Category: History

Language Games

Mark Davis6 Comments

Word GamesOn The Thinking Atheist, C.J. Werleman promotes the idea that atheists can’t be Republicans based on his new book. Why? Well, for C.J. it’s because the current Republican platform is not grounded in any kind of factual reality. Supply-side economics, Libertarianism, economic stimuli vs. inflation, Iraqi WMDs, Laffer curves, climate change denial—all are grease for the wheels of a fantastical alternative reality where macho small businessmen lift all boats with their steely gaze, the earth is forever resilient to our plunder, and simple truths trump obscurantist science. Watch out for the reality-based community!

Is politics essentially religion in that it depends on ideology not grounded in reality, spearheaded by ideologues who serve as priests for building policy frameworks?

Likely. But we don’t really seem to base our daily interactions on rationality either. 538 Science tells us that it has taken decades to arrive at the conclusion that vitamin supplements are probably of little use to those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world. Before that we latched onto indirect signaling about vitamin C, E, D, B12, and others to decide how to proceed. The thinking typically took on familiar patterns: someone heard or read that vitamin X is good for us/I’m skeptical/why not?/maybe there are negative side-effects/it’s expensive anyway/forget it. The language games are at all levels in promoting, doubting, processing, and reinforcing the microclaims for each option. We embrace signals about differences and nuances but it often takes many months and collections of those signals in order to make up our minds. And then we change them again.

Among the well educated, I’ve variously heard the wildest claims about the effectiveness of chiropractors, pseudoscientific remedies, the role of immunizations in autism (not due to preservatives in this instance; due to immune responses themselves), and how karma works in software development practice.… Read the rest

Hits and MITS

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I just came across the following scan that describes how an MITS Altair 8800B became my first personal computer, journeying from Albuquerque to Las Cruces, New Mexico and getting an EEPROM burner attached to a ribbon cable snaking out through the enameled steel case. The speech synthesizer predated stored digital samples, by the way, so it instead emulated phonemic mixtures generated by digital waveform filtering.

And that young chap on the left would later become my boss, three or four parts removed, at Microsoft. I still have that Altair, too, safely stored away.

MITS Altair Convention

Original PDF Scan:

MITS Computer Convention

 

 … Read the rest

The Vapors of Hell

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Since Plutonium has now been unearthed in Turkey–no, not the element, but the gates of the underworld where the Priests of Cybele got drunk on gases erupting from below the water table–it seems only appropriate to trace the historic, mythic, and semantic roots of the notion of Hell out from its roots in antiquity straight through to our modern representations.

We can draw a direct line from Tartarus to the concept of punishment and the afterlife that arose during the Hellenistic period and filtered into the Near East, and what better representation of the dangerous threats from deep beneath the earth than a cave that kills animals and makes people drunk on the fumes? Such a place must have captivated the minds of the ancients by providing a corporeal connection to the mythic dancing of the deities.

The great irony is that the Hierapolis and the Plutonium was bulldozed by Christians in the 4th to 6th century CE, thus destroying a touchstone of their own cosmology.… Read the rest

Hirsi Ali’s Social Evolution

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali reminds us of the depressingly anti-freedom recent history of Islam in her recent Newsweek article, Muslim Rage & The Last Gasp of Islamic Hate. For Hirsi Ali, despite fatwas on Rushdie, 9/11, and the murder of  her friend and collaborator, Theo von Gogh, a kernel of hope is nascent in the democracy movements that emerged from the Arab Spring: when people have to govern themselves they will, ultimately, turn towards freedom of expression, thought, and worship.

But is that hope warranted?

Is there any sense of inevitability to the liberal programme that emerged from industrialization, affluence, and education? Or is the “progress” of the West more contingent than that, built from happenstance due to the geographic separation of America from Germany and Japan in World War II combined with the widespread availability of raw materials on the American continent, leading to success in that war and the growth of American post-War power in an unbombed industrial landscape that, ironically, led in turn to the defeat of Soviet Communism, itself claiming an inevitability to the flow of history?

Azar Gat raised a parallel question in The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers (Foreign Affairs, 86 (4), pp. 59-69) when he asked whether the rise of “Authoritarian Capitalism” in the form of China and recent Russia constitutes a viable challenge to the claims of liberal democracy. If so, then the notion that there is any sense of inevitability evaporates like the suppositions of dialectical materialism.

The underlying assumptions are taken for granted among most Americans: (1) all people are the same; (2) all people want freedom; (3) authoritarianism is anti-freedom; (4) people will oppose authoritarianism. It’s a nice thought that has some resonance in, say, the history of the Eastern Block, where economic limitations combined with cronyism and foreign political control led to (4).… Read the rest

The Evolution of American Gods

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Taking a break from my countdown, Simon Critchley is back in the New York Times with his fascinating analysis of Mormonism and the varied doctrines concerning reincarnation and the eventual divinity of, well, at least men. Interestingly, reading The Book of Mormon doesn’t illuminate these topics–they exist largely as exegesis through specific lectures by Joseph Smith. As Critchley notes about Smith’s lecture, the character and nature of God is finite, is a member of the Host of Heaven (or a council per the lecture), and creation in Genesis is not creation per se, but is instead some kind of reorganization of an infinite and timeless universe.

Fascinatingly strange, and compounded in its strangeness by the assertion that:

The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is co-equal [co-eternal] with God himself.

It is an evolutionary assertion that suggests our ultimate being is a divine form, and that we have the capacity to achieve this divinity through action, through works, and through effort at being good. As Critchley concludes:

…I see Joseph Smith’s apostasy as strong poetry, a gloriously presumptive and delusional creation from the same climate as Whitman, if not enjoying quite the same air quality. Perhaps Mormonism is not so far from romanticism after all. To claim that it is simply Christian is to fail to grasp its theological, poetic and political audacity. It is much more than mere Christianity.

While I doubt that this analysis will help assuage the concerns of conservative Christians about Mitt Romney’s faith, it undoubtedly serves as a touchstone for that uniquely American principle of religious freedom, and the underlying assumption (on Constitution Day), that the choice of a leader should not be tied to their choice of romantic delusions.… Read the rest

Socialistic Roidrage

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Just when American politics appeared to be getting down to bare-fisted fighting we get a re-affirmation that political ideologies are largely religious from one of the papacy of modern conservatism, George Will, in his inane discovery of socialist tendencies in college football:

The collective activity of team sports came after a great collective exertion, the Civil War, and two great social changes, urbanization and industrialization.

…

Progressives saw football as training managers for the modern regulatory state. Ingrassia says that a Yale professor, the social Darwinist William Graham Sumner (who was Camp’s brother-in-law), produced one academic acolyte who thought the “English race” was establishing hegemony because it played the “sturdiest” sports.

Ummm, sure, collectivism is like sports activity and, hell, like war or industry, where people collectively work collectively together towards some outcome. It’s almost like government itself, as one astute reader noted concerning the US Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare.” Those damned leftists!

Now, we might claim that George Will, confused by ‘roidrage, is just scrambling for material in his strange communist witch hunt, but this has profound implications for reinterpreting American history. For instance, until the Italian Fascists resurrected the old Roman outstretched arm salute that was then picked up as “Heil Hitler” by the Nazis, the Pledge of Allegiance was saluted by school children throughout America in the same way:

And, let’s not forget that Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge, was a Christian Socialist advocating the redistribution of wealth for the greater good of the American Christian people.

Will is right about all this sports nonsense.… Read the rest

From Smith to Darwin

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The notion that all the contingencies of human history can be rendered down into law-like principles is the greatest reflection of the human desire for order and understanding. Adam Smith appears in that mirrored pool alongside Karl Marx and, in his original form, even Charles Darwin. That’s only the beginning: Freud, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel, and a host of others are reflected there in varying, and transitory clarity.

Adam Smith is a iconic case, as I discovered reading Adam Smith’s View of History: Consistent or Paradoxical? by James Alvey. The paradoxical component arises from a merger of a belief in the inevitability of commercial society and, at various points in Smith’s intellectual development, a cynicism about the probability of forward progress towards that goal. Ever behind the curtain, however, was the invisible hand represented by a kind of teleological divine presence moving history and economics forward.

The paper uncovers some of the idiosyncrasies of Smith’s economic history:

[T]he burghers felt secure enough to import ‘improved manufactures and expensive luxuries’. The lords now had something beside hospitality for which they could exchange the whole of their agricultural surplus. Previously they had to share, but ‘frivolous and useless’ things, such as ‘a pair of diamond [shoe] buckles’, and ‘trinkets and baubles’, could be consumed by the lords alone. The lords were fascinated with such finely crafted items and wanted to own and vainly display them. As the lords ‘eagerly purchased’ these luxury items they were forced to reduce the number of their dependents and eventually dismiss them entirely.

The lords ultimately have to trade off economic freedom of the artisans in exchange for more diamond shoe buckles. Odd, but perhaps reflective of the excesses of the wealthy in Smith’s era–something that needed explanation.… Read the rest

Cosmological Interregnum

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Zach, the main character in Signals and Noise, finds himself fascinated by cosmology because it is the only thing that takes him outside of everyday reality into a realm that is alien and mysterious. Biology is reconcilable to our personal lives, law is a linguistic game, computer science is second-hand to Zach, the complex mathematics of the titular “Signal” is discoverable in intent if not details, but cosmology asks questions that cross into a metaphysical realm. Unlike religious feeling, however, there is no requirement of faith and no direct application to human interactions. There is no ethics of cosmology and little human history.

Should we have expected this? Should we have expected a universe that has black holes or neutrinos? We currently believe that the universe is expanding and may expand forever into a cold, diffuse conclusion. Dark matter and dark energy have to be invoked to explain this and the clumping we observe in the universe. But, interestingly, tiny little particles called neutrinos may be a large portion of this dark matter. Neutrinos have tiny mass and behave somewhat like photons passing through translucent materials when they pass through matter, but they change forms during transit according to an interesting interaction with matter known as “flavor oscillations.”

While the Catholic Church uses cosmology to justify ex nihilo creation, there is almost nothing in modern cosmology that justifies or supports religious sentiments, whether Western or Eastern. Indeed, this is just plain weird shit that devolves out of mathematical results and then is confirmed or denied by experimental methods (with a bias towards the confirmed results).

Zach is more than justified. He is right in his fascination and his skepticism about merely human ideologies.… Read the rest

Thunder and Revelation

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Adam Gopnik’s exceptional review of Elaine Pagels’ new book on The Book of Revelations in The New Yorker brings the complexity of the early 1st Millenium into stark focus. Were the Pauline tracts aberrant and Revelations an attempt to turn early Christianity back from Gentile contamination?  Why was the book so controversial and the early Christian world filled with so many heresies? Arianism, Sethianism, Valentianism, and the list goes on and on…only to be resolved by political wrangling and ecumenical councils.

Noteworthy is Pagels’ inclusion of discussion of the Nag Hammadi poem, Thunder, Perfect Mind.  Gopnik points us to a Ridley Scott commercial for Prada that includes a reading of it:

Thunder Perfect Mind – a Prada Film starring Daria Werbowy from M G on Vimeo.

Also notable is that the model uses some cherry picking of the poem content.  “I am the whore and the holy one” probably has the wrong resonance for a Prada perfume.  From mystic revelation to luxury goods…as astonishing a journey as The Book of Revelations.… Read the rest

Etruscan Teleology

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I was, somewhat ironically, concocting salmon risotto with a drizzle of white wine while my wife read to me about Etruscan mythology from Wikipedia this evening.  From Seneca the Younger:

Whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the clouds collide so as to release lightning: for as they attribute all to deity, they are led to believe not that things have a meaning insofar as they occur, but rather that they occur because they must have a meaning.

Last year we had the opportunity to visit the National Etruscan Museum in Rome during the most unbearably tropical European summer in recent memory.

Seneca the Younger somewhat snidely detected a difference, driven at least partially by a feeling of cultural dominance, that teleological explanations are inferior to naturalistic ones, that one more entity (or a host of them) provides no additional value to the explanatory system.… Read the rest