Cynicism? Hell! This is the clear and uncontestable, irreconfootable,
proven-time-after-time-result of empirical research and therefore is
absolute and valid for ever end ever amen!
---snip --
>This is where I am frustrated. You are right. There IS no new knowledge,
>just this ongoing deep-sea dive of new terminologies which further obscure
>the same phenomenon.... when we ought to be salvaging what we already
>excavated
>from the predecessors' texts.
This would be a good start to new knowledge, viz. knowing what we know
_about people_ and their habitual failings at socially ethical and
equitable distributions of power and production (i include knowledge here,
and everything else societies produce and reproduce).
A few words from John Ralston Saul for the bravely disinterested:
'...the very essence of individualism is the refusal to mind your own
business. This is not a particularly pleasant or easy style of life. It is
not profitable, efficient, competitive or rewarded. It often consists of
being persistently annoying to others as well as being stubborn and
repetitive
... Criticism is perhaps the individual's primary weapon in the exercise of
her legitimacy. That is why, in this corporatist society, conformism,
loyalty and silence are so admired and rewarded; why criticism is so
punished or marginalized. Who has not experienced this conflict?' (The
unconscious civilization, 1997, pp. 169-170). I highly recommend this book
to anyone who wants a precise and human view of this messy world.
And that's brings me to another blight: an obsession with getting rid of
anthropocentrism. Okay! There's other stuff out there - legitimate points
of view no doubt - worthwhile, necessary, etc ad infinitum. But how in the
hell can we engage with these until we clean up our own dungpile?
>...more than one language that everyone can speak, I am leaning towards
>mulitlingualism,
>that we might need to be more versed in many languages,
>such as the language of science & mathemtatics, the language
>of rhetoric, the language of philosophy, the language of fascism,
>and so on.
These should be the focus, the alarm bells for a healthy, disinterested
citizenry, at least to my mind. Already there are enough dialects and
specialists to go with them. Trouble is, these become privileged and, as JL
('95 somewhere around p. 58) points out, become the dialects of social
policy: "Listen to us, we are the experts, you can tell by the
goobledy-gook we speak - see you don't even understand us, we're so smart!
Best off you go home and let us run the world, we know what we're doing;
more to the point, we know what _you're_ going to do. Thank you and
goodnight .... " [Expert exits stage left, cuban cigar, "econometrics made
easy" handbook, sycophantic entourage, and whitehouse intern in tow] ...
It's okay for the intelligent wordsmiths and hermeneutically sophisticated
among us to say: open a discursive space for all dialects. However, the
fundamental of democracy - a healthy one, not the tokenistic kind we
ususally get - is a language (a public dialect) in which _everyone_ can
participate. That is, no matter where people come from in a given
democracy, they should all have the public debates open to them, not closed
as they most ususally are - especially when they count the most.
>thank you Phill, by golly. For a minute there I thought maybe *I* was blind.
You're welcome. We're all blind: Reality is a patchwork quilt. There's a
lovely little exercise in Maturana & Varela's 1987 (Tree of Knowledge) that
shows quite plainly exactly how blind we are - we literally can't see great
chunks of the world that we're looking at. Nevertheless, our clever little
minds stitch up the blind spots into a nice neat continuum. If you do the
exercise, you have to spend some time for it to work right. That's because
the mind doesn't like to have its weaknesses exposed to itself. Especially
the biggies like literal, sheer blindness.
Phil
Phil Graham
pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html