Moraline's contribution to the answer was more significant than he realized. Because he took a phenomenological approach; Husserl would have been happy.
The natural attitude gives a blunt answer that makes impotent and meaningless man. The phenomenological attitude (of which I consider Moraline) liberates man.
There was a dominant class that arrived a long, long time ago. Whether they influenced or created man isn't clear. Hesiod says they were the great race--but he doesn't say they were the great race of men, as they weren't men, but Gods. And this leads one to recognize: the term 'god' means drastically different things.
You have the same story, at the same time, on other parts of Earth. You also have incredible and sudden advances in mathematics, language, 'government,' engineering, etc. Of course, all of this 3000 B.C--India, South America, China, Middle East, Ireland. Yes, the Irish. Once cave men, suddenly building landing strips 5000 years ago.
It then vanished and reappeared.'It,' what was 'it.' Why did Hesiod's voice, coming from the 'dark ages,' so dark that humans didn't even have crude oil lamps, much less language? Why did an illiterate refugee suddenly write epic poetry? Why was Homer a contemporary of Hesiod? What were these men writing about, how did these men learn to write when the advanced language and culture of the Greeks was decimated? Note that the Greek of Homer and Hesiod was new. Language itself had been dead for 2000 years. How did it somehow come back?
Perhaps what Moraline uncovers is the hidden transcript of the individual. The Inuit, for example. They either were unlucky to wander to such a cold and hellish place, or for them the independence was worth the cold. My take is that the Inuit were not idiotic, aimless wanderers. They got there and survived there because they did not want what they left. Scott speaks of the hill peoples of Asia, running from legibility.
Independent from what? It doesn't matter. Yes, they (the Inuit) are a community. But not dominated so easily by some force, perhaps what is called a force of legibility.
Yet to understand that the bully might have not been from Earth is something either new or ancient. Hesiod's account of the Gods agrees with the Irish, the Indians, the Hebrews, the Mayans, and Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Chinese. These are systemic tales, these are tales of sophisticated, organized violence. Being and Time suddenly is a clear account of the matter.
Who were the Gods? It depends on who you ask. Is your god your guiding spirit? Or is does your god strike you down with fire? Why is the aquifer of the Dead Sea radioactive?
The natural attitude may very well be dominant bc of legible language. Men speak legibly now. There is no poetic sensibility to the words they speak. Verily men speak a written, reasonable, english. The divinities were made legible by Augustine, Aquinas et al, who thought they were saving them when in fact they were killing them off. The naming of things and the structuring of stories is very different for non legible peoples. The difficulty in writing of the divine in english is that the language may no longer be suitable for it. Ludwig chose silence.
ReplyDeleteI am writing too cryptically. I am throwing out the possibility that language isn't human. I am then making the further distinction that there are two completely different things, both called "gods." The first is the great, personal and mystical experience. Humans paint and dance and hallucinate to these feelings. I argue that these really were never gods, no one ever called them gods, no one ever worshiped them. I think your discovery of the Inuit was an example of this interpretation of 'gods.'
ReplyDeleteThe second sense of 'gods' or 'god' has nothing whatsoever in common with a personal, mystical connection to the Earth and other humans. I believe--and I know I will be dismissed as a lunatic but in my old age I no longer care--the 'gods' that all cultures speak about were ancient astronauts. This was the whole attack on Earth. This was the birth of legibility, language, 'science,' all of it.
So, on the one hand, you have something of the earth and happy, on the other hand something not of the earth and unhappy. This is what you and Wittgenstein have been trying to figure out but the idea that ancient astronauts came and visited the earth--that this is obvious by reading the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew (among dozens of other ancient texts).
The Wall Street Journal has a good article on unsold big rigs at the dealerships. Are they a good deal these days?
The sentence had a break it in it:
Delete"This is what you and Wittgenstein have been trying to figure out but the idea that ancient astronauts came and visited the earth--that this is obvious by reading the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew (among dozens of other ancient texts)--weren't at the forefront of your windshield. Now that I have pointed this put I expect I have put to rest all questions of philosophy. It also, interestingly enough, validates your whole project to escape the west and live like a savage, but it does not validate your project of truck driving nor my project of accounting. This is sad, proof that once the aliens get inside you, you are fucked. Yu identified this as being "Western," which you can easily swap with "alien mutated."
"Yu" is not a reference to a Chinese scholar, but should have read "you."
DeleteBy the way, the 500 aphorisms I wrote post-alien will never be published while I am alive. I am taking the happy path of accounting and not mucking up the waters of civilization.
"Know when to walk away, know when to run."
Delete-Kenny Rogers
Perhaps not astronaughts but a people just as unworldly: pale faced men who arrived in boats from across the sea. The children of a furious and vengeful god.
DeleteIt is only the outlaws, fools, and refugees that leave their homelands. To leave a homeland is to leave behind one's gods, one's form of life. The white mans priviledging of travel and world and universe exploration is the priviledging of exile and homelessness. He has perfected a form of life, originally farming based but now technologically beyond farming, that allows him to go where he pleases. It is a godless and rootless form of life that can be transported anywhere. He now dreams of living on Mars and other planets. To be without a home and without gods he calls progress. It was a symptom of my illness that I ever traveled at all. I should never have longed to see the world. I should never have gone to Europe or to South America.
Delete"To be without a home and without gods he calls progress." A distinction MUST be made here, though. The gods you speak of are gods of the Earth, gods of one's place. They are the helping and hindering spirits. Man worked with these gods but did not bow to them. The old religions, with their gods, speak of conquering, awe-inspiring forces that dominated and later decimated man. Perhaps I'm off the reservation here, yet in the hippy town in which I reside, I'm OK. Scott raises animals on a small farm. He has a routine. So does Karl. Maybe a happy routine is the course of happiness.
DeleteI mean to distinguish a positive god from a negative god. Who were the gods?
DeleteYes to all this. I have been at work awhile now along exactly these lines.
DeleteA sovereign god demanding obediance to a list of otherworldly and eternal laws is perhaps just a form of divine king-making and divine statehood and governance. Perhaps it is a mistake to examine helpful and hindering spirits (which you have termed positive gods) alongside the negative gods of the bible, koran, etc. Maybe they have nothing at all to do with one another? But perhaps there are vestiges of the most ancient divinities present in even the Christian God. For much of church doctrine and ritual was influenced by pagan customs. I tend to side with Brody's argument that the discovery of farming was so monstrous as to have displaced all the ancient hunter and gatherer spirits.
DeleteThe line I draw is hindering and helping spirits versus the Gods.
DeleteYes, the pale faced med have some similarities, but I think there was something far more extreme that happened about 5000 years ago. And it happened in the South America that you explored. There are gods in the two senses I mention in South America--the personal, phenomenological gods--what your Inuit people call the "helping and hurting spirits," and then the great tales of intergallactic battle, destruction, war, and visitation, that you see in the Mayan and other ancient South American culture. These were not tales of what men--this was 5,000 years ago, and it happened all at the same time across the Earth.
ReplyDeleteNow, as to the idea of traveling around and the thirst and desire to explore, this all came from the disruption from the ancient astronauts. Or it could have come about from man's great run from Africa. You make the assumption that just white European men are the bad guys who travel and conquest. That is not true at all. Man has been wandering the planet and changing cultures and languages and creating new ones for thousands of years. Ancient Middle East, ancient China, ancient South America. None of this is new. The evidence shows he walked from Africa. He eventually did settle down in various places, and some very beautiful cultures did emerge and lasted for various periods of time. I believe this is the source of great nostalgia and longing in some western men. But such melancholy should be relished--these men should be happy about the destruction of the indigenous cultures because anthropologists have written worthy anthropology on the matter. They have been fully cataloged. All is now correct and explained. The problem of the gods has been resolved.
My work in accounting will help rid the world of confusion and unhappiness and bring order to those who disobey the sovereign. The work of truck drivers helps deliver useful goods and services to hard working families.
The illness that you speak of, the wanderlust, perhaps led the Inuit to where they ultimately arrived. Your wanderlust was caused by a desire not be dominated and enslaved, to not be part of an ever-omplicating system. Yet it may be true that a failed project is worse than a project never undertaken. One can imagine the pampas of the barren Argentina as you wait to activate Shower Power. Yet I believe that such tragic juxtapositions keep man alive and motivated. All explorers are badly behaving men. From the perspective of a well-behaved suburbanite, indeed your cycling thousands of miles in the wind was the epitome of misbehavior. But so too was the wandering of the Fuegians. Yes, they eventually settled, but they had to first arrive. Each time you condemn your exploration, remember that in order for the Fuegians to arrive, they had to travel to get there.
ReplyDeleteThe greatness that exists in the failed state is the same greatness that exists in the failed project.
ReplyDeleteSo much leisure time has taken me away from this, where there has been much progress in the understanding of greatness and silence.
ReplyDeleteLeisure, as freedom from the fiat, is the one measure of wealth in this form of life.
DeleteThere must be something more universal than the 'fiat,' because can't this whole problem of being tied to a system also occur under a gold standard? I myself continue to mention this fiat thing--perhaps gold, while still some sort of enslaving system, is not directly tied to one sovereign. Perhaps your overall point on the fiat it is that it requires a man's buying in to the system--and the same buying into can happen with gold. Surplus can then be seen a a simple concept of power or energy, no different than the concept of electricity or energy for a physicist. A grid, a controlled system, the ability to store something that motivates human, acting as a large structure or matrix. Fiat just so happens to be something can control a matrix, but it could also be gold. Yet gold would represent a decentralized surplus material. I am trying to do an eidectic reduction of 'money' and 'fiat,' but I have injured myself.
DeleteThe fiat at times takes the same role as 'surplus,' in Moralinistic philosopy, and at that point my contention has always been that it represents a limit of explanation because it points to a transcendental and mystical force. Unless surplus is something you can catch from a whore and cure with penicillin.
"El Surplus es una puta, nada mas, nada mas."
Delete"O Surplus é uma putinha, nada mais, nada mais."
These are the first words to Moraline's great work: The Whores of Surplus
or
The Puteria of Fiat
Both would be big hits in these troubled and volatile economic times. "Have you tried the warm beer of the local whore house?," he asked. "No in fact I have not," I responded, looking to my girlfriend.
DeleteThe book for the Human Side Press will be called the Puteria of Fiat, and I will ghost write this book under the name of Jessie Myner with his permission. Jessie Myner, you are not allowed to read this book before its publication bu you must accept responsibility for its contents. I am performing intense regression analysis on surplus, fiat, and leggings and will tie this warm and cold beer consumption.
DeleteLeisure is freedom from labor or freedom from fiat? The romanticized vision of the hunt (which I have) combines a laborious activity with something of joy. I wonder if leisure could then be defined as 'enjoyable activity.' Sexual coitus could also be defined as a laborious activity, yet many also identify this activity as a leisure time activity. For example, the Jamaican woman who served the jerk chicken belated the other day that she wished she could "sit on a beech, smoke a spliff, and do nothing all day long. I am tired of working. I have raised two boys all by myself. I am tired."
DeleteGold could be fiat too. But the fiat did not really have power over men until the population had grown so much that all farmable land was owned and the huntable animals exterminated. Then men were forced into work for the owners of capital and compensated with government manipulated fiat. There was no other way to survive.
DeleteDuring the so called Dark Ages gold shortages were rapant in Europe. The church at one time had more than 70% of Europes gold. Most of the working poor had never seen a piece of gold fiat. But then the plague arrived and wiped out a portion of the population. Suddenly there was gold fiat to go around. The poor held gold coins for the first time. There was farmable land for them too. I am trying to point out that population growth is essential to fiat. Populations continually growing is necessary to support banking and govt debt. Populations growing is essential to the 1% continuing to earn a greater return. Populations growing justifies govt expansion and surveillance.
The whole system emerges from farming surpluses that were dependent upon land ownership rights (protected by a govt) and expanding populations to work the farmland (a farmers sons or slaves or serfs). With all the worlds farmable land being maximized with the help of genetic engineering and Monsanto, the effort is now to expand the population through synthetic foods. The whole world will become as densely packed as Manhattan. Then they will populate the other planets, no doubt irritating those 5000 year old spacemen you have written about above.
Travel was a great and successful failure. My condemnation of it is only in the sense that it was the best thing I could have done under the circumstances. I would not have come to the conclusion of condemning it had i not done it.
ReplyDeleteAs you point out and i was not clear to state, non western white men of many forms of life, predating farming discoveries, have wandered from their homelands. It is my contention these men were exiles, lunatics, and refugees, not noble explorers in the mold of a Shackleton or Amundson. These first wanderers were admired by no one, perhaps not even by themselves. For they were suddenly without any gods and any form of life. Men had never before known such homelessness.
It took countless generations of men in these new uninhabited lands, to discover the hindering and helpful spirits, the rituals of the hunt, the migratory patterns of the animals, the edible plants, etc. It was an incredible multigenerational project that I contend no sane and healthy man would willingly undertake.
ReplyDeleteThe white explorers had it easier in that they brought a powerful form of life with them: agriculture and animal husbandry, as well as the ideas of slavery for the service of working the fields. Bc their god was an agricultural god, he came along too. The white explorer did not thus begin from nothing.
ReplyDelete