Introduction
I found it hard to put my finger on anything that Richard M. Weaver wrote that I actually disagreed with. Ideas Have Consequences is a wonderfully written and dense book, of which most every line could be an inspirational and thought-provoking aphorism to be printed at the top of a page-of-the-day of a Franklin Day Planner, for instance. What might be superficially dismissed as "flowery" or "purple prose" is in fact making language work hard to get his points across as succinctly and clearly as possible. He builds definitions and arguments, making frequent appeals to literature and philosophy throughout the ages, and he makes good on his initial promise to lay out solutions to the problems he has thoroughly elaborated.
I was intrigued by what he said about feminism, especially, but among many other things, such as the function of education. We could probably chase our tails all night about what he says about the nature of society and the individual, which made me think about his comments on the arts and on aesthetics, and on science might be a good focus for discussion.
I found myself unable to disagree, at least not strongly, with much of anything Weaver wrote, but red flags went up a bit at his insistence on the need to revive dualism as a route to repairing the ravages of utilitarian materialism. As I'll get to below, I've always thought of dualism as a kind of hobgoblin, incompatible with the 20th Century science and mathematics of Kurt Gödel, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and others, and of micro and evolutionary biology in general. Weaver seems to tend to lump evolutionary theory in with denial of transcendentals, as I mention below, and this stood out to me as emblematic of the potential issues I had with Weaver's arguments. I don't feel that 20th Century science is the baby out with which the materialistic bourgeoise woes outlined by Weaver should be thrown, but at the same time I feel we cannot not reconcile our views on science and technology with Weaver's worldview.
Art & Music
He comes down hard on modern art and music. He makes comments similar to what he says about other larger more abstract things, like decrying the rejection of transcendentals. The idea that "the naked truth" is more truthful, that there are no outlines in nature, sensuality without ironic distance.
He takes a poke at modern art, painting landscapes, photography, etc. He doesn't mention still life painting that I recall--perhaps he's okay with that--while landscape painting, and painting of haystacks at different times during the day is "industrial." I wonder how he'd feel about Generative AI, or even machine translation.
Science & Technology
Weaver writes about the atomic bomb, so he had at least some access to the scientific ideas that informed that project. He takes a shine to the Platonic idea of forms imperfectly realized. However, when I talk to molecular biologists or quantum physicists, and increasingly, cosmologists; these fields all look like rabbit holes or "turtles all the way down" where there are no rules, no perfect forms that we already fully understand and are just trying to fill in the details. Do we hope to find the rabbit, or the mind of G-d, at the bottom somewhere, or are we resigned that we'll never get there, and if so, does this represent something that cannot be shoehorned into Weaver's otherwise very appealing worldview.
Early 20th Century math and physics was characterized by unknowability and uncertainty, with Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Gödel, among many others. Weaver seems to agree with the idea that "the information from our senses is actually the least reliable source of information" but does that include scientific measurement? Is this what he means by transcendentals, or to be dismissed along with a lifetime misspent mapping the nervous system of the leech?
Language
Weaver says some interesting things about language. One thing he said that I found particularly intriguing is that the exercise of translation is one of the best ways not to be self-deluded on the subject of meaning. I can't say I disagree. Of course he gets into the equivalences the Bible makes between G-d and The Word, and how this is an important concept, and how both the Bible and science are very much about assigning proper names to things, as in G-d calling Adam, first thing, to his side to tell him the names of all of the plants and animals, and how that was their names thereinafter. Anyway, he says that the degradation of culture and society is linked to the degradation of language.
Again, what about things like machine translation? Is this another example of the machine telling human beings what to think? Human beings skipping the process of developing skills and applying them to process and leaping straight to an unself-examined and automatically blessed finished result?
The Stereopticon
Joseph Goebbels really went to town on these ideas, especially with his attention to the radio. He made it the law to listen to the radio, for one.
One thing that struck me is "laugh tracks" or "canned laughter" as a way of telling people when to laugh at shows, and how people respond to this more and more. Laughing, as well as crying and yawning, are all memetic responses (they may be induced by memetic interactions and are contagious) hence even en absentia people may be synched up memetically, icons downloaded, and so forth, and this has huge ramifications for the consolidation of power.
Also, "what is a newspaper?" I had some thoughts about the early development of this technology, for instance, that presses dashing off a quick page or two each day and making money was probably an economic motivation for putting out newspapers instead of books. Books were worked on over time, and there was a problem of setting up for a given folio or quarto, and one had to decide how big of an edition to make straight from the start, even though it might take months or even longer to complete the project, which meant no profits from the expensive printing press the whole while.
One could wonder if the whole culture of newspapers and journalism, and the printing up of handbills for ads, political or otherwise, derived from the need to get money out of one's expensive capital investment without the risk that a book, exacting and months in the making, with lots of up-front work and supplies outlays, would otherwise involve. This same economic culture, of course, exacerbates the cult of popular authors, or the fact that everybody wants a bible, and large organizations (such as churches) can pony up large sums for large quantities to printers, who would otherwise be taking a chance of making a run of books and then trying to get the money back by selling them.
So this might be a kind of "memetic accident" associated with the printing press as a technology, trying to replace an oral tradition of minstrels and speakers and such. I could go on and on about the odd memetic dynamics we've perhaps inherited from these past early decisions and vicissitudes. For example, how nowadays journalists could spend months on a story that is effectively printed once and then to a degree forgotten, e.g., Woodward and Berstein, the Boston Globe Catholic Child Molestation story, etc. Unlike books, which are collected, kept in libraries, referenced (which newspapers can be as well these days).
Rob Words on the printing press
No comments:
Post a Comment