Euclid
or some such twist
and what gets me, why I mention this at all, is
that the poem was good

though no one bled directly in it
words were clean, scientific
stitched in artful lines for the anthologist
and while a slashed wrist would have to wait
this poem of shadows, or math
or some connection in the courtyard of art
this fragile suture, poet to geometer, takes life
over your dead body
and mine

and it was good
which is why I mention this at all.
-p.65, Language Matters: Selected Poetry

7.) I remember reading about some hotshot engineering students - probably at CalTech? - and the problem of stacking oranges at the grocery store. Because of their roundness, there's far more non-used-up space (AKA "air") between oranges. How to maximize the number the oranges stackable? Well, you obviously make square oranges, using the Lego-mind. Easier said than done.

I hadn't thought much about shipping containers and how they have made the world seem far smaller and distance irrelevant until I read Andrew Curry's fine piece in Nautilus not long ago. "Invisible to most people, (shipping containers) are fundamental to how practically everything in our consumer-driven lives works." As for packing as much stuff into a space as efficiently as possible, it doesn't get much better than shipping containers. ("Invisible to most people...")

Score one for rectilinearity.

8.) One of the Prophets of Euclidean space and modern consciousness, Marshall McLuhan, in 1968:

The visual sense, alone of our senses, creates the forms of space and time that are uniform, continuous and connected. Euclidean space is the prerogative of visual and literate man. With the advent of electric circuitry and the instant movement of information, Euclidean space recedes, and the non-Euclidean geometries emerge. Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician, was perfectly aware of this change in our world when he took Alice through the looking-glass into the world where each object creates its own space and conditions. To the visual or Euclidean man, objects do not create time and space. They are merely fitted into time and space. The idea of the world as an environment that is more or less fixed is very much the product of literacy and visual assumptions. In his book The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics Milic Capek explains some of the strange confusions in the scientific mind that result from the encounter of the old non-Euclidean spaces of preliterate man with the Euclidean and Newtonian spaces of literate man. The scientists of our time are just as confused as the philosophers, or the teachers, and it is for the reason that Whitehead assigned: they still have the illusion that the new developments are to be fitted into the old space or environment.
-p. 347, Essential McLuhan, from an essay, "The Emperor's New Clothes," originally in Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, co-written with Harley Parker. McLuhan asserted in 1968 that "the artist is a person who is especially aware of the challenge and dangers of new environments presented to human sensibility." McLuhan thought artists were subversive because society expected the replication of existing orders and forms, but artists violated these expectations.

Three thoughts:
a.) In 1968 McLuhan may have been far more prophetic than he thought: not only are scientists still trying to come to terms with non-Euclidean findings in astrophysics, materials science, microbiology, subatomic physics (but I do see some inroads), but going back to Jed Perl's essay on the "state of the art" in painting 45 years later, McLuhan's "with the advent of electric circuitry"...and I think maybe painting, contra Perl, may be, if not dead, in the ICU, condition: critical.

b.) When I do that mental yoga which allows me into McLuhan's thought-space, I realize how intensely Euclidean my assumptions seem, as based on the idea of Gutenberg Man and the space of the literate reader of texts, for hours every day, decades on end, eyes decoding 26 symbols with punctuation, left to right, linear left to right, left to right (THIS), left to right, punctuation. In my conditioned assumptions of quotidian reality, objects "really do" fit inside of space and time. I want them to create space and time themselves, by power of their sheer Being, capital be. But most of the time: no. I have to work on it. How do I get out of Gutenberg Euclidean head space? Cannabis, film, walks in nature, animation, humor and surrealism, reading Joyce or Pound, get into the Korzybski-Zen level of the phenomenal event-level, pre-language, observing without hypnotizing and misleading "woids," and then careful consciousness of abstracting, watching myself abstract until It all melts, or something strange in science. You have your ways.

c.) For such a overwhelmingly "straight" Euclidean man, Prof. McLuhan's (whose personal politics were a sort of conservative Catholic with tinges of anarchy?) mind was, to me, reliably non-Euclidean and psychedelic. His deep immersion in James Joyce and Ezra Pound was probably a significant influence here, but there was so so so so much more. He was an absolute virtuoso with playing with metaphors and combining those ideas with others, if only just to see if they were thrilling and made anyone else want to think about some idea in some new way. I find this an anarchist strain in McLuhan's thought. (How about I take catholic idea about the senses and think about the new electronic media, like radio of TV? I can add ideas I copped from Thomas Nashe, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Harold Innes, and anthropologists. And Finnegans Wake! And mythology, Poe, Einstein,  and painting's figure/ground and the rise of the Renaissance's vanishing point? And then: Vico! And commercials and comic strips!? And Walter J. Ong...and and and...)

9.) Robert Anton Wilson's extensions of Timothy Leary's ideas of the evolution of "circuits" in the human mind drew heavily on Euclid for the first three "domesticated primate" aspects of all of us: the oral/biosurvival circuit is about approach/avoidance and is represented in Euclidean metaphor as "forward-back." The second circuit stage of development (according to the theory, we "imprint" all of these circuits), the anal/territorial circuit, is about up/down, and represents the deeper levels of any thinking about politics, whether within the family, local city, national, or international. Notice up/down fits well in Euclidean space-thought.

The third circuit is about right/left and for mammals like us, based on the bilateral symmetry of the body and the nervous system, which nature has seen fit to encourage a dominance of one side over the other, most people's left hemisphere's motor cortex encouraging right-handedness. Conceptual thought and left-right equations (think: algebra!) and logic all fall under the third circuit.

Although neuroscientific ideas about hemisphericalization in evolution and discrete modules of each of the brain's two hemispheres has moved away from a once-popular notion of the "holistic" right hemisphere and the "linear" left, these metaphors still seem to resonate. For Wilson, right-handedness and math and literacy in symbolic humans indicate a left-hemisphere domination (the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body) which has unconsciously biased "linear" and hierarchical forms in human history, which begins with writing. The right hemisphere, relatively "silent" and seemingly subdued by assumptions about "reality" made by the left hemisphere (especially in industrialized Western humans), has yet to harness the intuitive genius housed in the right hemisphere.

So much ink has been spilled over these ideas, once extremely popular but now seemingly in a slow descent. Nevertheless, these ideas live, as you may have noticed from a conversation within the past few months. Why?

Well, I think it's because there's still some truth to the right/left brain modularity-of-function idea, although it's not as simple as those who popularized the findings of the Sperry and Gazzaniga "split brain" experiments. Also: I think Wilson was on to something: "Right-hand dominance, and associated preferences for the linear left-lobe functions of the brain, determine our normal modes of artifact-manufacture and conceptual thought, i.e., third circuit 'mind.' It is no accident, then, that our logic (and our computer-design) follows the either-or, binary structure of these circuits. Nor is it an accident that our geometry, until the last century, has been Euclidean. Euclid's geometry, Aristotle's logic, and Newton's physics are meta-programs synthesizing and generalizing first brain forward-back, second brain up-down and third brain right-left programs." - Cosmic Trigger vol 1, pp.199-200

For Wilson (and Leary) there were relatively "new" circuits that have appeared in human evolution over the last 11,000 years or so. And they seem non-Euclidean, more organic, curvilinear, and more inclusive of a holistic, total-floating body sense, as if we were meant to move through space/time.

To be clear: Euclid and his forebears the Pythagoreans wormed their way into our paideuma due to the natural evolution of mammals on a rocky watery planet with an atmosphere conducive to carbon-based replicative life forms under the purview of a energy-source star at a Goldilocks distance. We got Euclidean forms because that's the way we evolve. Which may Beg the Q, but it's one of my favored narratives, and my entire brain, both hemispheres, seem to harmonically resonate with it.

[Further extrapolations from Wilson on this complex of ideas: see Illuminatus! Trilogy, pp.793-795; Prometheus Rising, pp.97-100; Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, pp.342-347.]

10.) I grew up in boxy architecture, and when I first encountered this idea - about rectangles and 90 degree angles and conformity - I also found out we forgot how we did it, but at some point we had to learn to see in 3-D spatial terms. Supposedly some cultural anthropologists had gone into deepest darkest rain forest Africa and lived with and studied pygmies, whose complete environment was always giant trees and vines and moving through those living breathing green spaces, always canopied by jungle thickness as "ceiling."And when they were taken to a clearing at the edge of the forest and the anthropologists pointed to a man and a jeep far off in the distance, the natives thought they were seeing a tiny man. They had not learned to see over vistas of "open space."

So, I lay in bed and looked at the point where the ceiling meets the walls. Two walls meet at the "point" of the ceiling. And I tried to remember what it was like to not see that as a point in space. It's akin to many visual illusions or the Necker Cube you've all seen. It was fruitless. Until, one day...O! Such little things that thrill me. Aye: the corner was on a flat plane. And then it pointed out toward me...

I attest, I assert that when I enter buildings of a non-Euclidean build, my consciousness is altered. An inventory of memories and anecdotes would bore you and me, but I wonder if you have felt the same? I love round rooms. A spiral staircase can really get me going. On and on. But here's the thing: if I grew up in a non-Euclidean house, I strongly suspect that entering a Euclidean "tiny box" house would alter my conscious also. Because I think these represent the unfamiliar structure of space...

I hope I didn't come off like some un-hep "square" in this blogspew.

Promiscuous Neurotheology: Pt.3

Denial and Forgiveness, Gratitude and Revenge
No, it's not the title of the latest from some prog-metal band from Norway: those are the topics that Dr. Michael McCullough of the U. of Miami (Florida) studies. He studies the origins of those actions in humans from an evolutionary psychology level. He appears to be a young hotshot in the field, with many papers published. He's interested in the origin of religion, too. He thinks it was adaptive because it helped people's self-control. McCullough thinks that religious people have more self-control, so that they set goals and meet those goals, their self-control via their religion helping them along the way. He did a multidisciplinary study of 80 years of worldwide research on self-regulation and the brain via meditation and prayer. Also, in his reading he found that when people viewed their goals as "sacred" they expended more energy and effort in attaining those goals. He also thinks people with religious "lifestyles" tend to have more of a God Is Watching Me So I Best Be Good outlook. Finally, he thinks religious people are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol (hey, alcohol is a drug), and they commit less crimes, are less prone to delinquency. "Religious people have more self-control than their less religious counterparts," or so goes a line from an article in Science Daily about McCullough's research.

Now I see from Dr. McCullough's Wiki that he also "holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religious Studies" at Miami. He co-wrote a book titled Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. He edited a collection of articles called Psychology of Gratitude.

I now beg the Reader for a short digression before returning to McCullough's ideas.

                                Wilhelm Dilthey (say "Dill-tie") had much to say about the
                                 late 19th century Methodenstreit - disputes on the methods 
                              of study - between the sciences of "Nature" and of the "Spirit"
                                  of human beings. Should the two be described differently?
                                   And if so: why? And: how?

Ideographic and Nomothetic Sciences
This has always seemed like heady stuff to me: tracing the origins of something like Revenge. And McCullough's sort of evolutionary psychology has been charged with telling Just-So stories by more than one high-powered critic. Personally, I find these books tantalizing, because, while they appear under the rubric of "science" they tend to amount to narratives culled from many studies. And there's nothing wrong with this! The old German distinction between Naturwissenschaften (studying Nature, or what we call the "hard sciences" such as physics, chemistry, and biology), and Geisteswissenschaften, the study of people and their systems: sociology, art, literature, anthropology, theology, etc: Nature was supposed to have been governed by descriptions that were "nomothetic," written in the language of mathematics, and concerned with the discovery of underlying law-like behavior of natural systems; the Social Sciences, primarily because we are dealing with the world we made and which includes ourselves and so is complex and filled with biases and the human spirit, were worlds of knowledge to be described in "ideographic" terms, or stories or reportage.

But for interesting reasons, this is not the way we try to reach the public about "science." Most of us non-specialists are not going to follow a book filled with equations. Give us our science couched in narrative! That light bends when it passes by a body of sufficient mass? Elaborate on this fantastic vision, please Mr. Smartypants! You can leave Einstein's equations - that chalkboard I once saw he was standing in front of in an old picture, filled with squigglies and numbers I ain't ever even a-hoidda? You can have it. Give us a picture. Please.

Value-Neutral Science Begins To Break Down, 1914-1944
Oh yes. There's one other face on all this I must address: for 100 years or more before 1945, there was an ongoing dispute about the sciences being "value neutral." Scientists were supposed to adhere to the idea that their work, their delvings and teasings-out of Nature's secrets, did not have social and political repercussions, or if they did, it was negligible. They weren't responsible for how their work might be taken later and used. Also: scientists were to consider politics as somehow beneath them. As the 1914-1918 war over some real estate near Alsace-Lorraine killed around 10 million people, this idea seemed less realistic. Mustard gas. Planes dropping bombs on people. All that.

Certain brilliant and courageous scientists came out strongly against the idea that their work has no ethical complications. On the contrary! And by late August of 1945, few scientists publicly stated that the pursuit of Nature's secrets was value-free. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was born, among many other advocates.

Still: Science Acts As Political Rhetoric
Despite the sniveling, embarrassing idiocy of much of the Unistatian public regarding matters such as evolution, stem cells, climate change, basic physics and how a woman's reproductive organs work - not to mention many have a rough go of it trying to find the Pacific Ocean on an unmarked map of the world - science is mysterious and carries a powerful rhetoric. When what scientific researchers are finding is convivial to business interests, it's great. When what they're saying might harm Big Biz's bottom line, they haul out their team of Public Relations (people trained to lie in very sophisticated ways) and create a counter-narrative and get it into the mainstream media, which they own, basically.

Now back to McCullough's work, keeping in mind that he may not think it has socio-political ramifications.

Doubt
Well, maybe McCullough has some fine points to make about "religious people" and their ability to delay gratification, because their strong beliefs aid in self-control, and maybe that's an appreciable part of the narrative about why religion evolved. He certainly seems like a nice guy. And note McCullough's quote at the end of the short article I linked to. In his multidisciplinary studies on self-control and the origin of religion, he says he understands how strongly held beliefs in God can go the other way; his insights led him to understand the psychology of suicide bombers. "Religion can motivate people to do just about anything," McCullough says after reading 80 years of research.

I think my Dear Reader's own studies of the human condition would bear this insight out?

I dunno. I haven't read his work on forgiveness, but I've often wondered how forgiveness came about. Ditto denial and gratitude. He's researched revenge extensively too, but I've always felt I "understood" that one, and I think I might get bummed out reading about it.

The McCullough version of evolution of religion feels Just-So-ish to me, but I really don't know. There was one interesting thing that jumped out at me when I read the short article about his research: the rhetoric of having intent/goals, then using your religion (meditation or other endeavors that alter brain states) as a way to achieve desired goals...why does this seem familiar? McCullough hints at people who are religious sensing the presence of God. Hmmm. It's suggested that the "religious" view their goals as "sacred?"

Then I realized why this seemed familiar to me. McCullough seems like a conservative guy. Another section of my brain suddenly said to me, "Hey yahoo: Aleister Crowley has told you of the same little jewels, couched in a weird Modernist style!" (Albeit except for the drug stuff.) I had so compartmentalized my thinking that I didn't see it for two days: What young hotshot (seemingly) straight-arrow Professor McCullough found in his research had been urged on by the Wickedest Man of the 20th Century, the Great Magickian, Liber Al. Around 70 years ago. Only: Crowley used himself as scientific subject. Crowley's work and biography make his insights seem quite scientific (to those who don't know much about Crowley: he thought the experiments one does to change their brain should be noted in almost clinical detail, in notes and extensive other types of writings.) He'd studied many sciences - especially chemistry - and math. Whereas McCullough's arrival at these insights seems to have derived more from the Professor in the Library method. Who among us can listen to McCullough talk about the importance of "delaying gratification" without thinking of tantra? Anyway...

I had a good laff on all this...

We place no reliance 
On Virgin or Pigeon.
Our effort is Science
Our aim is Religion.
-Frater Perdurabo, AKA Aleister Crowley, another proto-neurotheologist

Finally, I'd like you all to meet Dr. McCullough, talking about religion and self-control. It's 3 minutes, and NB "If I were a betting man...":

Edward O. Wilson and the Humanities

The following is part of a 1965 Unistat Congressional statute, trying to define the Humanities, and served as part of the context within which the NEA and NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) were founded:

The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.

82 year old Edward O. Wilson has recently released The Social Conquest of Earth, and according to statements Wilson's made in recent articles, it may be his last hardcore, serious sociobiological work. In this latest book, Wilson builds on ideas first articulated deeply in his book Consilience, which sought to ground all human knowledge in the broad discipline of Biology.

The Arts and Biology? Oh hell yea: Wilson has a thick argument for how all the stuff in the above quoted paragraph on the Humanities cannot be known unless we account for the evolution of cognition and the human being's sensory modalities compared to other animals (we are retarded in taste and smell, compared to other animals: what we do well is visual and the auditory), how these cognitive processes are bound in our nervous systems, the heredity that gives rise to our human-ness, and all of the humanities' prehistoric origins.

Having spent a good while perusing Wilson's new book, I'm struck by two things: 1.) He still writes very elegantly for an 82 year old; for a man whose been in the forefront of at least three "revolutionary" movements in Biology, and has articulated very abstruse ideas based in molecular biology and statistical modeling, this man still writes almost poetically at times. And 2.) Wilson, at 82, has ignited yet another scientific firestorm over a basic idea in evolution. This one's such a big deal that at least 137 of his colleagues signed a "we object" statement about Wilson's latest bombshell.

And it's quite the rancorous debate among intellectuals. If you're like me and instead of watching boxing you'd prefer to watch PhDs and public intellectuals and other eminent thinkers whip their symbolic feces at each other, then you really can't top this latest one, with sweet old "EOW" (as I abbrev. him) in the center of it all, getting his colleagues all exercised over...Group Selection. (It's usually not capitalized, but the fulsome vitriol surrounding the idea seemed to warrant caps.)

Aye, EOW says Dawkins's "selfish gene" idea was way overblown. In the more sober works, Dawkins's idea was known as "kin selection." You take care of your own, because their genes/replicators will have a better chance of flourishing in the next generation. Even if you don't have offspring of your own, you aid (in various ways) your nephews, nieces, cousins, siblings. Why? Because they basically carry "your" genes. The further away from your gene pool, the less you find you care about Others. This has given rise to a very "fit" (in a broad sense) gene pool. (Don't laff!) Kinship selection is enough to account for cooperative complex behavior. And, as space/time and light/particle can't be separated, altruism is really the obverse of the coin labeled "selfishness." So say the kin selectionists.

                         Wilson is said to have collected a million different ant species?

I loved reading Dawkins's great book (I consider this The Selfish Gene), because it was so intellectually thrilling. But EOW - perhaps the eminence gris among all evolutionary biologists - now says, basically, kin selection has been given far too much its due.

[Caveat: Although a generalist, I know enough about the politics of Biology to know that, even with my honest attempt to define kinship selection very briefly above, there are probably readers who want to wring my neck for simplifying it too much. Or, I guess, "getting it wrong." In the comments, please!]

Darwin himself - for EOW the greatest thinker ever - thought quite a lot about individual selection and didn't know anything about genes, but seemed to intuit them.

So, we've got individual selection, kin selection (which, from W.D. Hamilton's 1964 paper on, has been the foremost exponent for the "theory of everything" in Biology...until EOW's mathematical colleagues found basic errors in Hamilton's math), and group selection, which, until now, or until EOW achieves his paradigm shift, is a "woo-woo" idea not taken seriously, or if proffered by a Credentialed One, has been attacked as Heresy.

There's a lot to discuss for the generalist, but EOW thinks the time has come to explain the Big Q: how did humans and ants and other social creatures conquer? It's because they are "eusocial." Yes, but how? Well, there must be "trigger" genes that give rise to a species' complex forms of cooperating beyond kin or individual selection.

Harnessing molecular genetics, anthropology, ecology, and cognitive science, EOW says when termites or wasps or humans or (of course!) ants or snapping shrimp or a certain kind of mole rat develop a "defensible nest" they have passed through an evolutionary bottleneck and the genes that encourage cooperation and division of labor - even if individuals are not related! - has made them "realize" that a defensible nest is an advantage that accrues to all...and I'm still trying to understand the argument for group selection, but it's fascinating, even thrilling intellectual thought-stuff!

But what a magnificent intellectual Edward O. Wilson is, has been, and always will be. Even if his Group Selection gets shot down in 30 years, he's certainly caused his most eminent colleagues to think, not to mention your humble yet somehow overweening correspondent.

Listen to EOW on NPR's Talk of the Nation from a few months ago, on this very subject.

We, of a Certain Genetic Caste?

Turning in my vat of whimsy now, hoping to stay afloat, I proffer an idea from the late 20th century countercultural figure Robert Anton Wilson (who actually died in 2007), in my eyes one of five or ten most underrated thinkers, of any "class," of the last half of the 20th c. For me, Wilson seems a wildly successful (in terms of creative intellectual/artistic thought and sheer mass of production of wide scope) example of Mannheim's "free-floating intellectual." He wrote novels, plays, screenplays, encyclopedias, and a hefty mass of non-fiction. More on other aspects of his thought in subsequent OG riffages...

Of many projects, Wilson ("RAW" to his fans) greatly expanded on an idea usually credited to Timothy Leary: a sort of General Unified Field Theory applied to the biological and cultural evolution of metaphorical "circuits" in the brain/mind, most commonly known as the Eight-Circuit Model.

In his book Prometheus Rising (1983, revised ed. 1997) Wilson describes and extrapolates on the evolution of socio-sexual morality in human beings. This "circuit" is "activated and imprinted at adolescence, when the DNA signal awakens the sexual apparatus.The teenager becomes the bewildered possessor of a new body and a new neural circuit oriented to orgasm and sperm-egg fusion. The pubescent human, like any other rutting animal, lurches about in a state of mating frenzy, every call gasping for the sexual object."


Remember those days? Oh? You're still there? Moving on:


This circuit, according to Wilson, arose around 30,000 years ago (more recent research suggests it's closer to 50,000?), is imprinted in the left hemisphere of the neocortex, the imprinting sites being the breasts and genitalia, and was previously described by Freud as the "phallic" stage, and by the mystic Gurdjieff as the "false personality." In Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis it is "the parent."


Because sex is so exciting and disruptive, every culture places taboos on at least one aspect of it, for reasons unavailable to those living in that culture. ("It's the way we've always done things! God told us it was this way! Anyone who doesn't believe this is crazy, dangerous, or both!")


Indeed, for a robust, general idea of "morality," sexual attraction, mating, inheritances, genetic drift, reproduction, and the future of the species seem potent enough to make much ado...


Wilson says the "principle function" of this "circuit" is to form an adult personality, one that will care both for and about the children. Because we are the symbolic species, this involves lots of "planning, hoping, and having aspirations."


Long ago, mystical traditions worldwide intuited this circuit as one that will cause a person to become hopelessly "attached" or "stuck on the wheel of karma." Becoming a mommy or daddy certainly seems to encourage the mind to stay with worldly things. This is where the idea of celibacy arose: by negating the imperatives of this circuit, one remains free and has a chance at enlightenment, satori, nirvana, by realizing the mind of god, by getting a job as a Holy Man, etc.


[We moderns deserve some sort of credit for, at some point, insisting that we can have our cake and eat it too: I'm sure there are mommies and daddies out there who also have very active, rich spiritual lives. I have personally known a few myself. It isn't easy, from what I could see. But back to genetics and social evolution...]


Okay, so what about homosexuality? If this evolutionarily-evolved genetic circuit which has to do with morality, sex, taboo, and being a parent does as supposed by Wilson and Leary, what was homosexuality?


Wilson compares it to left-handedness, and says it was encoded in the genetic script to serve "an auxiliary function." In tribal and band societies, homosexuals were shunted into the role of the shaman, the healer, the witch-doctor. In modern, complex societies, homosexuals are pushed into the role of intellectual or artist, both of which still play a shamanic role. Other non-child-bearing "outsiders" who fit in here with the homosexuals are the heterosexual bachelor/bachelorette, the hermit, and the spinster. (Wasn't that a Pedro Almodovar film?) But the intellectual/artist plays a special shamanic role in "making, breaking, or transforming cultural signals."

In a footnote about the role of homosexuals in the genetic scheme of evolution, Wilson gets off into his characteristically bold and jazzily-creative speculative riffs, viz:

"Those who claim any perennial sexual variation is 'against nature' are underestimating nature's variety, diversity, and economy. The 'mutation' of Leonardo da Vinci, a left-handed homosexual, was needed to break up the signal of the dying medieval reality-tunnel and remake our perceptions into the reality-tunnel of post-Renaissance scientific humanism. His success is registered by the fact that a Leonardo painting is still the 'norm' of what we mean by 'realism,' i.e, most people (including right-handed heterosexuals) are living in the scientific-humanist 'space' this man invented."

Now, as a right-handed heterosexual with no children, I don't know about you, but I welcome Leonardo with open arms, as one of "us."

The present blogger sees the entire oeuvre of Robert Anton Wilson as a cornucopia of the Generalist at his/her most dazzlingly brilliant and fecund.

A Ramble on Digital Media and Mental Hygiene

Some of you know about the French philosopher and Jesuit and geologist and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. He was involved in Peking Man. He thought rocks were "alive" in some sense. He was involved in Piltdown Man. The Pope forbid him to publish his writings, because they advocated for evolution. Teilhard was a mystic of some sort, no doubt, and a universal thinker, and wonderfully weird. I'm not a catholic, but I love his ideas.

[The interested reader might start with his The Phenomenon of Man.]

He thought there was some teleological, vitalist force that was pulling human evolution toward Omega Point. The idea resonates with the Singularitarians, like Ray Kurzweil, but there seems some crucial differences. Anyway...

Teilhard posited in the 1940s (or earlier?) that humankind would in the future extend its nervous system around the globe. This was the noosphere, an atmosphere made of mind-stuff. (He was actually extending an idea from Vladimir Vernadsky. Or perhaps Edouard Le Roy. Anyway...) This idea influenced another catholic Generalist in my pantheon, Marshall McLuhan. His concept of the "global village" was heavily influenced by Teilhard.

Teilhard was cited more than any other thinker as influential on what Marilyn Ferguson called "The Aquarian Conspiracy" in her 1980 book of the same name. Teilhard was mentioned just above Jung, Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Aldous Huxley. This book and its ideas - rather puzzlingly to this blogger, and undoubtedly a boon for Ferguson's sales - proved to be an enduring threat to Larouche-ites and other Christian right wing groups. (See this example, for one among many. <-----Pssst! Those of you who love a good, thick, meaty conspiracy theory: don't miss this one! It's a sort of meta- conspiracy theory, in that the theorizing about the hated conspiracy seems almost far more conspiratorial than the "Aquarian Conspiracy" itself. Ferguson really scored with her title! But I wildly digress...)

So now we have the noosphere, in a major sort of way. And you are participating in it right where you are sitting now. Here's my question for us: is this contributing to your happiness? Can you check in with your feelings and say, "Yep, reading this guy's blog and these other Internet things I've done in the last hour are really the things I need to be doing. I like this. I need this and I find it fulfilling."?

Hey, maybe your answer is yes. But maybe not.

A brilliant blogger articulates his struggles well in a way that sheds light on this general topic here.

In the last week I've spent a lot of time researching (on the Web!) the term "addiction" with regard to cell phone use, Facebook, texting, playing video games, checking email, viewing pornography, and watching TV. Among other things. And there is no shortage of data there. There are a ton of studies, especially with regard to TV. The point is: clearly, some people have major problems with digital media and its appropriate place in their own lives. (For those with addictions, I am no doctor, but I would like to suggest some form of cognitive behavioral therapy, for reasons I might go into in some future blog rant-post.)

Why, with this wonderful mystical noosphere/Global Village, are some of us having such a hard time?

Two things immediately come to mind, and they are interconnected, it seems to me:

1.) We as the species homo sapiens have been physically like we are for around 195,000 years. We reached what's called "behavioral modernity" around 50,000 years ago. (Those of you who balk at these figures, let me know in the comments section, please.) But we've only had electric lights for around 130 years. Cut to the chase: for evolutionary reasons, most of us simply don't know how to most appropriately incorporate all the dazzling digital gadgetry at our disposal. One way to reassess one's stance towards digital media and their own feelings of well-being would be to get radical and look at one's own hierarchy of values.

2.) Every form of electronic media can - and should - be seen as having its own imperative(s). Is your Android conscious? Of course not. (Disagreements welcome in the comment box below.) The tremendously talented, probably-specialistic geeks who programmed your gadget DO have assumptions, both hidden and available to their own consciousnesses. Your iPad did not develop over millions of years like the duck-billed platypus. Just take a moment and contemplate - and I'm not assuming anything actively nefarious here! - that, by a welter of knowledge about human motivation - that by definition your gadget (including Blogger!) was developed by a large team of expert programmers who had assumptions about social reality and even "human nature" that were/are subconscious or unconscious or just generally unavailable to themselves.

But any medium - including books - will program you if you don't program it. (EX: killers in the name of their Holy Book) If you're bored and don't know what to do with yourself and reach for the email/cell phone/Facebook/Twitter/TV, etc...: you have not programmed those things; they have programmed you. They want you to use them for their own reasons, but you need to use them for YOUR reasons. Because you're a totally unique, free and creative individual with the spark of the Infinite within. For a tremendous buzz on this idea, see Douglas Rushkoff's recent book Program or Be Programmed.


So yes, friends: be a vibrant part of the Global Brain, with its noosphere enveloping us all, pulling us toward...something? (I will not dogmatize about this!) But be conscious in your use of these powerful new media. Aye, go have a blast, but be careful out there!

Tu quoque: Yes, I have my own media addiction, and it has to do with books. Some other time.