You're just like I was...
Mar. 10th, 2007 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThere's a scene in Happy Days. Richie Cunningham has to take a test, but someone has given him the answers in advance. He decides to come clean to his father. "Dad, I have something to tell you. I have all the answers." Howard, his father, isn't too concerned. "That's okay, son, at your age I thought I had all the answers too."
Howard, here, is failing to take on board the new information his son is trying to give him because he's too busy projecting himself -- affectionately enough, but also patronizingly and narcissistically -- into the situation. He's insisting on mapping his own experiences, his own former delusions, onto his son. He wants to help Richie overcome old mistakes that Howard made thirty years before. It's classic parent stuff. They never understand.
Tellingly enough, the Howard-mistake Howard mistakenly projects onto Richie is the delusion of omniscience: having all the answers. And although his answer seems to suggest he's over it, Howard still clearly thinks he has all the answers. About his son and what he's going through, anyway. Howard is still talking as if he's up on the high hill, that spot from which other people's errors can be seen, if only because they're your own. Sitting up on that high hill, Howard sees Richie as a little carbon copy of himself, thirty years down the line. "Oh look, here he comes, struggling up the same hillside path I came up, dealing with the same
delusions and pitfalls. Thinking he's already sitting at the top, when in fact it's only me who's sitting at the top. He'll find out soon enough, I guess. And then wish he'd listened to his father."
Anyone with parents knows how infuriating this kind of assumption is. It's all the more infuriating when we look in the mirror and see fresher-faced versions of our parents looking back. In other words, when we suspect that there might be some truth in it. But the main thing that makes it wrong is context. In the twenty or thirty years that separate two generations, a lot has changed. Lessons learned in Howard's slumped 1930s are probably not particularly applicable to life in Richie's affluent 1950s. Imagine the Waltons trying to tell the Jetsons how to live.
Projecting yourself too much onto something inherently different from you -- even if it's only different because the context has changed -- is a bit like anthropomorphism; projecting human attributes onto animals. Contemporary Western culture is incredibly anthropomorphic. I was in the Post Office queue yesterday, examining Easter cards featuring rabbits. While all the cards based on photographs were forced to show the rabbit's eyes on either side of its head, looking out sideways, ever-vigilant for predators, the cards which used drawings of rabbits "corrected" this, putting the eyes on the front of the face, as they would be if rabbits were a predator species like humans, not a prey species. As a result, the rabbits looked like long-eared bears. Presumably this alteration was to make rabbits more like us, and therefore more loveable. But why must we only love things on the condition that we can project our own features onto them? The "modern Stone Age family" in The Flintstones is funny because of all the anachronism, all the projection of ourselves onto a different time. But would you want an Anthropology Museum, or a foreign policy, based on the idea that Stone Age people are just like us?
The problem is, that's exactly what we have. Every day we read the opinion that radical Islam is reproducing Medieval Europe, or that Japanese women are just about to go through a stage Western women went through in the 1960s. We invade Iraq thinking that they'll thank us for giving them the political apparatus we already have. Thinking that if it works for us, it'll work for them. We are perhaps the most narcissistic culture that has ever existed. We really think we're sitting on top of the hill, the pinnacle and culimation of all history and all progress. The fact that we have to kill so many people to help them see how they're just like us, really, doesn't seem to convince us that this view might be mistaken.
To say that an animal is like a human, or one culture is like another culture at a different phase in its history, is a metaphor, nothing more. It cannot be the case, non-metaphorically. Even when different calendars co-exist -- and they do; for the West this is 2007 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, for the Japanese it's Heisei 19, for Muslims it's Hijrah year 1428 -- we're all living in the same moment. And we're all living with each other, changing each other's context, redefining each other. Today's postmodernism has been influenced by Islamism, as Islamism has been influenced by postmodernism. Even if the Islamic 1428 resembled the Christian 1428 in every way, the fact that we were around would change the situation utterly. Context changes everything. Imagine a 1428 in which Christendom lived alongside a postmodern culture with TV stations, pop stars and the internet. It would be an utterly different 1428, one which defined itself (probably negatively) against the postmodern culture next door.
Think, too, of how insulting it is to say "They're living our 1428. They're just like we were." What would we think of a Japanese writer who said the West had just about reached Japan's Meiji 18? He'd be dismissed as an incredibly arrogant nationalist.
Borges has two short stories which have a lot to tell us here. One is about a poet who's writing an epic poem describing everything in the world using an Aleph in his basement -- a wondrous little model which makes the whole universe simultaneously visible in a space just a few centimeters across. The West really seems to think it's the Aleph, the model, the place from which everything can be seen, and in which everything is contained. We really act as if we're up on the hilltop, and have the answers. The trouble is that in our Aleph, everything looks suspiciously like us. The rabbits in there all have eyes on the front of their heads. Maybe we haven't kept it clean. Maybe it's a mirror.
The other story is Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote, in which a 20th century man attempts to rewrite Cervantes' 16th century novel from memory. Borges makes clear that even if Menard had succeeded (and of course he can't, just like the famous monkeys with their typewriters and their infinite bits of paper containing close-but-no-cigar versions of "Hamlet"), he would still have been an utterly original writer, doing something Cervantes wouldn't have dreamed of: reproducing Cervantes word-for-word.
Howard, here, is failing to take on board the new information his son is trying to give him because he's too busy projecting himself -- affectionately enough, but also patronizingly and narcissistically -- into the situation. He's insisting on mapping his own experiences, his own former delusions, onto his son. He wants to help Richie overcome old mistakes that Howard made thirty years before. It's classic parent stuff. They never understand.Tellingly enough, the Howard-mistake Howard mistakenly projects onto Richie is the delusion of omniscience: having all the answers. And although his answer seems to suggest he's over it, Howard still clearly thinks he has all the answers. About his son and what he's going through, anyway. Howard is still talking as if he's up on the high hill, that spot from which other people's errors can be seen, if only because they're your own. Sitting up on that high hill, Howard sees Richie as a little carbon copy of himself, thirty years down the line. "Oh look, here he comes, struggling up the same hillside path I came up, dealing with the same
delusions and pitfalls. Thinking he's already sitting at the top, when in fact it's only me who's sitting at the top. He'll find out soon enough, I guess. And then wish he'd listened to his father."Anyone with parents knows how infuriating this kind of assumption is. It's all the more infuriating when we look in the mirror and see fresher-faced versions of our parents looking back. In other words, when we suspect that there might be some truth in it. But the main thing that makes it wrong is context. In the twenty or thirty years that separate two generations, a lot has changed. Lessons learned in Howard's slumped 1930s are probably not particularly applicable to life in Richie's affluent 1950s. Imagine the Waltons trying to tell the Jetsons how to live.
Projecting yourself too much onto something inherently different from you -- even if it's only different because the context has changed -- is a bit like anthropomorphism; projecting human attributes onto animals. Contemporary Western culture is incredibly anthropomorphic. I was in the Post Office queue yesterday, examining Easter cards featuring rabbits. While all the cards based on photographs were forced to show the rabbit's eyes on either side of its head, looking out sideways, ever-vigilant for predators, the cards which used drawings of rabbits "corrected" this, putting the eyes on the front of the face, as they would be if rabbits were a predator species like humans, not a prey species. As a result, the rabbits looked like long-eared bears. Presumably this alteration was to make rabbits more like us, and therefore more loveable. But why must we only love things on the condition that we can project our own features onto them? The "modern Stone Age family" in The Flintstones is funny because of all the anachronism, all the projection of ourselves onto a different time. But would you want an Anthropology Museum, or a foreign policy, based on the idea that Stone Age people are just like us?
The problem is, that's exactly what we have. Every day we read the opinion that radical Islam is reproducing Medieval Europe, or that Japanese women are just about to go through a stage Western women went through in the 1960s. We invade Iraq thinking that they'll thank us for giving them the political apparatus we already have. Thinking that if it works for us, it'll work for them. We are perhaps the most narcissistic culture that has ever existed. We really think we're sitting on top of the hill, the pinnacle and culimation of all history and all progress. The fact that we have to kill so many people to help them see how they're just like us, really, doesn't seem to convince us that this view might be mistaken.To say that an animal is like a human, or one culture is like another culture at a different phase in its history, is a metaphor, nothing more. It cannot be the case, non-metaphorically. Even when different calendars co-exist -- and they do; for the West this is 2007 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, for the Japanese it's Heisei 19, for Muslims it's Hijrah year 1428 -- we're all living in the same moment. And we're all living with each other, changing each other's context, redefining each other. Today's postmodernism has been influenced by Islamism, as Islamism has been influenced by postmodernism. Even if the Islamic 1428 resembled the Christian 1428 in every way, the fact that we were around would change the situation utterly. Context changes everything. Imagine a 1428 in which Christendom lived alongside a postmodern culture with TV stations, pop stars and the internet. It would be an utterly different 1428, one which defined itself (probably negatively) against the postmodern culture next door.
Think, too, of how insulting it is to say "They're living our 1428. They're just like we were." What would we think of a Japanese writer who said the West had just about reached Japan's Meiji 18? He'd be dismissed as an incredibly arrogant nationalist.
Borges has two short stories which have a lot to tell us here. One is about a poet who's writing an epic poem describing everything in the world using an Aleph in his basement -- a wondrous little model which makes the whole universe simultaneously visible in a space just a few centimeters across. The West really seems to think it's the Aleph, the model, the place from which everything can be seen, and in which everything is contained. We really act as if we're up on the hilltop, and have the answers. The trouble is that in our Aleph, everything looks suspiciously like us. The rabbits in there all have eyes on the front of their heads. Maybe we haven't kept it clean. Maybe it's a mirror.The other story is Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote, in which a 20th century man attempts to rewrite Cervantes' 16th century novel from memory. Borges makes clear that even if Menard had succeeded (and of course he can't, just like the famous monkeys with their typewriters and their infinite bits of paper containing close-but-no-cigar versions of "Hamlet"), he would still have been an utterly original writer, doing something Cervantes wouldn't have dreamed of: reproducing Cervantes word-for-word.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 10:01 am (UTC)"I'm surprised those armchair universal conspiracy theorists took time out from eroticising the political wing of the I.R.A. to -as would be expected- bellow heresy, and pull the programme's producers to the stake rather than permit debate."
There's nothing even vaguely helpful here. You are not putting forward your own position, which might possibly stimulate debate. You scorn people with environmental concerns because you assume they simply believe everything they are told, but then you seem to expect them to believe everything you say without even making clear what it is you are saying.
There might not be a connection between human activity and global warming... Well, there might not, although we'd have to then suppose that there's no connection between human activity and the environment at all. That there might be a greater cause - well, tell us about it and give us the evidence.
Are you suggesting that we just forget about the whole issue because it "might never happen"? I don't really understand what your point is.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 03:47 pm (UTC)As regards sneering you will find that more the province of the environmentalist lobby, choosing to label those who question their orthodoxy as neo-imperialist, flat earthers, loonies etcetera.
My point in brief is the need for skepticism in the face of an unproven postulation that has become accepted as an absolute truth, debate on the human activity/global warming connection is none existent and the anticipated reaction to those who choose to raise it as a debate issue is swift vilification.
The enviros seek to curb human activity, to fetter Third World development, to shackle scientific progress- they are the neo-luddites of our age.
They preach the need to reduce emissions whilst jetting around the globe then exhibit the gall to say "Yes, it is hypocritical but we still must get our message across".
Do you not think on the basis of this evidence that their philosophy is just a little dubious?
Or should we just accept all the scare-mongering and false science at face value, ignore the vested interests and put our heads deep in the sands.
If you think my points are worth considering a little research will confirm me as not being some isolated, recalcitrant,raving pariah, I suggest you google 'Chris Landsea An Open Letter to The Community' as a starting point.
Regards- Thomas
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 06:45 pm (UTC)Perhaps another interesting link: Google- Spiked Online, A Secular Version Of Kingdom Come for a thought provoking review of enviro-alarmist Monbiot's 'Heat'.
Thomas.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 07:18 pm (UTC)I suppose I still don't quite understand your point of view, since you say you defended (past tense) the environmentalist viewpoint, and that there's a world of difference between sensible conservation and curtailing development. In other words, I suppose I'm not sure of the extent to which you think environmental issues are important.
We also seem to differ on other points, as you'll probably gather from some other stuff I've just written.
Anyway, maybe I'll understand your point better after reading this stuff.
(Incidentally, probably the majority of my information comes from New Scientist, though there are other sources. I'm always aware that all I have to rely on in this world are my own experience and what I'm told. In the end, if there's a conflict, it has to be my own experience.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 07:05 pm (UTC)Just thought I'd add some stuff as I was in the middle of something else earlier.
Actually, there's no way I'm going to be able to do this justice, but anyway...
My own feelings on the matter are that there are definitely lots of strange things happening in the environment - these are all around us - and there are many theories as to why this might be. Particularly strong at the moment is the whole theory of global warming caused by CO2 and other emmissions. If we work to curb those emmissions now, while some calculate we still have time, then this may have a beneficial effect. If we don't, we may be in for a catastrophe. I actually do not think it would be much of a disaster to put a rein on use of cars, aeroplanes, on manufacturing, and so on. If, in fifty or a hundred years time, assuming we implement policies to reduce emmissions, we discover that it didn't make a difference to global warming - well, at that time it might be the least of our worries anyway that we're having fewer holidays and don't own as many gadgets.
I don't know if I am one of the people you refer to as 'enviros'. I mean, I don't think of myself that way, but then I'm not keen on identification with labels. I would say that I grew up in the countryside and have found myself to have very different attitudes about what is important in life to many of my city-upbringing friends (which is not to say everyone in the countryside is like me). Even as a child, before I'd ever heard about 'environmentalism' few things could upset me more than people cutting down trees. I have never been able to see the constant concreting over of land for 'development' in anything other than the most depressing terms. You've used the word 'progress' before, but I wonder what you mean by it. For me technology is a kind of distraction, and doesn't offer real progress at all. Accounts of tribes existing in a 'pre-civilised' state usually seem to me to present an almost ideal model of human society, certainly much preferable to what is generally called civilisation. I can see some areas that I'd be willing to call 'progress': medicine, abolition of slavery and... I can't remember the other one. There was something. For the most part, other progress either seems like something we can do without, or actually harmful. It's as if there is a couple who don't get on, and every night the husband (or wife, if you want to reverse the stereotype) gets drunk and beats his wife with a baseball bat, and she sits down with him one evening and says, "We've got to do something to improve things." And he says, "You're right. I'll see if I can come up with a design for an electric baseball bat."
That is how what people usually call progress appears to me. I dont care about science. I know people invoke science as a new sacred, as if it's entirely benevolent and infallible, but to me it seems like just one more convocation of megolomaniacs. Shackles on science? Great. Fine by me. I have to live in the world that science is changing, too.
People are hypocrites? Well, that's no surprise, and certainly doesn't indicate that human beings are not destroying the world. Besides which, environmental issues are not limited to global warming. Species are dying out left, right and centre at the moment (amphibians are having a particularly hard time, it seems):
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html
Whatever turns out to be the case with CO2 emmissions, the fact is human beings are destroying the environment. Is there a link between humans cutting down the rain forest and the shrinking of the rain forest? Is there a link between over-fishing and the dwindling numbers of fish in the ocean?
Now, I certainly don't know what the answer to all this is, but it does concern me, and I am trying to muddle my way through as best as I can. I think we should, by all means, have debate. I agree with you entirely. I suppose I tend to feel, however, that economic growth should not be the be-all-and-end-all it has been until now. Whatever happens, if we can learn from it to care less about economics and more about harmonious relationships, that will be great.
(Continued...)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 07:07 pm (UTC)Maybe, however, there isn't even a conflict of interests. Maybe both economy and environment can work together. If not, I know which I think is most important. I'm actually starting a new job to do with talking to people about the environment. It's an initiative in Islington Borough. The fact is, people are not (as part of this initiative) being browbeaten, or made to feel ashamed or anything of the sort. People are being encouraged to recycle, to use alternative forms of transport, to save water and so on. I don't actually see the harm in any of these things. The general motto seems to be that it's not using something that's the problem, it's waste. Some people might even say this is too wishy-washy.
Anyway, thanks for your information. I'll Google Chris Landsea.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 08:39 pm (UTC)It is perhaps a sad indictment of our times that scientific progress has come to be perceived as something negative, an evil which should be reined in.
Medical science, sanitation, infrastructure, the means of mechanisation of drudgery- all these wonders of our age are taken for granted.
I wish it were better understood just how short, brutish and ugly life was prior to the advent of the modern age.
Moreover I wish people could understand how denying developing countries the fiscal freedom to pursue these things- as is present I.M.F. policy and World Bank policy- on the basis of unscientifically proven, extrapolated fallacy is a monstrous, abhorrent injustice.
If you really want to know what it comes down to, the fact of the matter is all human activity (including exhaling CO2 if you like) is environmentally damaging.
If you really wish to push the religion of environmentalism to it's limits then cease wearing manufactured clothes, stop using electricity, abandon living in a house, take to the waters and the wild and refuse to employ medical science when you are ill or dying.
Effectively a return to pre-civilisation ...is that a valid proposition, is it one which people will embrace?
Thomas.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 09:14 pm (UTC)Effectively a return to pre-civilisation ...is that a valid proposition, is it one which people will embrace?"
Of course not. As I said, in one way or the other, I don't have the answers. Maybe we're just all fucked. My own personal answer is not to reproduce. Sad, isn't it?
Anyway, no doubt I will talk to you later. Just watching The Trap - Dreams of Freedom.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-11 10:05 pm (UTC)I enjoyed the exchange of ideas, Quentin.
Regards.
Thomas.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 07:42 pm (UTC)Yes, me too.
"Dang, I meant to watch that- his previous BBC series Power Of Nightmares was quite fantastic-"
It was, indeed, very interesting. Funny, I watched that film about John Nash recently, and he cropped up again in this in a less benevolent incarnation as the primogenitor of the 'fuck you' equation for balancing social interactions. This was only barely hinted at in the Hollywood film with a single line somewhere in which he seemed to express approval of the whole Mutually Assured Destruction principle.
Also interesting to see Laing in there. Knots is a favourite book of mine. My dad did some work with Laing, so I wonder if he saw it and what he made of it. I'll have to ask him.