Some Words on the "Third Culture"

Intellectual entrepreneur and publisher John Brockman's idea, or he takes most of the credit. I have a link to Edge.org over there on the side--------->a ways down. It'll give you some background. There's a whole lot of mind-stuff there and I happen to find almost all of it fascinating.

Situating itself in a lineage that includes The Invisible College and The Lunar Society, the Edge thinkers are all part of what Brockman calls the "Third Culture," a historical succession from the problem described by novelist and physicist C.P. Snow, in his 1959 book The Two Cultures, which lamented the artificial iron curtain between the humanist intellectuals and the physical scientists. Professors of English literature were almost proud to not know anything about, say, quantum physics; academic chemistry professors felt bad they were not up on Lake Poets. Or something like that. The point is: this divide was harming knowledge as a whole; all of knowledge belongs to all of us, and we ought to know more about other things, but you know what? The literary critics are just incorrigible in their disdain of science and the language it's written in, mathematics. 


Brockman steps in and says the time of the snooty New York literary critics is over. No one reads them anymore. They have become stale, predictable, and there's a rather large and fairly sophisticated audience of lay readers who are craving the buzz from scientists who can write well for the public. And the ideas coming out of science happen to address almost all of the perennial philosophical questions; only don't expect "God" to play as big a part here. (Or rather: when He does show up, He's probably more surreal than you'd imagined. He might even be an It, or pan-sexual, who knows?) It was Brockman's mission to bring these scientists-writers to the public, and the Third Culture was born. It's a big tent, too. 


You know, for me, it's been a smashing success. As I said, most of this stuff I find fascinating. (Scientists who can explain their version of string theory, or what nanotechnology can already do, or new inroads in Artificial Intelligence, or black holes and the multiverse, or evolutionary psychology and what it says about our sex habits, etc: Hey: OG says thumb's up.) 


It does seem to be a logical, historical succession from the previous Philosopher Kings, the small-tent New York literary intellectuals. (Much more on them in a later OG disgorgement.)


There was a time when most people "did" science, just for kicks. They'd collect specimens, did experiments, bought the most affordable microscopes and telescopes, read Popular Mechanics. When you were a kid, I bet you looked under rocks just for the joy of seeing something marvelous that might be there, hidden, and "Daddy, why is the sky blue?" Gregor Mendel was just dinkin' around! (Well, he was serious about his dinkin', albeit.) The history of astronomy is rife with dedicated amateurs who furthered the science. Why did science become so exclusive? Why did some of us lose almost all interest in it at some point? 


Progressively, science became a hard-core discipline, driven by business interests and the military-industrial complex, which fed the universities. If you were a terrific geek or nerd with math chops, you would have a job. Scientific training became more and more regimented because regimentation "works" in producing an army of "left-brained" technical intelligentsia that can do marvelous things, working in teams...


As you got into the university, if you were "good at math" of had a knack for basic physics or chemistry or biology, you were strongly encouraged - herded - into the sciences. Because the rewards could be so great. (And some smart people really seem to love their physical science; clearly, they receive intrinsic rewards in the teasing out of Nature's puzzles.)


But in this hothousing of more and more scientists for the "Establishment," (<---when was the last time you saw that term?), very many young people who were not great at math got turned off by "science," as if it wasn't for them. On campuses Art and Science were different worlds. Each felt a bit envious of the other, superior, and tragically incomplete: Snow's Two Cultures.


A basic way of looking at this: the intellectuals who were adepts at verbalization and the written word called themselves "the intellectuals," for awhile and got away with it. The scientists, adept in the language of math, were perhaps biding their time?


In science, specialization is all. In fact, you specialize as soon as possible (when qualified), then sub-specialize, then you microspecialize: voila! Ph.D! The synthesizers seem the vast exception: creative, they see the problems accumulating in different areas of one discipline, sense patterns, develop hypotheses, test, experiment, tinker....new theory! (Very rarely: new paradigm!) And it all eventually turns into plasma TVs, laser-beam weapons, the Internet in the palm of your hand, biomass fuels, an fMRI machine, machines that correct other machines, etc, etc, etc.


Brockman's scientists (and he also invites non-physical scientists, and even humanities people to join in the conversation about Big Ideas, much to his credit, and probably because he was involved in the Art world beforehand?) are the cream. They may be geeks, but they are eloquent and interesting to read and listen to. U.S citizens desperately need these people; too bad it's probably the already-formally educated who are paying attention...(NB: the lamentable level of public discourse on evolution, global warming, stem cell research, on and on. These Third Culture types are standing by! They're sitting on shelves in your public library! Oh? American Idol is about to start? Nevermind...)


Now: a proto-Third Culture had lurked long before Brockman got into Wiggy Ideas. When Ilya Prigogine put forth his theory of dissipative structures (early 1970s), he was tapping into a vein that poet-mystic-philosophers had been talking around for a long time. People like Henri Bergson. Titanic thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead. Weird polymaths who sought wisdom from the East. Prigogine (Nobel Prize) said his findings (in thermodynamics) were like a "science of becoming,"a "deep collective vision."


Prior to Prigogine, there was Ezra Pound's project.


Even further back...


If Brockman and his crew have included him, I missed it, but Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that the first Third Culture occurred when the new nomothetic social sciences arrived. This was 19th century stuff. What is "nomothetic" social science? Economics, political science, and sociology and the 19th century search for "law-like" formulations within those fields. The rise of those disciplines created a Third Culture in the ruins of the long-running medieval faculty of philosophy, which split up and became physical science vs. the humanities. Into the lurch: Econ/poli-sci/sociology, all of them fairly dismal, if you ask me...With some major exceptions, in my view. (Some other time, my friends.)


Back to Brockman's cadre of engaging scientist-public intellectuals: there are a lot of them, their work is almost always mind-blowing (to me, at least), and it's a boon for the Overweening Generalist, to say the least. Now, before I apologize for going on too long here, I ask you this Question: is there a Fourth Culture in our midst? If so, who are its constituents, and what's their main thrust?


Apologies for veering into verborrhea; if you stuck with this rant: thanks. And please: any thoughtful dissent is welcome.

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.

Notes on the "Free-Floating" Intellectual

Drawing from and greatly fleshing out Alfred Weber's concept of a freischwebende Intelligenz, or "the socially unattached intelligentsia," Karl Mannheim in his Ideology and Utopia, the Ur-text in the sociology of knowledge (pub in German in 1929, translated into English in 1936), argued that all ideas in the political, economic and cultural fields were rooted in class interests and social and economic circumstances of the thinker. No one from any strata had a complete purchase on the "truth." A very small group of thinkers, however, were subject to the least amount of bias and were able to articulate viewpoints about the cultural scene from a wider and more encompassing stance: a relatively classless stratum of free-floating intellectuals. 


Mannheim was historicistic (is that even a word?) enough that he rejected the notion of "relativism" because it seemed to assume there existed a Platonic realm of Eternal Truth, True Being, etc. Mannheim favored "relationism": as history moves on the truth changes according to time and place. In this he was influenced by pragmatism. Anyway, the idea of a special class of intellectuals who were able to see more than their institutionally attached academic brethren in the universities, churches, think tanks, and government: this has long appealed to the marginalized (indeed: the marginal themselves?) book readers living in their cold water flats, surrounded by stacks and piles of books and magazines, a cot, and maybe some food. But to what extent does this concept hold (cold?) water?


Mannheim thought a main value of this posited group would be the development of a "dynamic synthesis" of all the other ideologies of the other groups. Anyone know a writer in 2011 who has accomplished this? I think I know a few, but you will probably disagree with me. Anyway, I'll get to it in some later blog-spew...


Well, certainly the institutionally-attached seem to be indebted to larger interests. Probably too many to enumerate here...But the institutionally-attached have far more resources at their disposal, too. (The itinerant academic and full-time scholar Morris Berman has cited the "McWorld" values that American universities have devolved to for much of their faculty and students. Some studies in 2010-2011 have suggested there's never been a time in U.S. history when a university education was so expensive, and the after-graduation job expectations so dismal. Start here?)


Back from the digression: The relatively unattached stratum are free to study anything, at any time, to keep their own hours (apart from their rent-paying job, if they have one), and to edit, publish in little magazines, 'zines, write plays, radical essays, blather on in blogs, etc. (What would Mannheim have made of blogs?)


In an essay in 1969 by Noam Chomsky, published in the New York Review of Books, "The Menace of Liberal Scholarship," he very articulately decries the increasing role of specialist, technical intelligentsia from the universities as playing strong roles in the administration of the State. Because of Chomsky's ethics, he is almost always criticizing the U.S, because it is "easy" to point out what's wrong in some other country's political maneuvers; a truly free intellectual will focus on criticism of their own country. (This basic idea of Chomsky's seems criminally misunderstood, or rather, actively non-understood. What is interesting is that he has developed and sustained his incredible body of critiques of the U.S. while "attached" to M.I.T. He has answered questions surrounding this seeming paradox many times, as you probably know. See one discussion around this issue here.)


Why does Chomsky think specialist, technical intellectuals go in for service to the State? Senator Fulbright had recently lamented (this was 1969) that universities had failed to serve as a counterforce to the military-industrial complex. Fulbright thought the lure of money was too much to pass up for these...geeks. Chomsky saw access to money and influence and access to a highly restricted, almost universally shared ideology and the "dynamics of professionalism." Then, 30-odd years after Mannheim's discussion of the possible role of the "free-floating intellectual," Chomsky writes:

"The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect."

Ouch! Was Chomsky right? Is he still right? Some of us unattached, generalist, inveterate readers of thick texts hope not. Has the rise of the Internet changed the ratios a tad? Maybe?

More later; this topic is - for moi - too rich to abandon here.

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.

An Odd (But Wildly Successful) Pre-C.P. Snow Attempt to Bridge "The Two Cultures"

In a monumental work in the sociology of knowledge, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, by Randall Collins, a key idea is this: in the history of philosophy, "There are two polar types of creativity: the creativity of fractionation as thinkers maximize their distinctiveness, and the creativity of synthesis as intellectuals make alliances among weakening positions or attempt to reduce a crippling overload as factions exceed the law of small numbers." (p.131)


This law of small numbers has to do with any period of intellectual history and a limited number of arguments that receive "attention space." If there is vibrant emotional energy spent around "knots" of ideas, other ideas find it difficult to gain traction. And these knots of ideas are small in number: from three to six. See the book for much more on the Law...


As Generalists, most - but not all - of us would fall towards the pole of "synthesizer." Collins says synthesizers, "are necessarily dedicated to a vision of an overarching truth, and display a generosity of spirit toward at least wide swaths of the intellectual community." (p.131) 


In the history of intellectual thought, fractionalizers and synthesizers are ideal types, but more common than a strong synthesizing is a weaker form: syncretism. With this in mind, I turn to Ezra Pound's early 20th century creative move to make poetry more "scientific" via his creative misreading of Chinese ideograms.


Pound's Imagism and his use of the ideogrammic method proved enormously influential in 20th century poetry, even if the initial impetus was based on mistaken (or "half-baked"?) ideas about how chinese writing worked, and how scientific methods proceeded. 


After announcing as a teenager that he would know more about poetry at age 30 than any man alive, Pound (around age 30) developed Imagism, which emphasized "direct treatment" of things, whether subjective or objective. He was also influenced by the scholastic idea that there is nothing truly in the understanding unless it was there in the senses first. 


Pound thought his ideogrammic way of seeing was both an art and a science, and was at odds with logic. As he saw it, in the material sciences of biology and chemistry, scientists "examined collections of fact, phenomena, specimens, and gathered general equations of real knowledge from them, even though the observed data had no syllogistic connection with one another." (Guide To Kulchur, p. 27)


He thought that scientists make their observations holistically and creatively, and that poetry ought to do this as well, and that chinese ideograms worked in a way that was isomorphic to scientific observation and thought.


To whatever extent Pound was "wrong" in his suppositions, he successfully carried out his revolution in poetry in the 20th century. And he did it by trying to synthesize the physical sciences with chinese writing! Given Pound's rather garish biography, does this constitute a time when Madness brilliantly showed its own methods?

A Non-Definition of "Generalist"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


Ahhh: scholars vs. academics. 


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


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

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

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

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


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

Some Fugitive Riffs on Axiology

Axiology: the study of values. The definition can be unpacked in many ways: aesthetic values, ethics, even the beauty in mathematical rigor. But from a personal standpoint: what are our own hierarchies of values?

It seems to me this resides near the heart of an adult in a putatively "free"and Open (democratic?) Society: one must constantly evaluate what matters most to one, and act accordingly, always seeking new information, listening to one's own intuition, ransacking ourselves in search of more integrity (however we define that), and having the courage to think for ourselves. (How much lip service is paid to "thinking for oneself," and how much of that is actually done?) And it seems probable that all of this is based on some sort of neurologically-based system of values, largely inherited from the family and culture at large.

We inherit our values while developing into adulthood. Neural circuits are developed, and assumptions about "reality"are largely based on that platform. But these are amenable - neuroplasticity seems to strongly suggest so - if we seek to truly realize our creativity and uniqueness. It takes work.

An adult will seek to realize him or herself by rooting out what was inherited osmotically and begin the long, exhilarating process of weighing what truly is valuable to oneself, to what degree, what matters more than some other values, what can be discarded entirely, what needs to be given a test-run, what might be hidden from one, etc.

When Euclid concocted his Elements he posited some axioms that were, to him, self-evident and inarguable. He built the edifice of his geometry upon these axioms. Analogically we have done the same for our values, whatever they are. And they are wildly variable!

(Interestingly - fascinating to me - in the 19th and 20th century mathematicians tweaked Euclidean self-evident axioms and derived entirely new geometries - often called "non-Euclidean geometries" - and these have proven to be of practical use!)

How best to explore our values and do this heady work?

How to negotiate those ancient values of Individual vs. Collective "goods"? Happiness and pleasure vs. Duty and responsibility to others? The active life vs. the contemplative? Etc, etc, etc.

The present Blogger currently sees a fairly bald self-interest lurking in almost all of the corporate-owned and sponsored mainstream media; this renders values offered as "goods" there as inherently highly suspect. Where to seek guidance? I have no easy answers...

It's a lot of work, but I insist that it's exhilarating, and absolutely essential for a responsible adult in a free and open society.

If the Reader asks, "Well why doesn't this Generalist guy just tell us what his values are?" I say: this is a blog post. My answer would be too long. That is not the point. I want you to think about your own dynamic hierarchy of values, as I am. I am trying to prod you. And look at the pictures of Thinkers I chose to include, below. That should give you a hint as to where I stand.

So: your own hierarchy of values, based in your wildly individually complex biography. Your axiology. Can you articulate your unique hierarchy, if only to yourself?

Have FUN with this!