New Sophists' Almanac

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I'm convinced there's something deep and slightly disturbing in today's Get Fuzzy....

Gord,

Here I am, still culling the blog for unanswered questions from which to make new posts. One in particular needs attention. At Reconciliation you ask,

I'll have more to say about this later, but I am curious to see what kind of room for reconciliation you see between these two movements? I get from your sense that science is a more reliable starting point, a better neutral ground, and a more sensible side to take, and sometimes, believe me, I would express this opinion too. But you also seem profoundly more realist than me, likelier to simply accept the state of affairs being that the two are separated and it's unlikely any great unification is going to happen any time soon. So then, what kind of rehabilitation or improvement do you see as possible? And what are the likely results of that?

Questions like these are the ones that make me look at the books in the library catalog, on my therapist's^* shelves, and even the unread ones on my own shelves, and despair of ever finding the time and will to read sufficiently even to approach the subject.

But that hasn't stopped me so far, so why balk now? As I see it, two big things separate (good) science from theory—literary or social or critical or postmodern—as understood in the liberal arts.

1. Repeatable experiments
2. Mathematical and logical languages for distilling observations to succinct laws concerning the behavior of definable (even if only statistically) objects

This is not the "fault" of postmodernism or of the various liberal arts fields: they are dealing with concepts like human motivation, literary meaning, social structures, and so on, objects that science has not yet to my knowledge been able to reduce to well-defined and unambiguous objects of study. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, neurology, and other -ologies are working on these problems; but they are sufficiently intractable, and sufficiently vulnerable to the effects of cultural and emotional bias, that their theories and postmodern theories are destined to overlap and come in to conflict.

But if this is the case, and if one also assumes that both postmodernism and science have something worthwhile to offer, then the conflict that arises from their overlapping fields of study ought to be a constructive one, right? It seems to me that PoMo and literary theory movements are obliged to amass large amounts of correlations in the hope that patterns of causation will emerge. But once you get a theory of causation—for instance, showing how and why writers in one era influenced the writers and culture and mindset of another—one's ability to prove it is about on a par with trying to prove a difficult court case. You can't run tests or experiments, any concepts of human or social nature you invoke to connects facts A and B will be arguable, and so on; so mostly you're left trying to argue why your theory is more plausible than another. This happens in science, too, but it seems that once a topic is raised, the physical sciences at least tend to rush with ever-increasing speed towards the kernel of an issue until it is very well defined, mathematically modeled, and so on. But for the liberal arts the crux of an issue tends to end up being some facet of human nature itself—hard to get a bead on without succumbing to an ideology. Which then feeds the next round of critical and literary theory.

To borrow a metaphor from astrophysics: there seems to be an event horizon around human phenomena beyond which liberal arts can't go without getting sucked into a black hole of impenetrable theory. We see this in existentialism and postmodernism when the concept of human nature is written off as a non-starter. Existence precedes essence, but that essence only emerges as a sum of one's actions; discourse trumps agency to the point of determining it. From a scientific perspective it's as if the existentialists and postmodernists decided that the thing which can't be observed using their preferred methods of phenomenology and textual analysis must not exist except as a footnote or a shrug of the shoulders. And it might be true that the concepts of self and agency that we acquire from our culture are myths and no more. Does that mean we're utterly free or utterly passive beings, however, or does it just mean that we don't yet understand ourselves?

Is there a place for the scientific method in such a context? I think the answer is yes and no. Yes, because even literary theory has to respect rules of evidence, deduction, and inference if it wants to be plausible, and it may very well point to a field of ideas subject to a more scientific treatment. Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained seems a fairly good example of this. His concept of inference systems offers a way to start connecting discourse to biology (I say this as a person who's only read 2/3 of the book, mind you). If the behavior of these posited systems can actually be measured and delimited by statistical means, double-blind studies, and so on, as he seems to be suggesting, then we can start building a model of the thing that processes the discourses and memes we're obliged as members of society to absorb.

No, because some of the subjects which PoMo and other kinds of theory address may never be measurable by purely analytic methods. Issues involving values and pure subjectivities (if these aren't also myths) and goals for the individual, society, & species may always require a degree of creative speculation that science isn't equipped to provide except to assist in the making of predictions. But I'm saying "may" a lot because I really have no idea—the answer will depend on how big an unobservable "black hole" exists between theory and neurology, I think. If any.

What postmodernism can offer science is a both more and less straightforward. The culture in which science is done and from which goals and methods are chosen will always beg analysis so that we can better know if we're doing what we're doing for the right reasons or even for the reasons we happen to think are motivating us at the time. Assumptions that go into the fashioning and execution of studies of human beings will always need to be questioned and understood.

But how well postmodernism can do this will depend on what kind of "-ism" postmodernism represents. It is a set of methods to be employed? Is it simply a freedom from certain classical and modernist assumptions that infused the ideas that preceded it? Is it a form of entrenched institutional conservatism (albeit a quasi-neo-Marxist multicultural one) whose chief purpose is to give tenured professors job security? I'm pretty sure that when most people hear the word "postmodern" the last is the thing that leaps to mind. I suspect that if postmodernist theorists want to contribute to science, then they are going to have to approach science with combination of ambition and humility that characterizes a young physicist or chemist: not just a desire to explain and succeed, but also a willingness to brutally abandon any theory that doesn't work, and a willingness to formulate theories as defeasible expressions, statements that are admissible to some kind of proof. Or failing proof (in questions of values, say) then at least analysis in terms that can be defined and understood and shown to be relevant to scientists' work. It will have to pass a "so what" test. Scientists and lay persons must formulate their so what tests in a fair and definable way in turn, however.

-----
^* Is mentioning one's therapist in a blog a sure sign of ghastly self-absorption? Even if it is...I think my therapist is a great guy: an ex-philosophy grad student (way into Heidegger) who decided that academia wasn't for him and switched to psychology on the theory that he would learn more and do more good working in the "real world." Grad students the world over who long for a sympathetic thesis adviser should weep in envy.

Gord,

Here I am, still culling the blog for unanswered questions from which to make new posts. One in particular needs attention. At Reconciliation you ask,

I'll have more to say about this later, but I am curious to see what kind of room for reconciliation you see between these two movements? I get from your sense that science is a more reliable starting point, a better neutral ground, and a more sensible side to take, and sometimes, believe me, I would express this opinion too. But you also seem profoundly more realist than me, likelier to simply accept the state of affairs being that the two are separated and it's unlikely any great unification is going to happen any time soon. So then, what kind of rehabilitation or improvement do you see as possible? And what are the likely results of that?

Questions like these are the ones that make me look at the books in the library catalog, on my therapist's^* shelves, and even the unread ones on my own shelves, and despair of ever finding the time and will to read sufficiently even to approach the subject.

But that hasn't stopped me so far, so why balk now? As I see it, two big things separate (good) science from theory—literary or social or critical or postmodern—as understood in the liberal arts.

1. Repeatable experiments
2. Mathematical and logical languages for distilling observations to succinct laws concerning the behavior of definable (even if only statistically) objects

This is not the "fault" of postmodernism or of the various liberal arts fields: they are dealing with concepts like human motivation, literary meaning, social structures, and so on, objects that science has not yet to my knowledge been able to reduce to well-defined and unambiguous objects of study. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, neurology, and other -ologies are working on these problems; but they are sufficiently intractable, and sufficiently vulnerable to the effects of cultural and emotional bias, that their theories and postmodern theories are destined to overlap and come in to conflict.

But if this is the case, and if one also assumes that both postmodernism and science have something worthwhile to offer, then the conflict that arises from their overlapping fields of study ought to be a constructive one, right? It seems to me that PoMo and literary theory movements are obliged to amass large amounts of correlations in the hope that patterns of causation will emerge. But once you get a theory of causation—for instance, showing how and why writers in one era influenced the writers and culture and mindset of another—one's ability to prove it is about on a par with trying to prove a difficult court case. You can't run tests or experiments, any concepts of human or social nature you invoke to connects facts A and B will be arguable, and so on; so mostly you're left trying to argue why your theory is more plausible than another. This happens in science, too, but it seems that once a topic is raised, the physical sciences at least tend to rush with ever-increasing speed towards the kernel of an issue until it is very well defined, mathematically modeled, and so on. But for the liberal arts the crux of an issue tends to end up being some facet of human nature itself—hard to get a bead on without succumbing to an ideology. Which then feeds the next round of critical and literary theory.

To borrow a metaphor from astrophysics: there seems to be an event horizon around human phenomena beyond which liberal arts can't go without getting sucked into a black hole of impenetrable theory. We see this in existentialism and postmodernism when the concept of human nature is written off as a non-starter. Existence precedes essence, but that essence only emerges as a sum of one's actions; discourse trumps agency to the point of determining it. From a scientific perspective it's as if the existentialists and postmodernists decided that the thing which can't be observed using their preferred methods of phenomenology and textual analysis must not exist except as a footnote or a shrug of the shoulders. And it might be true that the concepts of self and agency that we acquire from our culture are myths and no more. Does that mean we're utterly free or utterly passive beings, however, or does it just mean that we don't yet understand ourselves?

Is there a place for the scientific method in such a context? I think the answer is yes and no. Yes, because even literary theory has to respect rules of evidence, deduction, and inference if it wants to be plausible, and it may very well point to a field of ideas subject to a more scientific treatment. Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained seems a fairly good example of this. His concept of inference systems offers a way to start connecting discourse to biology (I say this as a person who's only read 2/3 of the book, mind you). If the behavior of these posited systems can actually be measured and delimited by statistical means, double-blind studies, and so on, as he seems to be suggesting, then we can start building a model of the thing that processes the discourses and memes we're obliged as members of society to absorb.

No, because some of the subjects which PoMo and other kinds of theory address may never be measurable by purely analytic methods. Issues involving values and pure subjectivities (if these aren't also myths) and goals for the individual, society, & species may always require a degree of creative speculation that science isn't equipped to provide except to assist in the making of predictions. But I'm saying "may" a lot because I really have no idea—the answer will depend on how big an unobservable "black hole" exists between theory and neurology, I think. If any.

What postmodernism can offer science is a both more and less straightforward. The culture in which science is done and from which goals and methods are chosen will always beg analysis so that we can better know if we're doing what we're doing for the right reasons or even for the reasons we happen to think are motivating us at the time. Assumptions that go into the fashioning and execution of studies of human beings will always need to be questioned and understood.

But how well postmodernism can do this will depend on what kind of "-ism" postmodernism represents. It is a set of methods to be employed? Is it simply a freedom from certain classical and modernist assumptions that infused the ideas that preceded it? Is it a form of entrenched institutional conservatism (albeit a quasi-neo-Marxist multicultural one) whose chief purpose is to give tenured professors job security? I'm pretty sure that when most people hear the word "postmodern" the last is the thing that leaps to mind. I suspect that if postmodernist theorists want to contribute to science, then they are going to have to approach science with combination of ambition and humility that characterizes a young physicist or chemist: not just a desire to explain and succeed, but also a willingness to brutally abandon any theory that doesn't work, and a willingness to formulate theories as defeasible expressions, statements that are admissible to some kind of proof. Or failing proof (in questions of values, say) then at least analysis in terms that can be defined and understood and shown to be relevant to scientists' work. It will have to pass a "so what" test. Scientists and lay persons must formulate their so what tests in a fair and definable way in turn, however.

-----
^* Is mentioning one's therapist in a blog a sure sign of ghastly self-absorption? Even if it is...I think my therapist is a great guy: an ex-philosophy grad student (way into Heidegger) who decided that academia wasn't for him and switched to psychology on the theory that he would learn more and do more good working in the "real world." Grad students the world over who long for a sympathetic thesis adviser should weep in envy.

Remember the 2blowhards discussion of Postmodernism for Beginners? Curiosity drove me to see if the discussion had continued in the comments since the last time I had looked. It has, and I particularly like a comment left by one Justin Blank.

Dear Gord,

Something you said a while ago...

We were chatting earlier about whether there is or ought to be some etiquette restricting religious people from telling nonreligious people that they prayed for them. For the atheist, being prayed for can come across as profoundly presumptuous, or flattering, or just plain annoying. For the religious, it can be an act of compassion or (as I am sure C.S. Lewis would be quick to remind us) a prideful act as well, especially when announced to the object of one's prayers.

...has been tickling a lobe of my brain. I finally figured out why.

From Cyrano de Bergerac, Act Five, by Edmond Rostand (Brian Hooker, trans.):

Cyrano.  Why, now I think of it, that is so—
You, bursting with holiness,
and yet you never preach! Astonishing
I call it...

Ah, now I'll astonish you—
I'm going to let you—
—let you pray for me
To-night, at vespers!

Roxanne.  Aha!

Cyrano.  Look at her—
Absolutely struck dumb!

Sister Marthe (Gently).  I did not wait
For you to say I might.

Is the skeptic and freethinker cowed at the last by his impending death, or is he simply seizing a last opportunity to make a gallant, gracious, and theatrical gesture? I fell in love with Jose Ferrer's 1950 movie adaptation of the play and have an English edition of one of de Bergerac's books that I've never managed to finish. The literary persona that Nietzsche creates for himself often reminds me of Rostand's Cyrano.

Gord!

I'm back from the convention and the subsequent week (including the weekend) of frenzied preparation to release the product upgrade we promised everyone at convention. Now I can take time to blog. I just read about your flu...my sympathies! What an unpleasant way to spend one's time.

I love the bit about the stone meditation toilet. In the well-plumbed western world, we take it for granted that the toilet-seat is an excellent place to ponder life's eternal verities. But there are lots of places in the world where sitting down comfortably is not the norm for doing one's business, so I can imagine that toilet-meditation would seem surprising in such a context. Especially if the construction standards aren't up to code (i.e., if you live in a grass house, don't stone thrones). I know that lots of places in Japan, especially rural areas, still use the "hole in the floor" method of plumbing. Good for practicing your Sumo stance; not so good for clearing the mind. (I have been told, however, that wearing heels actually makes this task a little easier.)

I wonder if Buddhist monks have ever been frustrated by the sense that they'd be able to achieve enlightenment if only they could sit a little longer, a little longer...damn! Gotta go to the bathroom. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I have a lot of catching up to do, so let's get to it...

  Postmodernist Moral Judgments

I agree that we can't dismiss a philosophy or religion simply because its human proponents fail to live up to its ideals. The tendency to pull moral judgments out of our backsides is certainly a common human trait, and the postmodernist is no more to be faulted for it than the preacher or politician. However I think there's a difference between a postmodernist riding a moralistic high-horse and religious leader who does so. It seems to me that in the latter case the religious leader usually doing something consistent with his basic worldview, no matter whether I agree with him or not. The worldview itself may be riddled with contradictions, the leader may be a base hypocrite, but at least it follows from the idea of "God as universal legislator of values" that one can make absolute moral assertions.

The postmodernist needs to be a little more careful, I think. He needs to predicate his judgments explicitly on the moral premises he intends to follow. It's not enough to say something like, "Bush is wrong to invade Iraq because it's a neocolonialist act." Instead, the postmodernist needs to say something like, "If your goals are the preservation of human life, the fostering of international peace, etc., then such and such actions in Iraq are contrary to these goals in principle and in fact for these specific reasons." If he doesn't, then he's in the position of saying, "There are no universal moral values, but by they way...if you do X you're wrong." If you're going to criticize, you have to be able to explain why you're right and the other guy is wrong; but for the postmodernist as postmodernist there is no "why" except the influence of some discourse or text which is neither good nor bad in itself, right? The preacher, by contrast, is in the position of saying, "I believe in universal moral values, and here's one of 'em." He may not be very credible either, but at least his conclusion doesn't contradict on its face the premise of his profession.

Also, if we're going to talk about a postmodernist "school," then is it valid to say that the "school" is characterized by a tendency to make sweeping moral pronouncements that seem not to follow from the movements' premises? Or is that simply political correctness at work in academia, and we shouldn't hold postmodernism at fault for it? Or should we, but only in a vague and not very useful sense? Again, the so-what problem rears its head: if you're going to criticize an action or a belief, one should be prepared to offer an alternative. If you want nonacademics to take you seriously, anyway.

Which is not to say one should refrain from deconstructing or analyzing beliefs and actions; only, that one should realize that moral criticism only has content in the context of some set of beliefs or goals. One can do the former without having any particular moral scheme or goal in mind, but offering such analysis as the equivalent of meaningful ethical criticism is rather useless, it seems to me. Such analysis might be a source of superb cultural insight, but by its very nature it would be the kind of insight that could be used towards diverse ends

I'm thinking I should stop worrying about postmodernism as a school and instead think about this writer and that idea. Unless I want to reform the academy, that is.

  Nietzsche

Thanks for posting that bit about Nietzsche's sister. I knew the story, but the suggestion in the article that Nietzsche might have been autistic would seem to explain an awful lot about his temperament. For me Nietzsche's a fascinating combination of intellectual beacon in the night and psychological train wreck; something from which the eyes just can't seem to disengage. What's especially fascinating is that he knows he is something of a train wreck; he knows that his own philosophy is as influenced by personal factors as the ideologies he seeks to discredit; and it seems to me that his version of the "will to truth" is an effort to make his struggle transparent without falsely simplifying it. That's why there's Zarathustra always prowling around the margins of his other books. I don't read Nietzsche as a prescriptive philosopher so much as an object of study: here's a guy who, in a sense, heard the word "evolution" and immediately leapt to the broadest implications of the concept for the human species, at a time when everyone else was trying to minimize the shock introduced by the concept.

  Secret Agency, Man

'Way down yonder you asked, "Does at least my assertion make sense that there's not necessarily a value judgment against agency involved in the Foucauldian worldview?" To which I am happy to answer, Yes. Explaining how things work doesn't necessarily constitute a value judgment, nor does deconstructing the idiosyncratic myths of agency that various cultures hold dear.

But it seems to me that if we're going to look at agency in terms of "...a system that is delimited by a huge and distributed power process that is comprised of competing, cooperating, clashing, and fusing discourses," then you have to admit the study of what goes on inside heads and not just between them. If it's all in the discourse, then how did human society ever get from one discourse to another? To explain how things change without accounting for individual agency is to say that new ideas appear out of nowhere, I suspect.

Mutations in genes are caused by known physical processes, cosmic rays and DNA transcription errors and so on, but what causes mutations in memes? Is it just the random degradation of information as it is passed from one person to another until a new and successful meme is accidentally born? Even if it is, what causes the degradation and why? Earwax? Individual will to power, interpreting and distorting everything received? But according to fixed rules, or is something less predictable going on?

Reading what you've written about postmodernism in general and Foucault in particular, I get the feeling that the big project afoot is something akin to Asimov's psychohistory, but based on literary theory rather than statistics. (Maybe statistics would come later, after the theory produces something for the statistics to be about.)

I really like your statement that,

I also think I could add a fourth [reason to be interested in postmodern analysis]: desire to be as self-reflexive as possible. One wishes to understand why one is fighting in the way one is, and how one's assumptions came into place; one wishes to avoid the kinds of unexamined assertions of truth and reality that one sees all over the place.

But of course this makes me think of Buddhist meditation. And thinking of Buddhism makes me think that Buddhism and postmodernism have similar problems when it comes to the question of human agency.

Buddhism posits karma, laws of cause and effect that govern human behavior and perception even down to the granularity of emotions and thoughts, but seems to have a hard time explaining how a person might choose to turn away from material things and devote himself to sitting. Postmodernism seems to suggest complex laws of cause and effect governing the way discourse shapes perception and belief which in turn shapes discourse. Individual agency is dissolved in a labyrinth of language and forces.

But then, if you meditate or do therapy, you discover that it's possible to learn to perceive forces and language at play in your consciousness that have been influencing your feelings and behavior without you quite realizing it; and after you perceive the forces you can act on them in some way. This suggests that the scope of one's agency is defined first by one's range of perceptions of outer and inward phenomena. Buddhism, postmodernism, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology all suggest, however, that what we take to be inward can be treated as "outward"—that is, as objects of study that are not me. Those thoughts and feelings that pass through my mind during meditation don't define me; they just adhere to an ego-concept that is a false form of self-identification. The issues I discover in therapy can be released. Postmodernism can help me understand where some of these ideas came from and why they seem "natural" when in fact they are anything but. Cognitive science and evolutionary biology can perhaps explain why some ideas and inferences and habits arise very quickly and easily while others are hard to grasp.

About all that's left for agency is that sense of decision-making in the moment of deciding, I guess. But is there anything wrong with that? What of the romantic idea of an authentic self, when there is no self as such? One focuses instead on authenticity, I suppose, the quality of always striving for the true perception which then (if we're lucky) will guide an "authentic" action.

Maybe. I'm getting sleepy and I'm rambling. Are there any particular questions you want me to answer that I've failed to get to in the last month? I suspect there are several from past posts that I'm overlooking...

Again, I'm glad you're feeling better. And I agree with you and Adam.

Ciao,

Marvin

Marvin!

The genius of spent fever washed over my mind... I finally well-and-truly awoke this morning with the worst of my fever behind me (though when I eat anything even a little spicy, as I've just discovered, I reactly very strongly), and something had come into my mind.

You stated in an earlier post that you think

people do believe in magic bathrooms, but for such a belief to take off it needs a more well-established religious background tom give it oomph. Like the water of Lourdes or the healing properties of kissing the image of Jesus that appeared in a tortilla. A bathroom that's magic for no reason at all is a bad meme. A bathroom that's magic because the Pope once shat there is, on the other hand, a perfectly acceptable meme for many, I think.

I've never heard of an example of the latter, but the former makes sense... though, it usually requires the sacralization of the site by an agent, does it not?

I remembered an example I heard about in Korea. There is a temple one of my students told me about, where there is a stone toilet. People go to this temple to sit in a big room upon the toilet and meditate. It is a meditation toilet. Unlike some temples I've heard of, which were on ground sanctified by one or another sacred being (such as the one near which I lived, Mireuk Mountain Temple, which was blessed by the Mireuksamjong: I know the sam means 3, and that it means there were three beings, but I don't know if they were three angels (bodhisattvas, gods) or three buddhas); this place seems to be the place for toilet meditation because toilet meditation is a good idea, and they built it there. (At least, I can't seem to find anything indicating any other reason.)

Good afternoon,

I'll tell you what those terms meant, and then explain what I found interesting in my impromptu experiment.

aegae - You assume a lot, yes. It's actually just the formal address used in a letter, just as we say (or, rather, write), "Dear Marvin" in English. It's the polite form, while there is a less polite form used in speech (hantae). It's also used to describe something being said or given to a person.

Kkaddugi - Mafioso was the correct guess. Policeman and politician may or may not be the same thing depending on where in Korea you live.

shibal saeki - While you didn't know what it meant, you know it gave offense. It means fucking baby, by the way. (I've also heard someone claim it means "fuck baby", which supposedly implies one's mom conceived one while inelegantly, perhaps wantonly, fucking).

joji - male genitalia (I corrected myself in my explanation, ever so long ago). Which in context makes more sense.

hyeongnim - "some kind of honorific" is correct. It means Elder Brother.

Moshiseumnida - this is a courtesy; it means "You are handsome!" There is no implied insult here.

bballi-bballi - is indeed an idiomatic phrase equivalent to "posthaste" or "lickety-split"

What I found interesting was how, in large measure, given the context, you did very well guessing the meanings of the words. It surprised me not just how well you did (for I think that the context was a great help) but also how very close you were in many cases to the actual meanings. You could tell that bballi-bballi was an idiom (many Korean idioms use doubles), and when you were wrong about joji it was because you were remembering part of my own explanation elsewhere, instead of guessing what was likelier from the context. (It's probably normal worldwide to insult a man abouthis penis size, but rarely would a man insult another man about his vagina size.)

Anyway, I'm too hepped up on fever right now to go further into it, but I have an idea about a quiz I'm going to create online to test linguistic inference, I think. We'll see. Maybe when the fever passes I'll think it was a silly idea.

---

PS Why fasting? I hadn't eaten in about 24 hours when I wrote that post. And later paid the price for letting my strength get down, it seems, when this flu hijacked my body.

This is probably old news to you, but I found it interesting: an article on Nietzsche and his sister.

I just spent most of the last 36 hours sleeping through a horrible fever/chills episode. My head is clearer but also hurts, and I can only move very slowly. Hmmm. I wish the church people across the road would transpose this song they're singing down a few steps... when people can't hit a note, they can't hit it. They consistently sing the note a half-step flat, and it's ugly! The whole neighborhood has to hear these damn sour notes every week. It's obnoxious. Not very loving to their neighbors, if you ask me.

Marvin,

Are you still at the convention? I am at my office right now. I've started swimming, and I've been having a few things going on that have kept me busy, but I don't want to get into them now. Anyway, I am ruminating your questions. One of them I'd answer this way...

We must be very careful to judge the philosophy on the grounds of its own consistency. We can't dismiss Christian morality on the grounds that Catholics used to use it to justify slavery or that the rigid pursuit of one reading's injunctions caused a lot of suffering in Europe (and perhaps worldwide). However, we can reject certain uses and readings of it.

I agree that the elements in the postmodernist school who take it upon themselves to make moral judgments have some serious questions to answer. I'm not totally convinced that one cannot fuse postmodernist investigation with a form of moral philosophy, and perhaps the provisionality (and lack of absolutism that it necessitates) would make for a more sophisticated and workable morality than reflects real human capacities. Still, I think when profs get on their postmodernist high-horse, they're only as bad as religious, scientistic, or other people who get onto the high horse and dictate truth about things beyond the range of their knowledge or understanding. It's just embarrassing.

But I think the postmodernists you're talking about are not worse or better than religious leaders pulling the truth out of their backsides, or others doing the same. It's a pretty human tendency.

I'm thinking about how much within the movement's philosophy itself is given to working against the formulation of this sort of postmodernism. This is something I shall have to chew on for a while. (I will say the question has come up a few times—in my mind anyway—in a discussion I have had off and on with my friend Myoung Jae, who's writing about the Death of the Author these days. How much Postmodernist academia may have severed itself from the world and from any ability it once had to affect or matter in that world seems to me to have tremendous significance for academia in general, especially given the alternative, which seems to me to be the scientific, and essentially (because funding-dependent) pro-business (and subservient to business) model of morality and priority.

I'll think about this for a while. More on the other post later!
Fondly,
Gord

Good morning,

It's the calm of Sunday morning in the exhibit hall, the calm that precedes the torpor of attendees dragging themselves in after a Saturday night of eating and drinking too much downtown. I'm going to try to respond to your experiment, Gord...

aegae - I'm going to guess that this is a kind of affectionate diminutive, like "little brother." Or it could be a more macho variant on the theme, something that drinking buddies or comrades might use to refer to each other. Akin to "dude," maybe. (Assuming a lot, ain't I? vbg)

Kkaddugi - Mafioso is my first guess; maybe politician or policeman

shibal saeki - I have no idea. There are so many possible ways of giving offense, and the context for this depends on the definition of the former.

joji - I think you've explained this one before to me: female genitalia

hyeongnim - Some kind of honorific that will seem flattering at first but which, in combination with ...

Moshiseumnida - a greeting of otherwise considerable courtesy, will turn out to be an insult. Hence ...

bballi-bballi - an idiomatic phrase equivalent to "posthaste" or "lickety-split"

On other topics, I hope I'm coming somewhere near making my point clearly with respect to postmodernism below. I want to draw a categorical distinction between deconstructing moral beliefs and making moral judgements. It seems to me that a lot of folks in the PoMo community do the former and, if the conclusion fits nicely into a pleasing presupposition about ethics or political correctness, automatically assume they've also achieved the latter. I think this is not the case. Once you reach the point of deconstructing morality as though it were just another idea-set, then you're intellectually somewhat obliged -- if you feel the need to be consistent (a case in point for this example) -- to make your moral judgements in a conditional form, i.e., "If you believe in X values and Y goals, than Z means are inappropriate because they clash with X and Y in certain ways."

Marvin

Hi Gord!

All is well, but the last week has been a very busy one. Preparing for the annual convention hosted by my employer, doing new product testing and writing user documentation, etc. I haven't had the mental energy to think deep thoughts. (Not that this stopped my from buying Jedi Academy, the latest Star Wars game devoted to achieving enlightenment via mass-murder, mind you...total lightsaber-whore that I am.) I am not offended, but in fact have been devoting many process cycles of my subconscious to the problems you presented in your last post.

I think one point of clarification on my part might be in order, however. I'm not poo-poo'ing postmodernism on the basis that it fails to provide a grounds for hope or ethics or agency along the model of an atomistic soul or whatever. As an enthusiatic fan of Nietzsche, I haven't much business criticizing postmodernism on those grounds. My so-whats are directed towards a particular facet of the postmodernist school—and perhaps it is only that aspect which one tends to see in the American media—that presents itself as qualified to deliver moral verdicts out of a discipline for which moral concepts of right and wrong have no special or universal priority.

Foucault may indeed say "grow your own," which I take to mean, "figure out your own moral stance." But today's academia is quite happy to use its PoMo lingo to assert its moral authority on a wide variety of topics. And of course postmodernists have every right to their opinions. But I'm not convinced that postmodernism as such provides grounds for assuming such moral authority. In other words, a reductionist view of how moral opinions originate and disperse through a society doesn't necessarily provide support for any particular moral point of view. It might provide the conceptual means for connecting a moral point of view to a situation and working towards a particular outcome, but that's not the same as defining a desirable outcome or ethically legitimate means.

So it makes sense to me to imagine a postmodern theory that would help Dr. King understand his desires, goals, and the context in which he must strive to meet them; but I have trouble imagining a PoMo theory that would be able to tell Dr. King whether or not he ought to proceed. But that doesn't stop PoMo academia from doing just that sort of thing.

Marvin

PS - I should note that I'm in an exhibit hall in Dallas, taking a break from my booth at the Apple kiosk, where they kindly provide iMacs for people to use for checking e-mail, news, and so on. I must go back to work soon, alas...

Marbinaegae,

Just checking that you weren't somehow unfortunate enough to piss off Cheong's cousin the Korean Kkaddugi. If you were, don't call him a shibal saeki. That would be a very bad idea. And don't talk about George Bush, he'll think you're implying he is less than gifted in terms of the size of his joji.

You may wish you call him "hyeongnim" and declare, "Moshiseumnida!" whenever you see him. While he is gazing in a mirror happily, you should get out of there, bballi-bballi!


***
This is not just a silly post, but also an off-the cuff experiment of sorts, a test of the idea that human inferential systems are as powerful as Boyer and Pinker imply. With the given context, what do you infer the italicized parts of the above post mean? (By the way, all of those phrases are in grammatically correct, but possibly badly-anglicized, Korean)

I have a second text I'd like to perform, but I won't do it now. I'll wait to see the results of this one first. I may even created a nice poll to test it. It could be interesting to get a wider sample of responses. Hmmm.

I also am writing just to make sure that the blog's still taking posts, and to make sure I've not tossed out something offensive on the blog in the mad frenzy of posting. I remember something about calling "dimwitted" some claim you didn't make, but I think you knew I didn't mean your question was dimwitted.

Hope all's well.
Gord

Marvin,

Nope, the problem with the first screenful thing was, as I later suspected, linked to bad code in the tag for the Invisible Pink Unicorn image. Fixed now and behaving well. And today I also finished a MAJOR renovation over at my site. Looks quite different. The technical stuff needs some changing, of course, but the look is much improved and it loads a lot more easily with the thumbnails I created for the scripted image slideshow and the new slideshow script itself (which also looks a lot nicer). Anyway...

Back to the discussion of Postmodernism... I reply to you, another: So what?

Wait, let me backtrack. It took me a bit of thinking, to no avail, to try and really understand why you felt that the Foucauldian understanding of the world is so problematic. But your recent post makes it clear: it's because for you the notion that all human action is bounded and delimited by discourse seems to suggest futility, meaninglessness.

I think that you're right, of course, in saying that understanding it as such is a big problem. If people use postmodernist notions of agency and the way agency is shaped to stifle active work to better society (however subjectively that "betterment" can be and is understood), it's a rotten thing.

But I see nothing implicit in understanding that our modes of thinking and acting (and reacting) are primarily shaped, delimited, and to a large degree even determined by our social situation. For example: in ancient Greece, would-be philosophes like you and I would be expected to have young boyfriends of a sort with whom we engaged in a very special relationship quite unlike modern gay relationships... and yet in our society, we're not. And I would suggest that if we'd been born in a society that sanctioned and expected us to have multiple wives, we would at the least probably desire it, and if it were affordable to us we'd probably have them. Similarly, if we were born into societies where younger males were made into men by rites of passage that to us seem brutal and horrifying, we'd probably be a hell of a lot more comfortable with the idea. Or, if we were Koreans, living with our parents for decades after the age of 20 wouldn't seem odd to us.

And yet, we inexorably, irresistably, accord with a great deal of the normative assumptions of our society. And the fact of the matter is that so much of what we think is neutrally right or wrong or is "just the way it is" is that way because of a number of complexly interacting idea-systems in conflict and cooperation and interaction. And that distributes power in specific ways.

I think there is a role for agency in Foucault's worldview, and that the key to it is implicit in the fact that he wrote all the texts that he did. What did he write? He wrote failing, crippled (in his own opinion, according to the introductory sections of The Archeology of Knowledge) analyses of this fabled "way things are". He thought about it a lot and tried to understand it and while acting within it (for certainly his own work is driven by the very Will to Truth that he discusses), he seeks to understand the system as best he can from within.

That's not to say I think he's the key, the way, the truth, and the light. I just think that he was well aware that all attempts to change the system are not things that are fully bound by agency... that the agencies that act upon the system are also, before they ever act, shaped by and acted upon by the system of discourses and the process of power.

What I am suggesting is that for Foucault, the normative and the cause-and-effect analyses by which you tell good power-processes and bad ones make no sense universally. People come up with them on their own, based on their experiences, and no matter what you demand of others, we're all living within these subjectivities that all contribute to a larger process. It's as power is what happens at the friction point where distributed discontinuous subjectivities meet.

Given that, I suppose Foucault would advise you not to ask him for his sense of what makes this or that segment of a given discourse good or bad; he might likely tell you the ideas good and bad are subjective, not as a way of dissuading you of thinking in these terms, but to remind you that asking him for such criteria is simply requesting his version of the discourse so that it may act upon you. He may tell you, "Go grow your own, young man."

I want to note I don't think your question is stupid, and I think Foucault might not think so either. But that it makes no sense given the larger governing forces of discourse that Foucault outlines is, as you say, to ask for something "outside the purview of the discipline."

I see now why you write the following:

And yet, you've said that you'd expect postmodernism as a school of thought to react to attempts to reform or improve the "situation" (by which I read the social status quo or some part thereof) by arguing that such attempts are likely to be "simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place." A foolish and naive waste of time, in other words.

And yet, I don't think refraining is what is called for. I think highly critical self-interrogation analyses of one's goals, motivations, and notions of good, bad, improvement, and what exactly the status quo is, are in order. But I don't think, except for the way that lazy tenured professors and their ilk use it, that this kind of conceited attitude is something implicit in postmodern theory. I do think there are other dangers inherent in postmodernist thought, such as the ones I mentioned elsewhere. But I don't think this is necessarily (or rightfully) natural to the thinking of this theoretical movement, the political economies of academia aside. (And that is a huge aside that I'm even considering might deserve a whole book someday.)

For what it's worth, I think Foucault would probably answer to an activist such as Dr. King that postmodernist thinking doesn't so much endanger his enterprise as an agent delimited and largely determined by the system he inhabits, but rather that being this kind of agent (as we all are) interestingly determines how one resists and changes the status quo, and that this being true, close scrutiny of one's goals, ideals, desires, and assumptions is warranted.

What I am suggesting is that there may not necessarily be a value judgment in saying that all action occurs within a system that is delimited by a huge and distributed power process that is comprised of competing, cooperating, clashing, and fusing discourses.

The grounds for looking at them are therefore not simply to discredit any and all action, but simply to understand how things change the way they do. Why do they change slowly so often? Why do notions form and take hold as they do? How do so many subjectivities give rise to a falsely objective-appearing general sense of the world in a given society? I don't know that there is any implicit objection in the postmodernist conception of how agency is acted upon by forces in the power process.

I think that of the reasons for interest that you list, curiosity is the best one. I also think I could add a fourth one: desire to be as self-reflexive as possible. One wishes to understand why one is fighting in the way one is, and how one's assumptions came into place; one wishes to avoid the kinds of unexamined assertions of truth and reality that one sees all over the place. And I think, when one looks at movements like the current "Anti-Globalization" movement, there is a lot need for this sort of thing.

The only thing I wish is that more postmodernists would apply the same critical processes on their own assumptions. There'd be a lot fewer dumbass professors in the world if they did. But, worldview-complacency is the plague of academia, and the very infection which Foucault's work seems to me designed to attack.

But I'm trying to tie this up before class starts and I have a feeling I'm talking out my bottom now. Does at least my assertion make sense that there's not necessarily a value judgment against agency involved in the Foucauldian worldview?

Gord!

This one's going to be kind of short, so I didn't think it deserved a full-blown "II." While I've been spending the weekend trying to get my computer to work (I think I finally have things going again, hence this post), I see you've been very busy writing and redecorating. Sweet! I too have run into the "first screenful" problem, but I think it might just be lag from Blogspot's database or something. Usually if I look away for a minute, then look back, the whole page mysteriously appears. Maybe it's just taking a moment to load?

I think I can afford to be brief with this one because you've done me the convenience of asking a very specific question with respect to number 2 of "Postmodern Prelude" below.

Not that the question of, "Why should I care?" is as addle-brained as my literary example above... it's not. But the idea of caring on grounds that something is a (normatively, or absolutely) good or bad process, well, perhaps it may well be. I'm not sure. Can you not find other grounds for caring about a particular power-process, which doesn't rely on an appeal to ostensible universals?

Now, as you my recall, my original question was in response to the following statement of yours in an earlier post:

I know however that postmodernism as a philosophical school would be profoundly skeptical with regards to anything presented (even implicitly, as I suggested Foucault might have been doing in his work), and would probably argue (with somewhat good historical support) that most attempts as improving a situation actually tend to simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place.

To which I replied, "So what? Provide me with criteria for distinguishing a good power process from a bad power process, both normatively and in terms of cause-and-effect, and the postmodernists might then actually be saying something."

In my opinion, this still isn't a stupid question at all, or an irrelevant one. Here's why.

As you've described it, "power process" is a concept designed to help us look at the forces that shape human society, history, beliefs...human everything, really...in an impersonal, reductionist sort of way. To ask whether a power process is good or bad is like asking if the quadratic formula is good or bad in a moral sense: the question is outside the purview of the discipline.

And yet, you've said that you'd expect postmodernism as a school of thought to react to attempts to reform or improve the "situation" (by which I read the social status quo or some part thereof) by arguing that such attempts are likely to be "simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place." A foolish and naive waste of time, in other words. The implication is that one should refrain from doing a given thing because as an action it must inevitably arise in some greater or lesser degree—probably greater—from the complex interweaving of forces that brought the unwelcome situation to be in the first place. Which raises a big question: whence the "ought?"

Our hypothetical postmodernist is issuing a value judgment. But based on what? Postmodernism doesn't yield fodder for value judgments, rather it yields fodder for descriptions about how those judgments by and large are made. The postmodernist objection amounts to nothing more than, "Your decisions can't help but be subject to the forces at play in the greater social milieu! Dr. King must inevitably rely on the same Bible that was used to justify slavery in the first place!" To which Dr. King will reply, "So what? If I can turn these forces and discourses to my advantage, why not use them? I'm not proud."

What are the grounds for the postmodernist caring about how and why Dr. King affects any particular power process, or vice versa? The postmodernist has issued an objection. On what grounds? Dr. King is relying on a set of ostensible universals to guide his thinking, true—one of which will be the utter falseness of the ostensible universals arrayed against him—and one can describe how he came to ascribe to these universals in such and such a way. But he has a reason for wanting what he wants. What reason has the postmodernist for issuing an objection to *his* reasons?

You ask, "Can you not find other grounds for caring about a particular power-process, which doesn't rely on an appeal to ostensible universals?" Offhand I can think of three reasons for caring about a power-process.

1. Self interest. The existing process doesn't give me what I want, so I'll try to change it.
2. Curiosity. My "will to power" manifests as a "will to truth" so strongly that I'm willing to philosophize with tweezers (Nietzsche philosophizes with a hammer; Foucault philosophizes with tweezers.) that I actually care to understand how broader power-processes work.
3. Ostensible universal values (which may or may not dovetail with a concept of self-interest, though they probably will). I'm convinced that the status quo forces people into certain circumstances in a way that is fundamentally wrong; because of X it is my duty to try to rectify the situation.

As far as I can tell, postmodernism provides no conceptual tools or principles that can serve to invalidate any of these modes of thought. At best it can argue that my ostensible universal is only the product of years of discourse that has evolved under the pressure of various power-processes, etc. Ok, say that it is.

So what?

As an analogy, take the surfer. The surfer is a happy, blissed out dude. His favorite place to be is on a board on top of a big, gnarly wave. The wave, and the ocean behind it, is pure power. Left to its own devices it is likely to kill you or crush you or deliver you to Teeth in the deep. The surfer, however, understands the power-process, and his own tools and innate capacities, well enough to employ that power-process to the ends of achieving a major rush, dude. Cowabunga!

The fisherman for his part feeds his family, or his village.

Material self-interest at work. Aesthetic interest at work. The pleasure of achieving a goal; the pleasure of feeling oneself in control of a (localized) process; the pleasure of knowing oneself to have done some good according to one's standards, however ostensible their universality may be. Ok, maybe my motives can be analyzed until they are just the effects of so many power-process causes. Knowing this, what standard have I produced by which I can judge that I ought not to act on my sentiments? Knowing how a car works isn't an argument not to drive to Memphis, or Selma.

As for ostensible universals, once must ask again, what are the grounds of the postmodernist's objection? That the attempt at reform won't succeed? Why does that matter? Without criteria, universal or otherwise, for making judgments of some kind of value, what content does the postmodernist's objection contain? What reason? Why should I not simply regard the power-process as a thing implicit in human affairs and resolve to master it as best I can towards my own ends, which may not be universal but are at least my own?

It is fine for the postmodernist to observe that most attempts at reform stem from the same power-process that created the thing defined as the problem. Perhaps that is an inevitable aspect of the human condition. But when he uses that observation to argue against taking an action that I've justified in the realm of my own subjectivity, he has to provide a reason that has force within that realm. He has left the domain of description and entered the domain of ethics.

If he is not willing to provide criteria for explaining why interacting with the power process is a particular way is undesirable, then what can anybody say in response? Except, "So what?"

Marvin!

I am finally getting down to answering (to the best of my middling abilities) your various questions about Power and Postmodernism. I will set out to answer the following questions:

What the hell is a process of power? Or power process? Or whatever the hell it is these postmodern authors go on about?

How can we tell a "good" power process from a "bad" one, either normatively or in terms of cause-and-effect?

Given the universality of power processes and their inevitable taint by human foibles, why should one actually care about the particularities of a given power process in a given context?

What grounds are there for comparing the Nietzschean notion of The Will to Power with Postmodernist conceptions of "power"?

There is also one point I will not address, which is the following (which can be examined at some later date, perhaps):

How worthwhile is the comparison of Foucault's criticism of power processes in Discipline and Punish to standard Republican arguments against Big Government?

But before I turn to these questions, it's important to note where I am coming from. I will try therefore to first give you the answer as I understand the Postmodernist Academic Mainstream's thinking, and then explicitly note when I am filling in my own theories. As a general rule, I should note I am hardly well-versed in postmodernism, beyond what your average M.A. student in literature manages to pick up on the street.

1. What the hell is a process of power? Or power process? Or whatever the hell it is these postmodern authors go on about?

I think the notion of a power process could be described as follows: How the hell did the world come to be as it is? For the status quo of the world involves specific distributions of privileged truth (and points of view from which this truth can be surveyed and confirmed or resisted). Privilege determines economic, political, and ideological wealth. (Ideological wealth being, in my own weird jargon, the luxury of not having to fight to have one's ideas heard, understood, or accepted.)

Now, there are points of obvious privilege. But no point of view is absolutely privileged, and none escapes from the scrutiny of the overall ideological system (which includes both the mainstream and the sum total of all the resistances to it). The whole of the context is constantly in flux, shifting one way and then the other. As the shifts occur, massive changes in the status quo, and in the fates of millions, occur.

Foucault answers this question of how things came to be as they are by very selectively but also very closely looking at the history of ideas, and how older ideas were changed or superceded by newer ones. Now, this kind of history is necessarily complex. It's not a case purely of human agency acting upon historica backdrops, as we've often been instructed to see things by our teachers in high school looking at the histories of "Great Men (and Women)". And yet agency does sometimes come into play, or rather certain intiatives are originally agency-driven but later do become part of the process.

And while Foucault does show some sympathy to questions of class struggle, as are clear in the end of Discipline and Punish, he knows that class is no more in control than specific individuals. Class is another set of cogs in the complex reality machine, interacting with individual acts and with the tides of reality-formation that whole societies seem to create.

And I think a tremendous amount of the power that is generated in a society is generated at its frail spots, rather like the force that we find in action at the fault lines where tectonic plates meet. These forces move so slowly as to be imperceptible, and yet they unleash a host of powerful effects upon the surrounding environment. (The environment in this case would be human minds and the society that they collectively generate.)

2. How can we tell a "good" power process from a "bad" one, either normatively or in terms of cause-and-effect?

I don't know that we can, really. I mean, you and I can, in saying for example that the power process in, say, pre-World War II German or Japanese society is one we think of as bad. But good and evil seem difficult to apply to something as wide as a whole society's consensus reality. For a consensus reality is, as you well know, a very uncertain, self-conflicted thing. Not all Germans hated Jews or wished their slaughter. Very few opposed it. Here, agency and resistance are strange questions.

Can a society be bad? This is a question that people like Jesuit priests asked themselves when they were aiding in the (ideological, if not political) colonization of much of the world. And I think the nature of the question betrays an assumption: that a society can be "good", and that if any society is good, it's likely that one's own is the best. It seems to me that Foucault asks instead, How do societies go about deciding what about themselves is good, and hiding from themselves what they feel is bad? How do discontents manage to endanger this process, and how are they combatted? Good and bad here are tools of rhetoric, not really useful because they cannot but apply to one's opinion.

And I think the thing is, postmodernism stays away from opinion one subjects like this because opinion is inevitable, but deep exploration of ideas is not. Best to push the hard work when pushing any work, and let people do alone what they would anyways do alone.

Which raises the question of agency. I don't think Foucault had a generally negative view of agency, nor do I think most postmodernists do, once you really talk to them. Hell, postmodernist theory is a body of work that has been produced by people exercising their agency. However, the myth that one individual's (or class's) agency shapes the world is too simple. That's why this notion of power process becomes important.

(Note that I am referring to Foucault a lot. These are my limits. Derrida to me reads like horseshit, and Deleuze & Guattari wrote such pablum as not to be worth my time.)

Knowing the power process suggests that one can find a way to adapt within it, yes, but more importantly, Foucault is always talking about what led up to the present. The impetus, it seems to me, isn't to illuminate something to draw millions of war-hungry followers. Rather, it seems to me a wish to illuminate previously unsaid things about reality, about the processes by which the apparent world is conjured up by us as a group.

I don't know, therefore, how Foucault would relate to something like interference in a given situation after reading Foucault, or attempts to exercise agency on the current power process. I don't know whether, in his official formulation, something can be considered more or less bad. He would say that in societies there is a complex play of forces that are tied to different discourses... and that power, rather than something to be exercised by individuals or classes, is something that can be detected by the orderings of knowledge and of the human world that arise from what he calls "verbal performances". (I'm thinking here of the concluding sections of The Archeology of Knowledge... of which I have read only the concluding sections, I am sheepish to admit.

In fact, I am sheepish also to admit this: that answering this question is difficult. It is an idea that I kind of soaked up from various short readings (the texts of which are all lost to me now, and in most cases the even authors' names are forgotten) and from professors' and guest lecturers' discussions. It was a sense of power as a kind of ubiquitous force that somehow was connected to, but not directly acting upon, the ordering of the world in which we live (or our ideas about the world in which we live, which is where that ordering after all takes place).
Analyzing the idea doesn't rob it of force to me, but I do see the following problems with it:

• It sounds a like like other "mysterious forces" at work, ranging from divine omnipotence to the idea of the Holy Spirit, or karma, or other notions such as the Invisible Hand of the Market. Of course, one could raise this objection to the notion of gravity or of magnetism, but unlike with gravity and magnetism, this idea of "power" is not necessarily isolatable or testable. Or is it? Is the kind of exploration Foucault doing something we could regard as experimental? I think this is where postmodernists shy away from, or make an enemy of science. They don't know how to answer this question.
  
  For my own part I think they could turn profitably to science for models of humans, and of other primates (for comparison) in seeing how social reality is formed... for even in chimpanzee social groups there are elements of "consensus reality" of the kind in which Foucault's "power" seems to operate.


• It focuses on the play of verbal performance, when I think there are possibly deeper congitive functions that delimit the range of firstly humanly possible and secondly human-normative verbal performances. Which is to say that perhaps a lot of our sense of normativity and in fact a lot of what we say arise from our wiring, rather than some logogenerative ordering of knowledge.


• It doesn't adequately explain how new discourses arise, the significance of that point of origin (which unlike Foucault I think does, probably complexly, exist).


• It doesn't give us a sense of where agency is located, or whether agency can affect these larger governing processes of power at all.


• It's kind of depressing. Not really a strike against it, but it does kind of open the door to those types who are all "more postmodern than thou, cant you hack the meaninglessness"... the pomo posers, if you will. Who are absolutely useless almost all of the time. It does seem to open the door to dismissive types who don't want to try make things better, and in a way encourages them to do so. And those people really suck.

I think therefore that the Foucauldian idea of "power" (which it seems to me is basically what my professors and classmates talked about when they talked about "power") is worthwhile in that it complexifies things, makes us have to think hard about avoiding simple notions of causality... but it also is not a complete recipe. It's kind of like people who would found a religion on physics. Physics is a very valuable way of understanding part of the world; but it's no key to how to live. It seems to me Foucault's useful in teasing apart the elements that make up a worldview, but he's worthless for those who ask the question, "What to do about this?" Except, of course, as an impetus to self-examine one's own desire to do something... which, to a certain point is very commendable, and after a certain point is absolutely crippling.

The difficulty for Foucault would be that asserting anything as good or bad is to enter into a very simplistic discourse-formation. He can see it and retreats into analyzing how that formation occurs. So it's kind of like asking a literature student a question about a given novel like, "Is such-and-such a person smart?" Of course, they will explain to you that the author depicts the character as intelligent in the following ways, for these reasons... the original question makes no sense for the context in which they're working. Not that the question of, "Why should I care?" is as addle-brained as my literary example above... it's not. But the idea of caring on grounds that something is a (normatively, or absolutely) good or bad process, well, perhaps it may well be. I'm not sure. Can you not find other grounds for caring about a particular power-process, which doesn't rely on an appeal to ostensible universals?

3. Given the universality of power processes and their inevitable taint by human foibles, why should one actually care about the particularities of a given power process in a given context?

When I read Discipline and Punish I came away with the feeling that Foucault did a good job of describing some of the unintended consequences of the movement to reform punishment and prevent crime in Western civilization; and, that he did a plausible job of suggesting that these consequences emerge in large part from a desire to exert power and control on the part of the reformer that is not so different on some level from the desire to exert power and control on the part of the old aristocracies. So far so good, although in some ways it sounds an awful lot like the standard conservative American argument against big government and excessive state regulation of public institutions. I was left thinking, "Ok Foucault, these are good insights but the culture is going to produce something and no matter what it is it will be tainted by the selfish motives of puny humans. Would you rather live under Louis XIV or Jimmy Carter? Or Ronald Reagan, for that matter?"

Well, ultimately, agency is not possible for Foucault. As he writes in the Conclusion of The Archeology of Knowledge:

I can understand the unease of all such people. They have probably found it difficult enough to recognize that their history, their economics, their social practices, the language that they speak, the mythology of their ancestors, even the stories tat they were told in childhood, are governed by rules that are not all given to their consciousness; they can hardly agree to being dispossessed in addition of that discourse in which they wish to be able to say immediately and directly what they think, believe, or imagine; they prefer to deny that discourse is a complex, differentiated practice, governed by analysable rules and transformations, rather than being deprived of that tender, consoling certainty of b eing able to change, if not the world, if not life, at least their 'meaning', simply with a fresh word that can come only from themselves, and remain for ever close to the source.

It seems here that agency is out the window. And that, it seems to me, is the rub for Foucault. He's looking at the rules underlying what we say and how we say it. Any question of, "So what do we do about this?" would bring him not to answer the question, but of course to cleverly analyze it, looking at the history of such questions, and looking at where this desire to "save" the world, to change it, comes from.

Which of course is a sensible way of looking at the world in books. Discovering governing rules that make people say most of what they say, make us think how we do, is an important and attractive task to us. Especially to you and I, I would propose, because we tend not to think like the people who surround us... am I correct? In Foucault, we find a different suggestion from the instinctive sense we have, which is, "Well, I am just different from the people around me," a kind of essentialist impulse which, though evolutionary psychologists usually discuss it in relation to racial groupings, also can apply to other human coalitions, like geeks and jocks and band kids or philosophy geeks and goths or whatever other social grouping you can think of. In Foucault, we're different because of the different discourses we have encountered and the effects that these verbal performances have had on us.

And yet, that's the question. Cannot profoundly alien verbal performances have some calculated effect? Certainly, societies develop mechanisms to deal with this, yet I can say from my own experience here that some Koreans I know do get exposed to discourses they have never encountered before when speaking with foreigners. Not the dumb hockey punks or the young Republicans, of course; those types are rather stereotypical in the Korean mind, alongside the ravenous businessman and the leering boorish American soldier. But someone who can actually criticise Confucian practice while being intimate with at least some core Confucian texts, or who can point out how Korean readings of Christian scripture are very different (and, notably, more Confucian) than Western ones... when I have had conversations like these, I've seen people thinking about the strangeness of their ideas. It's also rendered elements of my own culture less transparent to me, such as that Western readings of the Bible are also readings coming from a culture alien to that of the original culture that produced those scriptures, or what kinds of orderings in my own society safeguard things like patriarchy (as opposed to those in Confucianism).

Cannot action have a profound effect? As my friend John Wendel often reminds me, the choice by Martin Luther King Jr. (and many other black activists, among them many Christian preachers or adherents) to use essentially Christian discourses of morality, brotherhood, and peace, were extremely important to the kind of civil rights movement that he participated in. It also has a history stretching at least as far back as Frederick Douglass's Narrative where Christian virtues are demanded of whites who call themselves adherents.

Yes, action can have a profound effect... it is true. But how, and why? Certainly, we cannot credit only King with whatever advances the American civil rights movement achieved in its heyday. Certainly we must also credit those who heard his words, and who were effectively "infected" with his message, living it and spreading it to others. We must credit those who resisted and yet resisted shamefully, poorly and ineffectively, harming their own agendas in the process. We must credit the dozens and dozens of other people who, all in their own "verbal performances", helped push the rock up the hill. But what of those who spoke out with the attractive suggestion that things didn't need to change? What of the Klansmen, the good old boys, what of those black people who as much as the whites feared integration and who took advantage in their own communities of the marginalization that was imposed on them as a group? (For, certainly, those individuals did and still do exist in every marginalized community.)

This is the key, I think. Action is possible, but action is almost always in the form of discourse-formation. Discourses do not result in changes; they result in shifts in the larger discursive field of the society. Discourses are, like those thusly-named particles in physics, complexly-interacting. The complexity is such that when one seeks governable rules, one must reduce away all of this. It is known (from his own words) that Foucault was quite aware of the limits of his project, and it seems to me that agency falls quite outside those limits. It would be as if one asked a doctor specializing in cancer, how is it that we can know when someone is beautiful? Asking a plastic surgeon might get you a sensible answer, rooted either in some prescribed aesthetics, or studies of the apprehension of human attractiveness, but while these are linked to the overall project of medicine (as much as plastic surgery is, anyway, and as much as the very techniques of medical practice rely on the doctor's ability to perceive health in patients, which is often the same as perceiving that kind of attractiveness we're asking about), the oncologist is going to look at you funny if you ask this question, and say, "Uh, I dunno. I guess, well, uh..." and then either disavow making any statement, or give you something off the cuff. I think it's like that with Foucault... he doesn't want either to bullshit, or to spill out his own agendas, so he refrains from addressing action and agency.

And yet, there it is. He wrote all these books. He engages in his own long, complex, and provocative verbal performance. It's undeniable. What he hopes to achieve, I'm not sure... and yet I am also certain it's implicit in the texts. And I am also certain it's more than Mr. Freidrich von Blowhard suggests, as in some sort of attempt to salvage French cultural superiority after the messes France has gotten into and the loss of, well, pretty much all of its power and importance in the world. I think, though, I won't be able to answer this further until I have read a great deal more of Foucault. I am, at this moment, working from having read a few short excerpts in undergraduate classes, plus Discipline and Punish, the first text in the History of Sexuality series, and about a third each of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic. I've been lazy and peckish since arriving in Korea, at least with regard to the works of Uncle Michel. I'll try get onto it in good time. (Though for now I need to finish my book on the Boxers' Rebellion, and also to get through some texts loaned to me by friends.)

4. What grounds are there for comparing the Nietzschean notion of The Will to Power with Postmodernist conceptions of "power"?

You write:

I think this is different from Nietzsche's Will to Power, which I think bears a greater resemblence to the Freudian trio of id, ego, and superego, depending on which mode it's operating in. The Will to Power is a defining and motivating quality of personal agency; whereas the power process seems to be about something above and beyond the possibility of personal agency to affect.

I would not go so far as to assert that. I think that agency does have a role in Foucauldian notions of power, but agency is never clearly running the show. The fact is that agency is in more instances shaped by the power process than those instances in which it manages to shape it.

Nietzschean notions of the Will to Power are, perhaps, reasonable for a model of the individual as a romantic self, a self where there is an essential, authentic self. But selfhood for postmodernists is a mediated thing, a shaped thing, and the things that shape it are generally external.

(I think it's erroneous to assert this, but it could be a question of semantics. I think instincts and basic cognitive functions are internal, and part of the self, but then again they are the wellspring of our society, and they proceed from evolution... so on the larger timescale, internal and external become difficult to pick apart.)

Nietzsche-via-Freud (a la this model of yours linking id, ego, and superego to Nietzschean Will to Power) presents a self interacting with a world. They are discrete, are they not? The discreteness of the individual from the mediating texts and contexts of the world is not so clear for a postmodernist. "I" no longer can be used as the subject of unproblematic declarative sentences.

(I feel there's clearly some room for connections between memetics and evolutionary psychology of the type people like Pinker and Boyer talk about, here. I think a good hard look at the underlying universal basements of human consciousness's design would do postmodernist theory some good. But its practitioners are likely to avoid this like the plague for reasons of politics and agenda, where text-mediated identity seems to be a kind of holy relic to be defended at all costs.)

I also am thinking I shall have to read The Archeology of Knowledge soon because there seems to be a lot related to Nietzsche. The Will to Knowledge (sometimes also called the Will to Truth) that is mentioned at the end is likely one connection. The very last paragraph seems to connect to Nietzsche as well, referring to words killing God; and finally, he mentions Nietzsche in the concluding chapter. As you have read this text already, you're in a better position to say, and I remember you mentioning other connections to Nietzsche, such as to his own text of Genealogy of Morals. (Wasn't it? I have also been lax about reading Nietzsche even though you put most of his work right in my hands... bad Gord, bad Gord!)

A personal note: I saw a pretty funny movie the other day with Mi Seok... called My Wife is a Gangster 2. I think if you could get your hands on part 1 of this movie, we could find a great deal of room for comparison of religious language and thought to cultural forms. I think we might even find them contiguous and inseparable. The name in Korea is Jobok Manura. Maybe you could ask Cheong if she knows where you could rent it?

Today we're having another band practice... we have a gig in Seoul next Saturday, one that may land us a recording contract if we are good boys and play well. So I should go get some breakfast and get on over to the practice space. Oh, and Myoung Jae, our fearless leader, just called and asked me to bring the concertina he loaned me, that I am apparently playing on our new song. I can't play concertina. This should be interesting.

Off I go. I look forward to whatever responses you may have, especially to my final question in the response to point number 2 above.

Finally, off-and-on when I view this page I only see the first screenful. I wonder if there's a problem with the template? I don't think I changed anything that would cause this. Maybe you know more about HTML than me? If you have any ideas, let me know.

Cheers!
Gord

Okay, no post about power yet, but I was sick today. And, I did manage to add an RSS feed via the good people at Blogmatrix. I think it will work, once it actually shows up on the site. We'll see soon enough.
(update)
It looks like the RSS feed is technically working, but won't probably kick in for a few days. I've also added a traffic tracker, eXTReMe tracking, to see just how much (or how little) traffic this site gets.

Wow, that was weird. The mp3s weren't playing, so in the process of testing it and getting sorted out, I got 2 streams running at once, Ockeghem and Reich (Electric Counterpoint) at the same time. Maybe only I would think this was pretty, but... it was.

Marvin,

I shan't attempt an answer at the question of what power processes are for now... I have much of the week off (appointments and other such things nonwithstanding), so I'm going to try put something sensible together to answer that question over a couple of days. For now, I'll turn instead to your True Confessions.

It's very interesting to me to see what you choose to categorize under "religious" in your own life. My own "religious" behaviours are somewhat different, and this suggests to me that when we say "religious" we mean different things from before even the get-go. Perhaps it's a case of my more firmly committed sense of the divine: that there is none, and that even if there were, it wouldn't matter much to our moral philosophy or daily ethics... or our need to find stable ways to go about living with one another. I call this atheist although I suppose that's because think it's undignified to having a strong opinion about a question which, either way doesn't change what I'm doing or how I am living. Personally I would rather it be called skeptical agnostic, but agnostic seems to mean, "We cannot know," or, "I don't know." I want the category that suggests, "Knowing either way shouldn't bloody well change how you live and conduct yourself, damn it!"

Maybe some of it is also upbringing, because my ways of being "religious" without being explicitly so seem to me to be more Catholic somehow. In any case, here are a list of things that I feel would fit into the (say, Boyerian) category of religious or related to religious tendencies:

• I tend to think of things as either worthwhile or not worthwhile by judging them on internal consistency, sophistication of argument, and distance from plebian appeal. I am more comfortable discussing Big Topics with an intellectual Catholic who works squarely within the Catholic tradition than with New Age hodgepodgists, or the sorts of Christians who speak in tongues or handle snakes. That's how I have arrive at my tastes in music and art, partly because of my own need for extreme complexity, but also out of a vague intuition that whatever everyone else likes is mostly simplistic, mindless crap.And then there is also the sense that aesthetics is of absolutely crucial importance, that things and constructions of beauty matter absolutely.


• I do tend to prefer complicated and detailed moral arguments to arguments that reason that something is right or wrong on the basis of some given scripture; I think I thus fit with the Catholic approach, moreso than other approaches.


• I do get moved by religious music, but it's usually Medieval or early Renaissance music... my favorite composers in this vein being Ockeghem (listen to a Kyrie) and Josquin, especially the former. But Bach is also extremely beautiful. However, for me it's not so much whether music is programmatically religious or not that matters for this sense of how I mean religious: for example, Steve Reich's treatment of psalmic cantillations (here's a sample from Tehillim) and his treatment of the electric guitar (here's a sample from Electric Counterpoint) seem to me to be equally moving, uplifting, and awakening. I basically find that it's the musical material itself that calls me to feel that it's sacred or secular. I share Joseph Campbell's feeling that most of the crappy folk-song singalong with an acoustic guitar that you hear in Churches these days is so profoundly secular as to be depressing, rather than uplifting.


• I am convinced that ethics is profoundly important to human life. This shouldn't be something I think is religious, and I note it only because it's a kind of proof that things that exist in every human culture (ethical systems, not specific ones but ethical systems) have a way of appearing to us to be religious when they're just plain human.


• I tend to try to remember to look at things around me and try to see through it to the truth of that thing. For example, when I see soccer players on the field, it strikes me how it is the particular physics of our universe that they're playing within, the rules of the game encompass that too; and I marvel at the particularities of human evolution that made it possible for such a balletic competition to occur. This reminds me of how medieval faithflul were often asked to try to see God behind the veil of the secular world, and so the attitude (and the struggle, against lethargy, to maintain it) seems to me to be religious.


• I tend, when I slip into bouts of self-torture and misery, to conceive of myself as doomed and perhaps being [unished for past misdeeds, or for some fundamental flaw... this all smacks of the notion of corruption tied to the idea of Original Sin, not that I credit it for my problems, but I think the type of ideas that these are, are at least comparable to one another.


• I tend to think of value in life as derived primarily (and sometimes, unhealthily, even exclusively) from external things beyond myself. It never seems to me that my mere personal happiness could be a justification for any given action or attitude. Failing the presence of things I designate signs of worth, I too cry out for explanation, and since none is ever offered I often concoct my own (rather compassionless, toward myself) explanations.


• I tend to be quite judgmental of my own wrongdoing and of others'; I think I learned this in Church, not from the sermons as much as the scriptures and the hypocrisy I saw all around me, among the unfaithful faithful.


• I am also, as you described, prone to superstition in the form of imagining causalities that are mysterious or unknowable to me, but somehow tied to some essential trait of my nature, some characteristic, or to my behaviour.

You ask:

Even if religion isn't literally true, it's still as real as any other idea and more powerful than most. The power of ideas being determined in large part by the predispositions of our brains, of course.

But what does this mean? The last part is clear to me but what does it mean for religion (or anything else) to be figuratively (or otherwise non-literally) true? Your comment seems to suggest that the "reality" of religious ideas, and their power, seems to give them a non-literal "truth" element. I am, I suppose, slipping into the postmodernist stream to ask why we use a word like "truth" to describe things we know cannot literally be true? I'll admit I am now less concerned with the idea of "truth" and what it means for religion to "be true" than I am with what the practice and experience of religion seems to tell us about ourselves. It seems to me that things which are not literally true aren't so much "figuratively true" as they are simply the kinds of things we tend to feel to be true in ways we cannot logically explain; that they carry an emotional weight and so we feel we must afford them some benefit of the doubt.

Our feeling of figurative truth doesn't, I am trying to say, impart a kind of special (or higher order of) truth to the idea. Which is not obvious to everyone, but that's not why I am saying it. I think I am taking the long road to asking whether the "truth" we give these ideas is something we grant just out of a universal human mental quirk? Or is it something about universal human needs? I don't know quite how to answer that, though I think the difference between quirk and need are big enough to make this question's answer important.

Enough of my blather. You wrote:

...I feel I have a personal stake in the fate of Christianity as an institution... rather odd for an atheist, wouldn't you say?

Not at all. I do rather keenly understand that kind of attitude and, in fact, I share it. Maybe it's because, well, for the bulk of people it's in our religious leaders that humans, at least publicly, direct their faith and moral thinking towards. They are meant to be moralized by their religion, to be awakened to right and wrong and to be guided to the path that a moral and loving deity would guide them to. Religion's supposed to be about good and bad, in other words, and we trust that even if it's flawed or misrepresenting itself or whatever, the people involved are doing the damned best to get at good and bad and do right by those who put their faith in them. It only makes sense.

It's kind of like when I come across ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers here in Korea who don't know grammar at all... I mean, don't know what an adjective is. You may think this is rare, but I have met several. Or, consider the doctor who can't remember the name of that organ that pumps blood. You know, the one in your chest. That would be outright ridiculous. Equally ridiculous to, say, a moral teacher and religious leader who bangs hookers in roadside motels or steals money from his flock, but also one who can engage in any old kind of bigotry, hate talk, or even the perennial sin of snobbishness. It's just ludicrous. And so are some of the moral stances taken by people who are supposed to be exemplars and teachers of moral aspiration. I hate to say it, but any preacher who sleeps with hookers has no place in his job. I have been very lonely for a long time in my life and I have never slept with a hooker. I have been so poor I had to borrow money to buy rice and lentils so I could eat that every day for two weeks, and I never stole from anyone. There's no excuse for having such weak moral convictions that one commits such obvious "sins". And, I would argue, there is also no excuse for continuing to receive moral teachings from the morally bankrupt.

I think your image of the unbelieving human as a kind of Sisyphian figure is an apt one. However, remember Camus's injunction (I do hope that I remember it, in fact, correctly): we must imagine Sisyphus as happy. There are many things in life which also follow this pattern, don't they? We always, in our hearts, imagine ourselves young, even when we most certainly are not. We struggle to get healthy but time and age will take that away too. We read and read and talk with people but forget more than we ever remember. Everything in life is Sisyphian. It's just that we never notice so much of it, or just accept it.

It's a question of human nature, and I've been reading John Stuart Mill lately. In On Liberty, he described human nature thus:

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces that make it a living thing.

Being a religious person is a kind of programming, and being an atheist is also a kind of programming. Mill would probably approve of that metaphor, of programming, because it is a kind of mechanistic thing. The Christian machine is a machine of faith, and the atheist machine is also a machine of faith that all the Christian mumbo jumbo is false. (I think atheism requires much less faith but it takes that tiny step of saying, "No there isn't!")

The tree, I think, doesn't engage with the silly questions of philosophers and atheists and the faithful. The tree just shuts up and grows, partly as a result of its inner forces and partly because of external influences. The tree doesn't engage in affirmation or in negation, as much as it just develops as an organic being. Trees aren't worried about their species, they just are whatever they are and that's that. To be a good theist requires certain human tendencies to be suppressed, and to be a good atheist usually requires of one the sheepish denial of certain of their own private tendencies and feelings. I think it doesn't have to be that way, especially not for the atheist. An atheist need not feel sheepish about his crying out for help, since it's a very human thing to do.

And I suppose that's my answer to this question of yours, about what's better, accepting religion while knowing it's "false" (whatever that means) or rejecting it and buying a sense of intellectual honesty at the cost of a perpetual weight of loss. I think that both atheism and theism as practiced these days seem to require a certain degree of intellectual dishonesty, denial of something about oneself. I think both come with a perpetual weight. However, I think for most people the dishonesty never quite becomes conscious... instead it's a kind of sense of obligation to be more faithful, a rhetoric that is promulgated by churches; or to forget experiences where you fail in your atheism and cry out, wonder if maybe, imagine an afterlife, or whatever. I think, in the end, people do as my friend Jack suggested: they mostly do what comes easiest to them. To people who walk away from religions, it may be hard but even living with that weight is easier than living with a sense that one is engaged in a sham. And since I think most other people simply never get around to asking questions about what they're taught, being a somewhat frustrated and inexplicably unserious adherent to very serious ideas is what comes easiest to most people. You ask, "is it better to accept religion with misgivings or reject it in the name of honesty, with the understanding that one can never wholly be free of it?" and as usual, I want to suggest that our options number more than two.

I am not five-ten, but an even six feet tall. And these days, about 220 pounds (100 kilograms), down from about 280 pounds when I first arrive in Korea. Rather shocking change. But I kind of do have thin legs, for my body. They're less thin since I started swimming, but not quite what I think they probably should be if I am to have the proper harmony of proportions. But... my feet are size 13 which means I can only ever buy shoes in Seoul. The man in the shoe shop I went to last time saw me come in and looked at my feet and said, "Ahhhhh. I like you..."

As for bat bulges, yes, probably about the same. Sometimes my little students used to point at me and shriek, "Teacher, JUJU!" which means, "Boobs!" And I mean, not just the time I was in drag for Halloween.

Okay, I need to go buy some groceries. It's the Harvest Moon Festival (a week of ancestor worship and pigging out on delicious Korean food) so all the shops will be closed after today, until maybe Saturday. Yikes. So I need groceries, and a bunch of them at that, as I'm cooking for two friends this week.

More on postmodernism and power later, Batman,
Gord

In all sincerity I ask you, Gord:

What the hell is a process of power? Or power process? Or whatever the hell it is these postmodern authors go on about?

The best understanding I seem to be able to glean is that all cultural actions are processes of power and that being a process of power somehow morally or intellectually invalidates cultural actions with respect to their morality, authenticity, sincerity, or all of the above. You say below that

Once, I was content to simply suggest that knowing the situation would be the first step, and the one that Foucault attempts illustratively to act upon. I know however that postmodernism as a philosophical school would be profoundly skeptical with regards to anything presented (even implicitly, as I suggested Foucault might have been doing in his work), and would probably argue (with somewhat good historical support) that most attempts as improving a situation actually tend to simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place.

To which I respond, "So what?" Provide me with criteria for distinguishing a good power process from a bad power process, both normatively and in terms of cause-and-effect, and the postmodernists might then actually be saying something.

When I read Discipline and Punish I came away with the feeling that Foucault did a good job of describing some of the unintended consequences of the movement to reform punishment and prevent crime in Western civilization; and, that he did a plausible job of suggesting that these consequences emerge in large part from a desire to exert power and control on the part of the reformer that is not so different on some level from the desire to exert power and control on the part of the old aristocracies. So far so good, although in some ways it sounds an awful lot like the standard conservative American argument against big government and excessive state regulation of public institutions. I was left thinking, "Ok Foucault, these are good insights but the culture is going to produce something and no matter what it is it will be tainted by the selfish motives of puny humans. Would you rather live under Louis XIV or Jimmy Carter? Or Ronald Reagan, for that matter?"

So...what's a power process that I should care that one is ongoing in any given context?

And I think this is different from Nietzsche's Will to Power, which I think bears a greater resemblence to the Freudian trio of id, ego, and superego, depending on which mode it's operating in. The Will to Power is a defining and motivating quality of personal agency; whereas the power process seems to be about something above and beyond the possibility of personal agency to affect.

Any thoughts? (Like I have to ask!)

Marvin

Gord,

I expect to spend the better part of this weekend testing and documenting new software stuff for my job, but before I do that I'll try to answer a few questions here. I'll address stuff more personal than theoretical...maybe it will help provide context for later discussions. I'll also ask a question about PoMo theory, but in a separate post with a more relevant header.

Below under "Religious Barbershops" you ask:

I shall end this with a question and resolve to answer it myself later, but also invite you to try answer it: what elements of your life would you characterize as "religious" despite your atheism? How much of your secularized commentary do you actually believe, and how much of it must you admit is explanation for some basically mysterious human experience?

As a rule I'd say my secularized commentary isn't to explain some basically mysterious human experience but rather to explain banal, repetitive human experiences that we see going on all over the place. That said, I'm certainly not immune in any way to religious impulses. I was raised Episcopalian and was in some ways the kind of overeager kid who believes so intently that soon the church itself can't measure up to his standards. Around the time I began to believe that most people's motives for churchgoing were social and and not "pure" or "holy" I also got into science, SF, and that lovely TV show Cosmos. As some point during my adolescence I read Musashi's A Book of Five Rings and picked up on some of the Zen Buddhism therein...not really recognizing it as such at the time...and turned from religion to martial arts. Same maddening perfectionism, different field of action.

Then came college and philosophy classes and Angst with a capital A and what-not...but I still remain highly succeptible to religious ideas, and I'm not even sure "atheist" is a really good name for what I am; maybe it's just the default choice since "believer" doesn't seem to apply either. I don't know if I can explain it neatly, so maybe a laundry-list of experiences is better. And incidentally, your experience of spontaneously praying when lost and penniless in a foreign land certainly feels familiar. I'm not above offering, silently and with a sense of embarrassed chagrin, prayers when I perceive myself or a loved one to be in danger. But that's how I was raised, and it doesn't seem realistic to expect such impulses to vanish from my character just because I've read some books to the contrary.

• Take for instance a poem by Francis Thompson called "The Hound of Heaven." I've never read it, but I've seen illustrated editions in bookstores. It compares the attempt to evade God to running away from a large dog that forever pursues you, fearful and crazed, through the streets until you give up in exhaustion and terror, only to find that the dog--though large and scary and irresistable--is actually kind and loving and willing to help you up and on your way once you accept his affection and return it with your own. I have had moments when for whatever reason life seemed so heavy that I must cry out to God for aid. Moments when for some reason I would begin to weep silently while driving to work or physically collapse to my knees in inexplicable grief when nobody was looking. My mind would cry out, usually asking God for help or an explanation and promising some kind of good behavior in return. Long after I had stopped accepting the essential truth of church doctrine.
• Therapy is gooood, by the way.
• I love church music: hymns, chorales, Christmas carols. I'm not so fond of the public recitation of psalms...they tend to make me feel like I'm among monotonously chanting pod-people, stereotyped cult members like you'd see worshipping the bad-guy in a cheesy B fantasy movie. But they can be very moving if taken as a window into the souls of people who have had experiences like the one I described above. "O Come O Come, Emmanuel," "We Three Kings," and "O Holy Night" are my favorite Christmas songs, I think. Especially when sung by Jessye Norman, say, or Aaron Neville or the Robert Shaw Chorale. The first captures amazingly the mood of hopeful expectation as yet unfulfilled; the second describes the agony and alienation of the passion with its explanation of myrrh; the last , with its "fall on your knees" and "His law is love" and "chains shall He break" thrills me and humbles me whenever I hear it.
• Even if religion isn't literally true, it's still as real as any other idea and more powerful than most. The power of ideas being determined in large part by the predispositions of our brains, of course.
• When the recent Episcopal General Convention confirmed the election of a gay Bishop (despite two last-minute slanders that were quickly and efficiently dispelled) I swelled with pride. I thought, "This is the way God wants us to work."
• Meanwhile the conservative factions of the church argued that by doing so the American church would alienate the Anglican communion around the world--especially in developing nations where it has grown fastest of late and where traditional local values tend to accord with socially very conservative readings of scripture. My reaction was emotional and somewhat vicious, maybe even bigoted: "It is not the place of the American church to be dictated to by the tribal prejudices of the Third World, and shame on western conservatives who cloak their own bigotries by enlisting such in their cause." The point of this is that I feel I have a personal stake in the fate of Christianity as an institution...rather odd for an atheist, wouldn't you say?
• I was a married in a church with Mass and everything because, whatever else I believe or doubt, I feel that my love for my wife demands such a gesture. The culture provides certain means to make public statements of love and commitment, and plain civil ceremonies have never felt adequate to the task of expressing what I want my wife to receive from me. It is an irony, or blessing, or less charitably perhaps a failing of nerve somehow, but I think I can honestly say that while the ceremony occurred I believed every word...and would again if I were to do it again today. And then if I were to attend Mass a week later, the Nicene creed would leave the taste of ashes in my mouth.
• Which is also a religious image, isn't? More irony for you.

Oh, I'm also prone to superstitions...if I do something halfway nice or different and then manage to hit several green lights in a row, I'll wonder if some Force isn't rewarding me for that particular behavior. I know better, of course, but I still have the thought.

I'm reading Boyer's Religion Explained now, and I suspect that when all is done I may see myself as a variant of Sisyphus. Forever locked in a struggle of reason to push that damn boulder up and over the hill of religion and forever condemned by biology and upbringing to see it always slide back down. Maybe not all the way, every time, but the weight will always be there.

Which raises a question. Suppose that religion is false but is no more false than any other moral or normative schema. If accepting it allows one to soar and feel free, and rejecting it leaves one with a sense intellectual honesty but at the cost of the presence of a perpetual weight, is it better to accept religion with misgivings or reject it in the name of honesty, with the understanding that one can never wholly be free of it?

Also...are you by any chance about five-foot-ten? If so then we must have practically the same build...I bet you don't have chicken legs either. But I've got lots of bulges!

The butt-bulge connects to the Bat Bulge;
The Bat Bulge connects to the belly bulge;
The Belly Bulge connects to the breast bulge;
And they all go a'jigglin' arounnnnnnd.

I remain,

Marvin

Chicken legs indeed. "It's a delicious," as one of my students said a few moments ago. Bats are less delicious. One Korean girl I know advised me to stop losing weight because my current belly size is quite appealing to Korean girls, she claimed. I am 20 pounds heavier than you and not all muscle. Significant bits are not muscular. (Though I am working on it.)

Quips. It's weird, which ones translate across cultures. They must be planned carefully, as any English teacher in Korea can tell you. Physical humor is great. I imagine Cheong's English is good enough that she'd get most quips, though...

Kimchi is a staple here, the main condiment for the ingestion of rice. Many adult Koreans feel meals are incomplete without it (except for certain kinds of meals, which don't require it, or so it seems). The "medley of other dainties" is know here as pan chan (side dishes) and is crucial to a good meal. People sometimes praise a restaurant for its wonderful pan chan and there is a kind of lunch special you can sometimes order called bek pan chan (100 side dishes) or bek pan for short. It's not strictly speaking something that precedes the meal, but rather something that accompanies the meal. Sometimes it is set out on the table first, and people pick at it before the main dish arrives, but they continue to do so until the end of the meal. In Korean meals, usually stuff can arrive before or after the main dish... suddenly, someone brings you some nicely fried fish or another soup. You take it in stride, and just partake of a kind of an eating experience that is... shall I say it? A slow kaleidoscope of flavours and textures, a little of this and then some of that, and so on...

To once again quote my student, "It's a nice."

Marvin,

I'm going to stop flooding this site now. I'm getting busy, just discovered that my band needs to practice like mad for a gig that was set up months ago. So I won't have time to flood this site anymore. But anyway...

Postmodernism and its handling of the concept of power is something which has occupied my mind now for quite a while. For years I've been asking myself why, clever and astute though his work is, Foucault leaves me unsatisfied. I know he's got a good handle on at least some of the kinds of power processes that can be credited for the structure of our ideas about many things. As I noted to you, it seems to me that there's just no sense (not even a vague one) of any kind of solution or even a possibility of mediating action. Once, I was content to simply suggest that knowing the situation would be the first step, and the one that Foucault attempts illustratively to act upon. I know however that postmodernism as a philosophical school would be profoundly skeptical with regards to anything presented (even implicitly, as I suggested Foucault might have been doing in his work), and would probably argue (with somewhat good historical support) that most attempts as improving a situation actually tend to simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place.

I can't yet specifically refer to the other authors you mentioned in your post, because despite having him on hand, my reading of Nietzsche has only advanced slowly and scantily. I shall have to get onto him soon, I sense, so that we have more common material to draw upon and discuss. As for Campbell, I am less familiar with him than you,
but familiar enough that I could cite him, if only I had some of his work on hand. (There may be some in my University's library, which supposedly has quite a good collection of English texts, but since I still lack a professor's card, I haven't gone to see.)

However, I can draw upon Foucault for now, though I am not in possession of the book which I think is his best, Discipline and Punish. But anyway, Foucault's system of analysis is more about the implicit approach to unearthing the history of ideas, and quoting him doesn't usually convey this approach very well.

You noted how Nietzsche, Campbell, and Foucault all state "up front that certain and perhaps all facets of culture, including some things traditionally considered beyond the scope of empirical understanding, are in fact the product of natural forces." Their interest in "power" (whatever that actually is) has in fact translated to what is now our (general social) interest in power. This is something we see not only manifesting in the bitter mumblings and essays of both graduate students and their professors, but also a general approach to criticising absolute power. I have heard half-cocked theories from people who would never ever go to grad school, but which are, when you boil them down, half-cocked combinations of Marx and Foucault that cannot be anything but a form of "naive postmodernism".

What is "naive" postmodernism? I would say that it has the following characteristics:

• it is overtly oppositional to other modes of thought, such as the scientific method


• it is invested in evaluation of power and ideology from an ostensible vantage point removed from this process, or at the very least oppositional to it


• it engages in criticism of general beliefs and culture, and of texts the meaning-producing agency of which is found to life not only in the author but in whole cultures and readerships


• it tends toward criticism of the mainstream in any given system or group


• it tends to rely on difficult language that is ostensibly necessary for the communication of sophisticated concepts newly made available to human thought thanks to the hard work of the postmodernists


• it is a revelation of the profound complexity of human life, and a shattering of the modernist ideals of deep-seated human universals underlying the (to modernist) quaint but not crucial differences between cultures


• it finds virtue in difference, and seeks difference out as a result

The problem is that these things are, to me, seductive values. I too value difference, and revile simplified, mythologized
approaches to humanity and the universe. I think that criticism of texts and of culture is a good thing, too! I also occasionally (that is, when I can find no better alternative) find myself using long words to communicate concepts that lie beyond the realm of daily communication for most people I know (and I mean back home in Canada, not here in Korea where most of what I would normally say in Canada is beyond the realm of daily communication in English).


Yet I don't quite share my fellow graduate students and professors' cynicism. For one thing, I think that while some elements of scientific method do invite and merit criticism by postmodernists, it's not sensible for postmodernists to try discredit science in general. This is not because scientific method is to thank for my word processor, for after all, that would be merely mercenary of me... and it would also be granting to scientists their begged question; for normally people who are siding "for" science and "against" postmodernism
tend to point out such technology as some kind of proof that all science is beyond the reach of postmodernist criticism. This is just as unreasonable as the postmodernists who think that science (and religion) can be discredited because of its history of misuse by racists and thugs.

Science is a system, yes, and as the system is constructed it's pretty good at weeding out the opinions and biases of people. Of course, it does not exist apart from scientists, which is to say it does not exist apart from its practitioners and therefore their goals, biases, and assumptions. I read an article discussing the culturally-rooted differences between Japanese and American primatologists, who looked at very different aspects of the culture of a particular species of primate (I think it was bonobos but I am not sure, as it's been four or more years since I read the article). The Americans looked at the primates with a bias for individual behaviours and power-competition, while the Japanese looked at roles within the group, bonding within the group, and cooperative strategies. Sure, in the long run science won out, because the differences in the articles were noted, but it took a long time.

And that's only one case where science is directed by people. Scientists are after all often researching things that are profitable to companies willing to fund their research, and so science is often, whether it cares to admit (or come to terms with) it, a servant of corporations that regardless of the intentions of scientists only have their own survival at heart, and which aren't concerned with the welfare or health of people, societies, or life on the planet. Ironic, this is, since science is one of the systems that has awakened us to the absolute fragility of life on earth.

You can see clearly here that there is a deep problem of instinctive oppositionalism that exists both in the scientific community and in the postmodernist community (which is to say, the academic humanities and social sciences community). These two realms seem to be locked in a struggle for prestige, funding, approval, and of course space in the minds of educated people everywhere. The fact is that these two disciplines belong in communion, in fusion, and that together they could provide a very powerful and coherent worldview. Instead, we have humanities academics talking about Frankensteinism, about dehumanizing reductionism and other evils of science that they don't really understand all that well; and on the other hand, we have scientists making hobbies out of ridiculing the most obviously clueless postmodernists publicly, while ignoring those whose work might actually be of some use to their thinking, or challenge them at all.

Unfortunately, the academic rivalry that exists - something which is of course external to both philosophical systems, and an artifact of the way that Universities run today - stands in the way of anything like a sensible cooperation between the two evolving. It's the Montagues and the Capulets fighting over a union that at least should happen on a trial basis... Romeo and Juliet should at least be allowed to go for pizza and a movie and make out a little to see if they can get along.

For example, I would say that a lot of the work about cognition and inference systems, like that which was discussed in the Boyer text (and supposedly at much greater depth in Pinker's How the Mind Works) seems to me to provide a wonderful model for at least elements of the power process as Foucault desceibes it, which seems to run on autopilot, devoid of any individual's agency and spontaneously taking the shape it has, and yet also necessarily arising from human beings... because, where else could it arise from?

(I think this power process might be different to the idea of "Will to Power" as you mention it, but I don't know enough to say more yet.)

Similarly, scientists who actually care as much about the state of science would be willing to criticise the politics of the science industry, which is to say the arms of the science industry that have become subordinate to the interests of powerful corporations where money determines the areas and types of research and inquiry that can happen... or where cultural or other biases affect the interpretation of results.

You write that

The difficulty I see in postmodernism is that it is a system/method/approach that allows us to carefully deconstruct conventional language and culture and belief-systems but which doesn't provide the tools needed to evaluate language and culture and belief. Evaluation requires a standard. That standard will be subject in turn to deconstruction, and so on. Postmodernism fails when, like a man with only a hammer, it tries to see all problems as nails.

I agree, but I think that the point postmodernists miss is that modernism was correct and was profoundly wrong at once. Postmodernism has succeeded in casting out the simplfying conceit that modernists forwarded, that human cultures were superficially universal. There are human universals, of course, as any creditable anthropologist, biologist, neurologist, or doctor can demonstrate. Once I pointed this out to one of my postmodernist friends, that while the kinds of identities that people find themselves constructing in different cultures are necessarily different, the processes of human cognition are evolved and therefore universal... and that the internal mental processes that result in identity-building are probably universal. She said that this might be correct, but that people are still so mired in hokey ideas of universals to the point where it is more important to take an oppositional stance and maybe later worry about the universals that might and probably do exist. I happen to think she is wrong, and that the humanities and sciences need to stop behaving like babies and find a way to listen to one another, before they both render one anothers' thoughts to inaccessible or institutionally repellent that reonciliation becomes impossible for the next millennium.

The problems of what we believe and do and say, and what we ought to believe and do and say, cannot be solved with only science or postmodernist theory. The former problem solved solely by science lacks a great deal of sophisticated deconstructive equipment which profoundly elucidates the ideas being discussed. (Physicists my claim to understand Shakespeare, but more often than not this just means they can follow the plot and understand the dialogue; they rarely realize how poorly they understand the plays, just as humanities professors rarely grasp how ridiculous their understanding of basic scientific ideas is. As an English professor about Thermodynamics, and ask a physicist about the anxities that saturate notions of masculinity in Shakespeare's time, as say illustrated in Hamlet, and you get a blank look in both cases most of time.)

The latter problem, a question of morality, is similarly unanswerable by either science or postmodernism alone. We can use science, as you say, "to help predict the consequences of adopting certain values", but science not only can't tell us what is good, it also cannot help us figure out why we think this or that outcome is good or bad. To some degree it seems able to "strongly suggest that the things that we experience as good and right can only exist through a happy conjunction of our biological nature and physical surround[ings]", as you suggest, but even this is not a culture-neutral proposition. Good and bad are highly charged, culture-specific (or religion-specific, or philosophy-specific) values and science usually avoids engaging with questions involving these issues, although scientists themselves often fail to recognize that their own definitions of good and bad are either idiosyncratic, cultural, or otherwise limited.

I think this is where I part ways with you and Mr. Sagan... I think that scientific method and elements of postmodernist thought need to find a way to reconcile themselves, and that doing so would profoundly improve both. I think that the circus that this culture war between scientists and humanities professors has basically become is profoundly counterproductive and holding back both sides from the profound benefits that they actually would give to one another in a more respectful and reasonable exchange. Science and postmodernism are both inherently limited, and it's likely that both would do a lot better cooperating than they are doing now wasting time trying to discredit one another.

I'll have more to say about this later, but I am curious to see what kind of room for reconciliation you see between these two movements? I get from your sense that science is a more reliable starting point, a better neutral ground, and a more sensible side to take, and sometimes, believe me, I would express this opinion too. But you also seem profoundly more realist than me, likelier to simply accept the state of affairs being that the two are separated and it's unlikely any great unification is going to happenany time soon. So then, what kind of rehabilitation or improvement do you see as possible? And what are the likely results of that?

I'm off to see a movie... I need to get away from this computer and out of my house. Until you've had a chance to respond to all my endless drivel, I'm going to put off posting here and focus on my own blogs, and on getting some work on my novel done. See you on the far side of all this endless text!

Gord

Gord,

Chicken-legs? Please. I'm over 200 lbs of meat, gristle & man, baby. And many men say it isn't about the Bat Bulge, old chum, but I've learned better. It's always about the Bat Bulge.

Regardless, thanks for the instruction in Korean culture. There are other, longer, deeper, harder posts for me to consider, but for tonight this one will have to do. You're wise to remind me that my idea of a sly quip may find no resonance whatsoever with Ms. Cheong, so I shall endeavor to be more respectful when planning future mischief. I've had kimchi at the local Korean restaurants; normally it is served along with a medly of other dainties before the main meal arrives. It seems to serve roughly the same role in meals as the chips & salsa that precede the main course in a Mexican restaurant. Is that how things work in Korea, or is it reduced to an appetizer here because few Americans seem to like it?

My copy of Boyer is in hand; Pinker and Preston are on the way. This means my nightstand will have The Making of the Atomic Bomb, PC Hardware in a Nutshell, The Boxer Rebellion, How the Mind Works, Religion Explained, and The Amazing Spider-Man all bidding for attention.

Heaven. Adieu,

Marvin

Marvin,

Tonight I shall write but one post, for tomorrow I work early and I work long.

I want to turn to the question I left hanging last night, which is this: how does religion complicate life?

I have been thinking today about this question. I think there are two answers, one of which is my (commonly shared) post-hoc throwaway answer (which I now distrust) and one of which is more even-handed and thought out and which I think makes more sense.

It's important not to simply romanticize religion and say that it offers merely comfort, or a sense of power, or a supernatural being whom we can please to make life easier. Now, if certain religious concepts were actually true, such as that sacrificing a goat to the right ancestor or deity could ward off evil, or that dancing a particular ritual dance could positively affect the weather, then this discovery would profoundly affect human life.

But there are plenty of religious belief systems and practices that, instead of simplifying life, profoundly complexify it. For example, I do not think that the conflicting notions of an omniscient God, free will, and predestination actually simplify life for people who consider the notion seriously. Or, consider the life of a Hasidic Jew. These people live with such a buffer of strictures around the core rules of their faith that they can actually violate many minor (and in fact religio-historically and mystically, though not practically, inconsequential, because they are intended as buffers) rules without even approaching the important rules. The rules that supposedly govern a Hasidic Jew's actions are so complex they would actually be impossible to follow in a nonliterate society, because nobody could remember enough of them to observe them all. The same goes for caste systems; there are tremendous amounts of negotiation, organization, and cooperation (as well as oppression) and also a lot of explicit political structures that are necessitated by caste systems. While delimitation of the possibilities in one's imagination of the world does simplify it in some senses, the need to bolster the system that maintains the castes demands a lot of effort and energy from human beings. This effectively complexifies life, in my opinion, compared to how life would exist without it.

However, this is not to say that complexification is merely a symptom of literate religious systems with codified theologies. I don't think that more vague and generalized beliefs like those of the groups that Boyer discusses, who believe in things like witchcraft and ancestor worship, actually simplify life either. Certainly, the explanations that people provide for things are often pat: in one of Boyer's examples, a hut's roof collapsed at this or that time, a phenomenon the causality of which is explained in terms of witchcraft. (And yes, it would eventually have collapsed because the termites had gotten at it, and the person giving the explanation fully understands this, but seeks to explain the far more mysterious question of timing.) Very often the basic theories of these preliterate religious systems are not comforting at all: the spirits will screw with your life if you're not careful, or witches will kill you (or your loved ones, or cattle, or crops) by magic if you anger them, or what have you. Again, sacrificial placation would be reassuring if it came with guarantees, but I think it's reasonable to assert that most people aside from the religious specialists tend to think that sacrifices are maybe helpful... "if performed correctly", or "if the right ancestor or spirit is placated" seem to me to be theologically correct repetitions of the post-hoc excuses given by anyone when the desired effect is not obtained; but I think also universally human is a kind of doubt that rituals are really effective or promise anything. No farmer walks away from his crop expecting a good harvest because a ritual was performed correctly; he thinks instead that maybe, if he is lucky enough to have placated the right spirit, then his necessary hard work might bear fruit.

Even the case of the atheist who rants and spits and foams lives a life profoundly complexified by the fact that his belief system (a) posits a world where there is in fact no God like the one people around him worship, and (b) where this needs to be said in some (or all) situations. And while, like you, I feel as uncomfortable with such atheists as I do with extreme religious fanatics, I differ in that I don't think we can afford to exclude them from our definition of religion. After all, we are seeking to understand religion in all its tremendous variety, right? Rather than, say, just the bits we are comfortable with...
So we find adherents in literate religious/cultural traditions engaging in a kind of hypercomplexified systems-formulation, whether they are behavioral rules or theological systems or what have you. We find people in oral religious traditions often engaging in a kind of game-like interaction with the supernatural agents whose existence is theorized in their beliefs. And all of this activity seems to have appeared relatively natural to most humans who have ever lived. Which leads me to the error in what I wrote above: I claimed that "effectively complexifies life, in my opinion, compared to how life would exist without it". Imagining a culture without some form of religion does allow one to complain that religion complexifies life, but the comparison is misleading... because nowhere does human culture exist without it.

Thinking this over, I realized why the statement "religion complexifies life" cannot make sense. It's not because religion is universal, for that doesn't mean that religious ideas accurately reflect reality (and the variety of them across the earth suggest that they don't); but rather, it's just that in the light of all the assertions I've parroted from Boyer, religion probably doesn't actually complicate life in and of itself, as much as simply reflect the complication that permeates the basic and natural human conception of life. The very processes that make us perceive the possibility and impossibility of supernatural agents, the application of inferred social interaction strategies to those agents, the complex and multivalent inferential triggers that we encounter when confronted with the dead, and our understandings of ourselves achieved through unscientific (and necessarily because of the structure of human consciousness, imperfect) self-observation... these are the things that complexify life. One natural function of a mind seems to me to be that of simplification of the world which renders it manageable, but it does this only by using a tremendously complex, and paradox-ridden, cognitive system. The blips and the conflicts in the system give rise to the kinds of experiences that I've mentioned earlier in this thread of the discussion; and this emotional and inferential mishmash is what complexifies inner life. The outer complexification is simply a reflection of that. (And I would say that the same goes for the complexity of human culture, and that in most cases the line we draw here is very difficult to maintain when we look closely enough at a given cultural/religious combination.)



Wow, by the way, your formatting with things like this box is rather handsome. Next time I shall try to change the text and background colors!

As for evangelism, I think that the urge to share religious ideas probably goes as far back as the experience of having them. Otherwise how would the ideas spread. But evangelism as we know it seems improbable in a society without literate, codified theology. It seems that before that point, general ideas are somewhat more haphazard, and melding (as we see in vodoun, and in several newer African faiths, as well as in New Age where literacy and rebellion fuel a more rampant fusion of texts and traditions) is easier because it doesnèt tend to threaten anyone's particular interests. When you have literate theology, codified religion, then you get competition and then you have something more like the evangelical model we know, with its focus on "conversion". Conversion is likely only possible in literate theology-implicit religion, where something more akin to "transformation" is likely a better model for oral systems.

An example of this might be the oral system of cultural/ethnic identity, which in Korea I find a lot more fluid than I imagined. I am very often told I am like a Korean, almost Korean, or even sometimes "truly Korean inside". while part of this means I eat the right foods and think the right thoughts to trigger more "us" inferences than "not us" inferences in certain peoples' coalitional inference systems, it also reflects a kind of sense that to be Korean encompasses an essential state, one that I paradoxically seem to straddle for people for whom that state matters. I don't see myself straddling that state because generally ethnicity isn't a big part of my identity, but for many of my Korean friends it is. I would take some of the credit in my language study, study of things like Confucius before I came here, and also some of my own personal tendencies that fit well with Korean cultures, as well as simple things like having basically gotten the gist of how to use the gestural codes here and having taken to a basically Korean diet, but I must also give a great deal of credit for this ambiguousness to the natural fluidity of the system. Nobody looking rigidly at my genes or my facial features alone could ever say such a thing. But we rely on a massive number of inferences and features when understanding whatever learned human categories we think in.

Alright. That's it for tonight. Perhaps if I have time tomorrow, I shall turn my thoughts to your ideas on postmodernism and power. I have an intuition that some of these insights about the naivete of the common assumptions regarding how humans operate might bear some relevance to questions of power and theories of postmodernist reading. After all, it seems to me that the idea that the whole model of human minds and the results of their being structures as Pinker and Boyer describe seem to me to be directly related to the kinds of agency-poor, systemic, distributed models of the power process that we find among postmoderns, especially Foucault.

But for now, I need sleep!
Gord

Marvin,

It's after 1am, but I have tomorrow morning off. It's one of the glories of teaching at a University that your schedule isn't the same everyday. I have three 8:30am classes during the week, but I have Wednesday mornings off. Remind me that this is wonderful on Friday night, because I teach until after 8pm that night. Ah well...

I am sipping wine and munching on ddeok, which is a kind of rice cake with bean paste in the middle. My posts won't actually reach the internet until tomorrow morning, but I am going to write distinctly in the moment. My head feels massively expanded, mainly because I had a nap earlier in the evening and then read the rest of Pascal Boyer's book, referenced earlier in this discussion. It's truly, as one of the blurbs claims, a masterwork. Quite wonderful.
You should read this book! Soon! It's profoundly pertinent to this conversation.

The basic idea is that everything human comes from evolution (as we all should know); that religious ideas are ideas of a sort that arise because of our history as gregarious anthropocentric creatures whose minds complexly use inference systems to make sense of the world. Being gregarious, as well as creatures stuck surviving dangerous natural environments, we're predisposed to inferring things about predators when regarding nonhumans, and about motivations and coalition-building when regarding persons (which we intuitively regard as difference). We're specialized in looking at persons since that's what we're usually dealing with in our gregarious lives; so we tend to evaluate other persons as agents of sorts. Our inference systems normally flag things that violate our expectations in specific ways, and we tend to remember those violations clearest. We also have such complex systems of inference that sometimes bizarre cognitive effects arise from contradictions between inference systems. (Such as when some dies, and we sense that they are gone, but also that they are still around.) All of this predisposes us to be susceptible to building and to easily retaining ideas of "exceptional agents" such as gods, ghosts, ancestors, animal totems, and so on. Exceptional agents having exceptional powers and access to (gregariously) strategic information, something we seem to intuit about them, we then construct ritual systems based again on naturally intuited gregarious practices of exchange and coalition-building; we sacrifice, devote prayers, and so on for the placation and salutation of the special agents. Then, in literate (specialized) societies, a lot of weird transformations related to the politics that evolve in larger state systems (and the competition that becomes likely).

That's the Reader's Digest version. The basic point is that the way our minds work is not fully accessible to our own conscious self-observation, so that a lot of what we intuit about the world, ourselves, and even about religion itself, is post-hoc explanation. (And examples abound outside of religion too... one I quite enjoyed was the way that both adults and even children over about age ten tend to use, unconsciously, simplified syntax when talking to little children. When you ask someone about it, they give an answer which, only when you think about it, you realize most people have never consciously formulated: that kids are like adults minus some characteristics. We unconsciously intuit it, and it's not quite as true as we think. (Boyer provides many examples of how childrens' moral, inferential, and other abilities far outstrip what we imagine them capable of.) But the most important thing is the idea that the whole (evolution-determined) structure of human consciousness simply makes religious ideas likely to arise and become popular, because of inferential tendencies, evolved cognitive strategies, and tendential emotional experiences.

In this sense, then, your question, "Are all religions sufficiently similar that a term 'religious language' can presume to describe all of them?" can be answered in the affirmative, as long as you can accept the idea that religion generally tends to involve supernatural agents, ritual practices, and explanations of human experiences and states (which are sometimes externalized because humans imperfectly understand their own internal, under-the-hood experiences). This is a definition of religion I can accept, and which doesn't make my head hurt too much. Granted, you are right when you write, contrasting with the religions of the book:

I tend to think of cannibal Neolithic cavemen and Aztec human sacrifices and Borneo headhunters and Easter Island and Pollen-Boy and those beautiful cave-paintings in France and Stonehenge and Ainu bear-sacrifice, too, and I think: these things are not all the same. Not unless by "God" one knowingly refers to the dank and mortal crevices of the psyche.

The thing I like about Boyer's definition of religion is that it is based upon the mechanics of consciousness which give rise to religious ideas, finds basic templates underlying those ideas and practices, and therefore escapes the problem of many heterogenous products by instead analyzing the processes that go on within the homogenous source.

Okay, on to some of your comments. First, you should not feel badly about your poetry/prose comment. If I were not a poetry-prose specialist, I think I would probably have used the same sort of reference myself. I understood the gesture, anyway. It does raise the question, especially in the light of Boyer's fairly-well-supported, and very-well-argued (by Boyer, not me) ideas above,
where is the room for "the prosaic" in human production.

In fact, I think this is where the idea of religion and language gets into trouble. Religion and truth are, remember, concepts that did not exist before literate, pluralistic societies. To look at one of Boyer's favorite examples, the Fang people of West Africa believe in people who have an extra organ in their abdomens, an organ which flies off at night and sucks victims' blood. They believe in witchcraft and magical attacks and ancestors who need to be placated. If you tell them about the Truine Christian God, this idea strikes them as bizarre, probably comparably bizarre to the way a dedicated Western atheist understands it. Boyer tells an anecdote of how a Catholic theologian dismissed the Fang peoples' ideas of witchcraft and this magical organ as nonsense, and how he wanted to make a comment to the Catholic about pots and kettles.

Of course, I agree with you that the specifics of religion matter. Child sacrifice is not reconcilable with a peaceful egalitarian society, nor is the sacrifice of virgin women. An enlightened religious practice and theology is a wonderful thing... even though human practice almost never follows human theology and morals (an issue also discussed in the book, in terms of a human tendency toward "theological correctness" which does not match practice... a necessity of being gregarious and needing to demonstrate common belief to establish group identity and ensure cooperation). So even to some one can reduce theology to literature without reducing religion itself to mere literature.

However, one can find a unified definition of religion by looking at the source of religions ideas, practices, and beliefs, which is very definitely us. And even as a dedicated atheist myself, I can testify to the power of the cognitive and inferential systems in the mind. Before reading this book I was quite embarrassed by the fact that, occasionally in moments of extreme duress, I do something rather like praying. When I lost my wallet and all of my money in a foreign country one night, I begged for help. I had no clear sense of who I was beseeching help from (although as far as I recall it was not the God I was raised to believe in) nor how the help could come to me. In fact, I didn't believe that prayer could help me, nor did I believe that the prayer had worked any effects the next day when an American fellow befriended me and gave me, out of compassion, exactly the amount of money I needed to get to where I had to go to get my travelers' cheques refund. I was hesitant to even mention this experience in the past, knowing that people like my girlfriend at the time (a dedicated Christian) would have told me, "See? That's evidence that you do believe in God!" when I know that in fact I do not. However, I do share the very human feeling in moments of extreme pain, stress, or fear that there may be invisible agents with whom I can bargain and from whom I can secure aid. It makes sense, seeing how I have all these structures predispoing me to understand my environment and needs as something resolveable through gregarious interactions. That terrible, rainy night, my girlfriend in the hotel waiting for me, as I ran through the muddy road hoping for what I knew was impossible, I turned outward for help, just as people have done for millennia. If I had not had the scaffolding of religious experience to have rejected, nor the psychological theories I could use to attribute this (merely, and thus erroneously) to my own suscpetibility to stress and worry, so that mere stress might have provoked reversion to behaviours (and indoctrination) from my childhood, and so on, perhaps my experience would have been something like the experience of some ancestor of ours, far back, running from a predator in the jungle or hoping that his mate survive some terrible illness.

That means that your comment about poetry is far more accurate, perhaps, than I allowed you credit for. For, in my view, poetry is precisely the way that we express things that don't fit into practical language. It means that the expression of radical experience, experiences which are somewhat baffling and confusing precisely because they imply the potential (and it follows by way of human thinking, probable) existence of invisible, powerful agents.

Which doesn't make solving our little conundrum about religious language any easier, mind you. If we accept this sense of what religion is, then I think we run into trouble with the following passage of yours:

So to be religious language it must be a jargon that discusses religious subjects, but it must also be a jargon that discusses religious subjects in a manner identifiably religious (as opposed to scientific or critical, say). So what is this "religious manner?" I'm thinking it must be a manner in which some set of religious propositions are taken to be given as true. Some text or tradition must be held as above question. But even that doesn't quite work, because one can approach religion in a mystical fashion that explicitly denies the truth of religious words while accepting on faith that a worthwhile truth will emerge from religious practice itself.

To accept those propositions is fine, if you're only talking about religion as it occurs in literate, specialized societies, and only if you accept the orthodoxy version of the stories. The history of those major world religions, including even Buddhism, says Boyer, is full of radical revolts in religious practice and discourse, though. The establishment of the religion seeks to make the doctrine dominate and to marginalize the localized practices... but it only succeeds provisionally, and temporarily, it seems.

I think this could bring me to your comment about religious language: that

Incidentally, I think people do believe in magic bathrooms, but for such a belief to take off it needs a more well-established religious background to give it oomph... A bathroom that's magic for no reason at all is a bad meme. A bathroom that's magic because the Pope once shat there is, on the other hand, a perfectly acceptable meme for many, I think.

Boyer's work not only accords with this idea but also explains why it might be so. Why would one of these ideas appeal to us and the other not? Because something violating our expectations for no reason doesn't intuitively make sense to us. Bathrooms are bathrooms, that is, dirty places that in fact we intuitively find defiling and bad. Urination in holy places is forbidden even when there is no such thing as a specifically marked-ff bathroom area. However, something that violates our expectations because of the involvement of invisible, powerful, and interested agents (like gods, spirits, or their representatives) makes intuitive sense to us.

One thing to remember - something that complicates all of this profoundly - is that the line between religion and other basic human modes of meaning-creation have only schismed very recently in human history. I bring this up to simply point out that religious language is like all other human language, in that it purports to state something about the world... it purports to state "the truth". So does culture, though. When Koreans state that they are of "one blood", is that a religious proposition? It's certainly mythic, given the fact that Japanese, Chinese, and even Arab (I am told) occupations of this land occurred over its long history.

Secular language, that is, language that is expressly secular in a sense that implies the negation of religious langauge, is a new invention. How old would you say it is?

You argue:

Phenotypically speaking, then, I hypothesize that we evolved to believe in whatever best suits our needs and feelings at a given point in time. Gods have traditionally been easy to squeeze into that psychological niche, and whenever we discover something new and complex and frightening we always try to dumb it down a little so that it will be of use to us. We've evolved to work within simple authoritative (if not authoritarian) systems, hence our tendency to create and destroy little gods (celebrities, ideologies, proverbial generalizations) for ourselves almost at a whim. For the study of language, to me this means that we approach religious language not as something different and separate from secular language, but as a kind of "larger than life" instance of language generally, where the use of language to define reality and to assert or seize authority is written in great big letters. Studying this, one then turns to deciphering the less flamboyant "small print" language of "secular" speech.

This last part makes sense, but I don't think you need to believe the first part to agree with the second. Boyer's arguments about ritual also suggest a kind of "larger than life" version of general obsessive practices common to all human beings. But maybe we're not so mercenary as you suggest? If we were, wouldn't we just sacrifice a piece of rice to the gods in exchange for a good harvest? Wouldn't we design a god who didn't require massive commitments of time, adherence to a complicated life-regimen, and so on?" This is not to ask "Why would the gods require a certain kind of sexual practice restriction?" because that's so universal (not the specifics, but the presence of some form of restrictions) that I'd say it has less to do with religion and more to do with our own gregarious instincts. Wouldn't our rituals be profoundly cheaper and faster and easier? Wouldn't Sunday Mass be unnecessary? Wouldn't we not need to pray daily? For after all, doesn't God supposedly know our thoughts already? Why should we need to express them in prayer?

I think the answer to this question lies above, in my anecdote about my own actions during extreme stress: people appeal to unseen agents because that's a human thing to do, not because religions teach them to. And when we ask them, they say they do it because of their religion, but that's a throwaway answer, not even consciously formulated. The tendency toward the practice almost certainly precedes learning any specific models of those unseen agents. (And kids asking invisible friends for help is likely another expression of the same process. Kids normally find a moderating influence in the less-worried attitudes of their invisible friends, Boyer reports.)

What you wrote about the two countervailing dynamics in the human mind is interesting: the creative and the simplifying, but the real question is, why would creativity have to be invoked to describe the world? I mean, if we were naturally all "hard realists", we would never even think to invoke our creativity to come up with explanations of the world. I think that the notions we have about gods and deities and powerful ancestors watching and getting involved in our lives is one of the simplest explanations that humans in general are capable of coming up with, if they have access only to naive (ie. pre-literate, non-externally-formulated, intuitive) physical, psychological and social models of humanity and the world. I think, therefore, that the reason so many explanations are so vague is because the questions that provoke them have never been consciously considered before; most of what people do is feel, and then when you ask them why they do X, they spit out the theologically correct answer (even if it doesn't fit with their feelings completely). Or, if there is no theological literature, as in the case of many of Boyer's interviews,
people concoct their own explanations which vary widely within even the same community. This kind of dynamic would be a sort of creativity under duress, which necessarily produces vague and untenable results... but over time some of them are powerfully appealing to the human psyche, and therefore are "effective" memetically: they will spread and affect populations over time, and become the foundations of local religion (or of literate theologies). This is, if we accept Boyer's model.

I realize that I sound a lot like a Boyer flunky. You know, I've just read the book now, so I'm going to need a few days before my mind comes up with anything like criticism of it. Right now, it all seems to be creditable and it all seems to make sense to me. Do you see any holes in the argument as I've outlined it here, and expanded upon it?

Finally, about power, your question (or was it mine?) is even more important here: who is trying to seize power when religious language is used? It of course depends on whom you're asking about: the religious orthodoxies in literate and specialized societies who use politics to secure competitive theological advantage in social settings, thereby assuring the survival not only of the ideas but of their religious specialists' relevance (and income)? Or the common practice of the people which often enough exists in absence of a codified theology (in pre-literate societies) or without regard to the codified theology (in literate societies)?

You're right that it must depend on the speaker. However, if we approach the idea of power from a Foucauldian sense, power is a distributed process that is under the control of nobody, and everybody is subject to it. This sounds a lot like the "religious" world that we live in as humans. Boyer's process suggests it's basic features of human nature and the particular algorithms involved in the process of a human mind perceiving and understanding the world that religious ideas arise, take hold, and spread. No doubt when fundamentalists use theological language to grab at political reins, it's an attempt at overt power-grabbing. But the bigger process of power - the process by which the world we live in is outlined, defined, and delineated - seems to be something that goes on cooperatively, under the hoods. To some degree, it's about humans finding themselves a place in the world, a set of relationships with special agent beings they tend to believe exist (relationships which are mechanically and instinctually operate on similar lines to those between humans and other humans). This would mean people finding a place in the power-process, more than anything. And sometimes that power-procss is extremely complicated. Not all religions allow the possibility of being a Sunday Christian-like person. Several religious demand continual ritual practice for aid against witchcraft, or frequent (relatively expensive) sacrifice, or rather profound (to us) restriction of movement or action. Evangelization is one example, but there are more, I think. I will try later to formulate something more explicit about that and post it.

(By the way, the Mormons in Korea are famous for being handsome and for speaking Korean well. You very often see two young white men walking about in formal clothing - suits, or dress clothes anyway - with backpacks. They learn Korean rapidly and supposedly can converse pretty well, and they eat the local food and so on. They're forbidden to date the locals, but I have heard that many of them do eventually quit their mission in order to marry Korean girls. Anyway, there are a lot of them. Funnily enough, the kind of restrictions on their lifestyle are actually comparable to the Confucian ones levied on young Koreans - even young Christian Koreans, for Korean readings of the Bible as I've encountered them are profoundly Confucian. Is that religious or cultural? The line blurs once more. Which suggests, of course, that our own Western - and equally appropriative - reading of this Oriental text called the Bible is probably terribly culture-driven.)

This passage is one I need to think about:

The problem for the non-fundamentalist theist is how to accommodate the world while retaining both logical and theological credibility. I strongly suspect it can't be done except by acquiescing to some kind of popular conventional wisdom; in the West that would be the belief that all religions are valid as long as they embrace certain basic beliefs about human rights, dignity, and so on. Credibility comes not from logical or theological consistency, necessarily, but from the security blanket of agreeing with the prevailing mood.

... and I also want to think more about the idea of how religions complicate life. In the Boyer text, the non-participation of many people in major religions is due to the fact that theologicially literate cults (like Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths) tend, in the process of establishing themselves as major religions, to weaken their immediate and practical relevance to peoples' lives, to reduce the numbers of activations of the inference systems that are activated by religious experience, and thereby reduce the incentive of participation; so some people dive full force into the religion and many other people simply return to other, simpler forms of adherence to their religious ideas and intuitions, or sometimes rebel.

I'm also going to put off the question of globalization and cultural erosion again, to another time. It's 2:30 am, and time for me to get a little more sleep after a nice refreshing shower.

Take care,

Gord

PS: Yes, I would love to have that setting that inserts line breaks turned back on. I really am used to that on my own blog and it would let me post with far greater ease. Thanks Marvin!
PPS: Ooops, double post. I was posting in a PC Bang with a bad connection and tried to delete it but then had to go. I think I've deleted it now.

Marvin,

You're doing a great job here keeping the conversation going, despite my own relative absence here recently. My computer's finally back to life, and I should have a connection in my house soon, so when that happens it should be easier to keep up with things here, at least until January... Thanks for all the great work here. It looks good, well, it will when I finally have enough fonts reinstalled to see it as it should look!

There was something I said about Korea in my last post on barbershops which it struck me as being profoundly generalizing and which also pointed to a possible problem both in our discussion of religion and religious language, and the treatment of religion that is provided by Boyer (in the book that I just finished tonight).

I wrote that in Korea, a man:

needn't [necessarily] get a haircut or a date to get access to sex or marital life... the possibility of an arranged marriage is still extant, after all (and not considered completely absurd, though it is seen as old-fashioned).

I was thinking about how representative views on marriage, and normativity of types of marriage, are here in my experience. I can't say anything for certain because, for one thing, I am a foreigner. Even though some Koreans love to explain their culture, it's impossible to get a really wide-range sense of a set of values that cross the range because people are, it seems to me, constantly checking themselves in what they tell a foreigner. Similarly, it's exceedingly easy to get dog soup in any city I've been to in Korea, but many Koreans I know talk about it as if it's a horribly barbaric food... and even the ones who like it are usually silent on the topic, even when I bring it up, until they know for a fact that I do indeed occasionally eat and enjoy dog soup. Some friends have remained silent on the topic until they ate it with me, at which point a whole series of reminiscences poured out, as if held in check until that moment, even though we'd discussed it rather directionlessly before then.

And not all of my (Korean!) friends like dog soup, the public baths, or the idea of arranged marriage. I can think of one male and one female friend who have talked about the notion of arranged marriage with me in anything but a negative tone. I knew a young woman who mentioned that her mother was pressuring her to hurry up and marry, for she was nearing the age that in Korea is considered that of spinsterhood (age 28, which 26 or 27 by Western reckoning...). Her mother had actually arranged for a young bachelor doctor to come around, and had decided that after all, after years of saying, "Never marry a short man," that maybe this short man would be okay. This came at a time when my friend was studying hard for exams that would determine her professional career path for life, and I can't help but think that part of the message was, "This job stuff is less important than marriage. Come on, girl. If you can't meet nice boy, let's find you one..." Anyway, that friend of mine, who is not an unattractive woman by Korean standards, explained to her mom that she was certain she could, on her own, find herself a good marriage prospect.

(Then again, you can see on my equally attractive friend Sun Hwa's blog that because of the current economic conditions in Korea, her mother advised her to get her career together and get married later.)

I know a man here in Korea who is even worse with women than I am. He's never had a girlfriend and he's almost my age; part of the likely reason is that he studied and studied and put off joining the "adult" world of the workforce until just last year. This meant he enjoyed a lot of free time to study, improve his English, and watch every movie ever made. But it meant no girlfriend because he was always broke and unemployed, not a great marriage prospect. (And as one of my female Korean friends claimed, no matter how laid-back a Korean woman is, marriage is always something she considers, even just speculatively, when she thinks about getting involved with a man.) Once he talked with me about the possibility that his mother might arrange for him to marry a nice girl. He wouldn't really know her very well, but she would be looking for a husband, and he for a wife, and they would do the standard thing: go on a couple of dates, gauge comfort levels, and decide whether to consider marriage or not.

Another woman (whom in fact I dated for a while) expressed to me her views on marriage as something of a conundrum. Being Korean, she said, she's been cultured to worry about when she will marry, about being able to do it well within the allotted time frame. And yet, she also is deeply committed to resisting the pressure to marry soon (she's 28 by Korean reckoning now) and to travel abroad more.

What I find interesting here is that there is a profound interest in the age of someone's marriage, now, much more than in who one marries. Of course there remains a long-ingrained sense of status correlated to the wealth or prestiage of one's spouse... one should try to marry well, which is I suppose familiar enough in our own culture, though I think it's far more profoundly accentuated in the gamut of concerns here. Marrying at about age 28 for women, or 30 for men, is something that is just assumed normative. My Korean age is 30, and when students discover that I currently lack a wife they often express either hopes for my speedy marriage, or their condolences on discovering the terrible and sad news.

It's true that the younger generation is such that it views arranged marriages as "old-style",,, and yet, this shouldn't be confused with a kind of "liberalization" in the way we think. After all, the younger generation (people of about age 23 now) seem far more rigid in their obeisance to the rule that dictates early marriage. Maybe it's just that I tend to meet unusual people my own age, and very average people of the younger set, though.

Still, all of this points to one of the most important things to consider whenever discussing any massive-scale human thing, from culture to warfare to religion: that generalizations endanger one's commentary's ability to reflect on the actuality of what is being discussed. In all of the areas of human activity, there are things that are universal, such as a profound concern with the rules governing sexual and domestic partnership, for example. However, when we look at one religion, or one culture, we tend to generalize. But the range of different views I mentioned above
is indicative that at every level of scrutiny, there are multiple value sets working, competing, and being talked about and practiced.

My readings in Boyer suggest this is true even at the individual level. His writings draw a lot on the work of Pinker and his discussions of "intuitive congition". I haven't read How the Mind Works but it's not difficult to get enough knowledge from extrapolating out of The Language Instinct and from the Boyer text. The basic idea is that a lot of what makes us think and feel certain ways is going on in a place in our mind inaccessible to us consciously, that is, "under the hood". A lot of the architecture of this would have been structured by that slow and patient genetic engineer called evolution. So people are, for example, able to intuit when they see a bird that other birds of that species have the same insides as this specimen; that the bird probably flies, lays eggs, and eats food like other birds similar in size and shape; that it tends to move about and it tends to have certain "goals" that motivate its movements. Our ability to inductively figure out things is even more profoundly complex when we are computing out our understanding of other humans, because we our intuitive systems are getting activated continually to pick apart motivations, cooperative or antagonistic alliances, emotions, linguistic meanings, possibility of sexual or other access to resources, and so on.

Which translates sometimes to people giving one account for something, which in societies with literate theologies is usually right from scripture, while in cultures without literate theologies varies from individual to individual. Very often if these "answers" are questioned, they turn out to be based on very vague feelings. We don't know why, for example, most cultures find human corpses so contaminatory. Well, actually, we do... we experience it when we see them. We are horrified and revulsed. But why? We talk effusively about the horror of death. Cantonese people say there's a bad air that comes from corpses. Other groups give other explanations. But in the long run of history, human corpses would have been profoundly contaminatory. They would have been dangerous. That's not all of the reasons why, but I shall leave it to Boyer to explain far better than me why corpses are horrifying. My main point is that the explanations we provide often depend on the presuppositions implicit in the questions posed to us... and so often we get explanations for things which people have never actually bothered to enunciate (even privately, to themselves) an explanation for.

Which means we must profoundly distrust whatever assumptions we put into our questions - without letting this cripple us and prevent further questioning - and we must also regard a widely ranging set of explanations with some delicacy. I think that in Korea today there are a profoundly varying degree of differing perspectives on marriage customs, in terms of how one can acceptably go about finding a mate. (Why Korea FriendFinder
should be any less absurd than a traditional matchmaker I cannot fully explain, but it's an absurdity foreigners seem to think exists too.) However, one thing that has not changed despite a major cultural upheaval, is the fact that the age at which one marries is of profound importance (even claims that it is not so important are enunciated as a kind of resistance to the pressure in most cases).

This suggests that religions, and religious language too, also likely contain a bewildering number of self-contradictions between actual belief-practice and enunciated belief-practice. Somewhere you addressed my the question of whether culture co-opts religion as much as religion co-opts culture. You're right to see it as a kind of dance that goes on endlessly, but it's not anything like a stately courtly dance. It's a disco full of all kinds of movements, some violent and wild, some smooth and orderly, some following prescribed patterns and some fighting to pretend (or remember) that no rules exist. And each one of us contains within one of the couples in this disco. That's how variant I see things as here, varying on the individual scale. Perhaps that's why communication, involving costs and tradeoffs, is the value I addressed directly in my first post on the subject.

One last thing: I am beginning to wonder where it is in any given individual that the "religious" part of life ends and the cultural begins. For us atheists the simplest answer should be apparent, shouldn't it? "The is nothing religious in my life", we like to say. And yet we attend rituals like weddings, funerals, and other things that are commonly involved with and connected to human religious practice. We feel a lot of the same emotions as the faithful, and according to Boyer, regardless of what they actually say (that is, what they say when asked to comment, and what they provide, often as an expected answer), religious and nonreligious people share a lot of the same emotions, sentiments, and experiences at such rituals: grief and anger and pain and yet also a strong sense of some change at a funeral; a weird but clear sense that the couple in a wedding shall from that day on be treated differently; that after a bar mitzvah, a boy is somehow different in his community membership. We justify the ritual on grounds of tradition or psychology, but our experiences internally suggest that we're just doing the same thing as the religious people: offering prescribed exegesis on what is equally profound and inaccessible to us, this mysterious experience that is what Boyer argues gives rise to human religious practice the world over.

So... I shall end this with a question and resolve to answer it myself later, but also invite you to try answer it: what elements of your life would you characterize as "religious" despite your atheism? How much of your secularized commentary do you actually believe, and how much of it must you admit is explanation for some basically mysterious human experience? (And by the way, I am not trying to trick you here. I think religious explanations are likely less accurate than psychological ones, but that all explanations of something we cannot actually self-observe are suspect... and that the best place to look for explanations of basic human experiences that seem inexplicable is in the realm of evolution.)

I look forward to your response.

Fondly,
Gord

Marvin,

• I wasn't looking at the bat bulge. The chicken legs were far too distracting.


• The rigidity of the hairshops in my area are far from anything like Commie barbershops as I imagine commie barbershops to appear. It's more a distributed, self-enforced, quasi-Confucian form of systemic rigidity. In Korea one often discovers that there is in fact a previously unimagined right way of doing things that one may never have even encountered if one had never come here. And yet, one is informed, it is the right (read only way of doing that given thing. Furthermore, it's not so much enforced by women as women are used to ensure the system remains intact. After all, one needn't get a haircut or a date to get access to sex or marital life... the possibility of an arranged marriage is still extant, after all (and not considered completely absurd, though it is seen as old-fashioned). Further, banish any images of men forced by women into the tepid pools... they quite enjoy it, and for that matter so do I! The public baths are quite comfortable and when you lack a tub at home (the shower shoots water onto the tiled floor, so there's not even a shower curtain in my bathroom) it can be very relaxing to sit into a bath. The barbers in that location are all men, by the way... but you have to go before 9:00 pm to get service there.


• I think the above scene is in fact the Korean equivalent of the barbershop, the analogue you're wondering about. It's a male homosocial environment, anyway... all men, men naked and men in T-shirts and men enjoying freezing water and hot water and mud and all kinds of other bathing pleasures (though this segregation by sex apparently only dates back to the appearance of Christianity here, I'm told, and before that it was co-ed... ah, sometimes I really wish that particular change had never happened). However, the men don't usually sit and chat, gossip, or complain in the baths. They watch news on a big TV, or sit in the quiet, but I don't notice a lot of chatter. Remember, public life in Korea for those over, say, 40, is still highly segregated to begin with... men work and the bulk of the women in their offices are "girls", literally young young women who are politically, power-wise, and otherwise unthreatening and somewhat irrelevant to them. Men go on drinking nights together, for example, and when men bond it's something that sounds a bit extreme to us... drinking together, falling asleep together, off to the bathhouse in the morning, and then eating some hangover soup in the morning. That's how old guys become close friends here. Maybe in some other venue, they talk. Or maybe they talk more when a hairy white man is nowhere to be seen. Certainly I've seen groups of women in the (fully clothed) spa downstairs holding long and intricate discussions about things. One group was debating a whole list of (incomprehensible to me) things that each of them deemed more or less sexy. But the men just talked a lot less there. I think some of the old idea that talk and chatter is womens' stuff, while men are best kept at reprimanding and demanding and explaining to the less experienced (and especially to young and pretty women, something I noticed one of my friend's father and uncle doing once on a mountainside), is something that maybe does still have some currency here.

Let me know if you want some Korean phrases for your next visit to Miss Cheong. The best one would be to call her "agashi", which is like calling "Miss". I bet she would be shocked and maybe happily surprised. And yeah, I would DEFINITELY ask about the man in the back and whether he actually works of just acts like he's a nasty boss. But you're better to ask her quietly. If you ask her loudly and he hears, she is obligated to preserve his appearance in public (what we often refer to as "face"). I think she is thus obligated anyway, but she might be more willing to be honest about him (whatever that may mean) if it's low-key. I also wanted to ask... does she sound like she is from Korea? If so, she may well think he's a good boss. I know people here who work 7 days a week, sometimes 10 hours a day, for pittance wages. If she's from here she may well be making a lot more money than she ever did in Korea, and forced to meet much fewer demands.

Swift service is a bonus, too. And you could also ask Cheong to let you try some kimchi, if you've not enjoyed it before. It's worth trying, as long as you have it with some rice.

Gord,

• My tights are my own business, and I'll thank you not to stare at the Bat-Bulge.
• I guess you're right, I shouldn't complain. It sounds like you have some kind of state-controlled commie barbershops over there...maybe Joe McCarthy was right? Or maybe this is how women have traditionally turned the tables on men in that patriarchal society: "Men have all they power, but if they want a haircut so they can get a date and get laid, I'm gonna make them stand naked and awkward together in a tepid bath before making them grovel for a decent coif; yeah, me and matchmaker, we OWN this burg, that's a mofo fact."
• Or am I reaching?
• My gut tells me that the barbershop I described in my "before" scenario must have analogues in other cultures. When you're bathing naked with loads of other men, is there any contingent of old guys who seem always to be there, talking about how the world is going to hell and who went fishing last weekend? If not, where do the old men hang out and complain on a Saturday morning?

I think I shall stick it out for a while with Cheong. I'm curious. I know I could go find another old fashioned white-boy barber shop, but that would be boring. I like your idea of having some fun with the change. There's a conference I have to attend in three weeks, and that will give me a good reason to get a trim before long. The great temptation, of course, will be to ask in a loud voice "Does that guy in the back ever work, or does he just come out once every half-hour to scowl at you women?"

And besides, unless the local Korean community shows up in droves, I suspect I'll be able to get a swift trim on the weekend for the first time in years.

...that at least one person has read this blog besides us! For that he gets a link! He deserves better, but until we get that grant from the International Conspiracy of Chapbook Publishers (ICCP? iCCP? Eeek!) it's the best we can do to thank him for spreading kind lies on our behalf.

He's a fun guy, but don't lick his dog...you don't know where it's been. Check out a violently executed plan.

Gord, thanks for a great post. I can see I'm going to have to be careful about letting you get all liquored up near computers—you like to pick fights! :-) Nevertheless I think I will toss up a link for 2blowhards on the grounds that they have a really cool blog regardless of what Friedrich Von B. thinks of the PoMos. For now I'll only say that my problem with his historical analysis of French PoMography isn't that it's right or wrong, but that such an historical analysis must of necessity be insufficient. FvB's analysis can be 100% correct and yet not confirm or discredit any particular PoMo idea. When I see arguments like it levied against postmodernism, I wonder how willing the arguer would be to permit Nietzsche's argument against Christianity—which runs on largely similar historical/psychological lines—pass as correct.

Incidentally, I think people do believe in magic bathrooms, but for such a belief to take off it needs a more well-established religious background tom give it oomph. Like the water of Lourdes or the healing properties of kissing the image of Jesus that appeared in a tortilla. A bathroom that's magic for no reason at all is a bad meme. A bathroom that's magic because the Pope once shat there is, on the other hand, a perfectly acceptable meme for many, I think.

Anyway, I can see I'm going to have to work harder at thinking things through before I post them. For instance, my comment that "we evolved to believe in whatever best suits our needs and feelings at a given point in time" totally omits the creative aspect of myth- (and religion-) making behavior. The image in my head is of two—for simplicity's sake—countervailing tendencies in the human animal. Plus all the other complexities introduced by social dynamics, family dynamics, individual psychological weirdnesses.... I don't have the professional knowledge to lay them all out, but I can imagine a constellation of forces at play. And I'm hoping for the sake of my ability to write bloggable essays that these forces can be generalized to some degree into two.

One, which I alluded to before, is the need to reduce or simplify the complexities of the world so that we can deal with them in an efficient manner. We want knowledge that will fit in nutshells. No matter how sophisticated your understanding of a subject, it is very difficult to get anyone to take your understanding seriously unless you can distill it to a 10 minute PowerPoint presentation. Five minutes without the A/V equipment.

The other tendency is the creative one, where people seem to pull all kinds of crazy-seeming things out of the air to either explain or adorn the perceived universe. Why invent a cult where the men grow boars' tusks to outrageous lengths in a competition to see who can garner the most honor by sacrificing the toothiest hog? Really? But then, why do I read a magazine devoted to the occultish art of turning one's computer into fetishistic token of geek manhood? What's the difference?

You are correct to assert that religion is a lot more complicated than I made it seem. You've also raised some questions which I shall try to answer.

Who seizes power when using religious language? I think it must depend on the speaker. There's a sense in which to invoke the divine is inherently to lay its mantle about one's shoulders...or, failing that, to presume to be in a position to decide on whose shoulders the mantle might belong. Even language of submission to the divine generally carries the implied assumption that one is, if nothing else, superior to those barbarians and apostates who refuse to submit to the proper authority. But then there are also cases of cultures and tribes where secular and sacred are so totally intertwined that this assumption that religion is about class or factional or even individual power seems gauche and ridiculously simple, too wrapped up in Marxism and postmodernism, somehow, to feel credible when looking at the long dawn of human cultural development. But then I must remind myself that when I use the word power I'm not just talking about conventional politics in the contexts of state and class (though neither am I excluding these things); I'm trying for something closer perhaps to id, ego, and superego, though not those specific things either. Something biological in origin without which culture and religion have no point.

Which leads to another question, about whether religion co-opts culture or whether it's the other way around. It seems clear to me that both things are constantly happening in a kind of ongoing dance. I'm going to suggest that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all offer great examples of religions that tend to co-opt culture. Nazi Germany and the American Republican Party, by contrast, are great examples of culture co-opting the symbols and mannerisms of religion for its own ends. But these are extreme examples filtered out by my preoccupations from the fact that religion and culture are not two separate and discrete things. To talk of one thing co-opting the other is to suggest that the two things are naturally at odds, but this separation of culture and religion is really a recent thing in terms of human development.

Here's a question: when does this separation occur? During the so-called "Axial Age?" Or how about this: imagine primitive man wandering across the globe during thousands of years of prehistory, changing only very slowly his beliefs and behaviors. A belief-system that reached stability in Mesopotamia, say, finds itself on an island in the subtropics by way of India and Indochina. Things begin to change...how? Familiar symbols and practices seem to not quite fit the new locale. A tension is born: between religion, the faith of the fathers, and between culture, the observations and opinions of the present generation. If beliefs and practices change, does it make sense to talk in terms of one thing co-opting another? Or does it make more sense to talk about revelation? When in the local shaman (or Buddha or Christ) the tension between established religion and extant culture causes something to break, and from the breach a new flower grows, are we still talking about one thing co-opting another?

Pause. It sounds like Boyer's on the right track. I shall invest in reading some Boyer and Pinker in the near future. Perhaps that will help keep my thoughts from wandering all over the map. I think you're right to suppose that the question is not so much about religion as about us (hello, again, Nietzsche!). Does that mean I need to yield the floor to professional anthropologists and neurologists? Maybe, but where's the fun in that?

About atheists: yes, some are ornery and believe that religion as a topic ought to be more or less anathema. However if you want to understand human beings and human culture, you kind of have to talk about religion. And want to understand it, not just badmouth it. So, when I talk about atheists in general, I'm excluding that particular breed. Their attitude has little to offer us in the current context. Just as when I talk about theists of different faiths who manage to get along well, I'm more or less excluding the radical and racial fundamentalists that exist within the various traditions. It seems to me that the reasoning of the fundamentalist is internally consistent, even if it is at odds with the rest of the world. The problem for the non-fundamentalist theist is how to accommodate the world while retaining both logical and theological credibility. I strongly suspect it can't be done except by acquiescing to some kind of popular conventional wisdom; in the West that would be the belief that all religions are valid as long as they embrace certain basic beliefs about human rights, dignity, and so on. Credibility comes not from logical or theological consistency, necessarily, but from the security blanket of agreeing with the prevailing mood.

Back to an earlier point, about our need to simplify and adorn the universe simultaneously. As you say, "religious thinking profoundly complicates life sometimes." But it also profoundly simplifies it. Think of the contrast between the practice of meditation and the mountains of books and sutras that try to explain it; or of the contrast between "love thy neighbor" and the mountains of books that try to explain away the problem of evil or which try to explain that sometimes loving thy neighbor means making war on him. Taken to heart, meditation and the practice of love and kindness can throw into sharp relief the byzantine rituals and competitions of daily secular life and give us some much needed distance from all the things that make demands on our time and bodies and egos. (An atheist that denies this fact is, I think, shunning the empirical evidence he otherwise would urge us to embrace.) A religion that tells us our caste and narrows our expectations provides us with a radically simpler world than a belief-system that tells us that all our options are wide-open on the condition that we are industrious and clever enough to take advantage of them. The system (and world) one prefers may be largely a function not just of upbringing but also of which flavor of ontological hard-wiring one has inherited.

What I would be interested in hearing more about are the ways in which religion complicates our lives. Are these complications a product of religion itself, or are they more a product of religious thinking trying to adjust to complications already present in the broader world? The most obvious one I can think of is that religion sometimes urges us to evangelize. To be a young man and be told by one's temple that one must go out in the world on a bicycle and shove the Book of Mormon at people for months on end must be a complicating circumstance, assuming that there are other things one would rather do with one's time. But is evangelism a natural aspect of religion, or is it a byproduct of what happens when civilizations grow to the point that multiple religions find themselves rubbing shoulders?

Ciao for now,

Marvin

P.S. Did you intend to have two barbershop 2 posts out there? And should we turn on the blogger setting that causes returns and blank lines to be converted to breaks and paragraph tags? I had that turned off, but we can turn it back on if that's what you're used to.

Ma-bin! (That's how your name would be said in Korean, after all...)

My posts no longer count as heroic in any sense. I am way behind, and you are in a red cap and tights. Ha. Tights! (Points and giggles.)

I don't even really have time to respond to this in anything like the depth I'd like, but I shall give it the old college try.

First response: You have barbershops? Shit man, quit complaining and go find another place full of old white boys! You have the option to move, after all! All we have here are hair shops or places where you must bathe naked in front of loads of other men before you gain access to the semi-barbershop-like thing where people usually insist on giving you a different haircut than you want, and you can't disagree fluently enough to succeed in mounting much resistance.

My last haircut was in a cheapo hairshop run by an ajuma who chatted with her friend (who was hanging out that day). I asked her in Korean if she could shave my head. She said yes, and I asked her if she could shave it to 12mm all over. She said yes, and took out her shaver and started to argue with me that 12mm all over would look funny on me. I agreed and said I like to look funny, and please just do it. She started shaving me with a comb in the one hand to distance the shaver from my scalp. I asked her where the 12mm fixture was, and she said she didn't have one. So I had to remind her three times I wanted 12mm, not 20 and not 18.

But finally she caved and did an excellent job. I paid her 5000 won, no tip (a tip would be not only weird but, I am led to think, somewhat insulting), and wondered whether I'd go there again. It was, relatively speaking, one of my easier haircut experiences in Korea, as far as first visits go!

Then again, I find joy in these little daily challenges, and they're getting easier as my Korean improves. (And this last time my hair looked perfect.) However, you are in Texas. Haircuts are supposed to be easier so that you have time to go, well, rope cattle or post philosophical thoughts online and crap like that, right? I don't know, I'd be afraid to go into a barbershop of the type you mentioned in the "Before" picture, but that's just me.

I'll start with this premise: Korean culture is one that mainly still exists isolated from the global culture; although it's grafted a great deal of foreign culture onto the skin of Korean social life, there's a hell of a lot under the surface that's still recognizable from before. Hot young women in sexy clothing dancing at techno bars still commonly have their mothers insisting they should marry by age 28 or 30 and bear children soon after that, and soon after the age of thirty-something hits, matchmakers are even sometimes called in to sort out the situation. Many kids don't bring girlfriends and boyfriends home to meet the folks until marriage is a distinct likelihood (though this is getting more and more lax too). And the younger generation seems even more neo-conservative than the people my age: my peers often speak of marriage as an inevitability that they are nonetheless putting off despite great anxiety about doing so... but one fellow the other night, a 33-year-old, was explaining to me that his mom and girlfriend (ten years his junior) both are pushing marriage, and he's the only one who's not in a rush about it.

Now... all of that said, and please remember that a lot of my experience of Korea is limited to the poorest and most provincial part of this country (still wired to the teeth, but I mostly have lived in backwater cities), would say that Korea has a kind of complicated relationship with its own identity. I get into this to some degree in one of my reviews of Korean literature, which you can read here. But basically the Reader's Digest version is that Korea has a certain degree of anxiety about its place and quality as a nation, which comes across to foreigners sometimes as something resembling arrogance, though once you see enough of it you see that it more deeply resembles over-eager bids for affirmation from others. (This is aside from the occasional events when older men simply challenge foreign men out of their own sense of personal inferiority and a need to outdo the white man. I usually don't experience it, but some people I know seem to encounter it a lot.)

It's familiar to me as it's also something Canadians, as a directly peripheral country to the USA, have deeply embedded in their psyche, a kind of identity at least in part built on resentment and on the negation of something: "We're not American!" or "We're not Japan's vassal!" (in the case of Korea). Now, there are many other things Korea could declare, such as, "We've maintained a great deal of our indigenous culture despite being invaded repeatedly for ages on end... we're survivors!" or, "We're the most wired nation in the damn world! Beat that! Woo hoo!" But always the division of north and south, and the memory of Japan, lingers. The older generation, for many reasons, won't let anyone forget... to the point of castigating young others whose novels don't thematically center on the Korean War and the division of North and South Korea.

The After picture that you painted is, to my mind, absolutely what would happen to the barbershop when taken over by Korean-Americans. And mind you, I think there is some difference between Korean-Americans and Koreans, but less than I imagine in Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans and their brethren in the homeland. I've heard that Korean disaporic communities are much more close-knit and exclusionary in many places like London and Vancouver, and imagine it'd be so in Austin too.

The Korean massage thing. I know. I know. But then once in a while someone does this amazing thing you've never felt before and you realize there is something someone knows here that people don't know about back home. But most people don't know that thing, whatever it is. As for the rest... the high-tech tools, the cash register, all of that makes sense. The magazines is funny... you never see them in the Jeonbuk shops I've gone to, only a TV on which everyone is watching.

As for the "Under New Management" sign: I wouldn't take that to mean, "The last managers were bad" at all. I've seen signs like that in Korea and it just means, hey, this place is different and you should come in and try the new things we've got here. Not designed as an insult to the last owners, more a kind of giddy announcement, like the "New!" signs that used to infest websites until those little icons stopped meaning anything.

None of which helps the situaiton of this (apparently desperately in-trouble) barber-shop. Which, by the way, is not your problem, not really. If you don't want to go there, you needn't go. You can be sure that you're not doing it because they're Korean (though maybe because of things they have done to the shop which they did out of ignorance of the customers' wishes, because they're not familiar with the clientele because they're Korean). The shop won't succeed or fail because of your business. Maybe a new clientele will emerge, full of young men who are quite happy to let Cheong manhandle them because she is a cute (?) Korean girl. Or maybe the Korean community will come out and support them. Maybe young women will flock in? Who knows. In any case, your actions in this situation are relatively amoral...

So I guess the question I would ask is: when you pay for a haircut, are you paying for just the cut (which is what I am usually doing), or are you paying for the cut plus the experience of the cut, that is to say the experience of the cut as you have grown to expect it to go, and which comforts you or provides some kind of pleasure, be it ritualistic or refreshing or whatever?

Because if you look at this whole Korean barbershop takeover thing the right way, you could really provide yourself with hours and hours of amusement. For example, when Cheong says, "Isn't a Korean barbershop better?" you could come right out and say, "Actually, you know, I liked the carpet, the fish on the walls, the old guys. It was all very comfortable and familiar to me. No offense, I just liked it because I knew it and it was comfortable. You might enjoy the flavour of kimchi plus mayonnaise, but I bet you find plain old kimchi comforting because it's familiar, right?"

Reasoning with Cheong might work, insofar as getting her to hear your point of view is concerned. Even as alien as it seems to some of my Korean friends, I can usually at least make my thinking relatively clear for them. How well those ideas or implications would be transmitted to the man who hides in the back room is predictably limited. Girls cut hair, boys make business decisions.

It's probable in my mind that some discomfort of the clientele might have to do with bigotry on the side of the clients, and some bigotry on the side of the new owners; it's probably a well-distributed vice. The new owners probably engaged in that very Korean practice of insisting on a certain way of doing things (such as decorating a barbershop), and to answer your question, I think they probably expected all the old white guys to do what all the old Korean ajeoshis would do, which is to go, Oh, this is what a barbershop ought to be, okay... and accept it, or ever praise it. They will have to learn the hard way that, no, the Korean way is not, in the eyes of these old white boys, better. It's just not. Anyone with good business sense would have seen that anyway. (Just as one of my old employers would have seen that French translations of products that weren't selling well in English was probably not a wise idea, regardless of the Franco-philic feelings of 90% of the employees.) Meanwhile, the clients probably didn't like the whole new setup, the collapse of the male homosocial atmosphere, and all of that... something compounded by the fact it was a "foreigner" takeover. But those old boys are closer to death than us, and the foreigners are everywhere, so their point of view will not win out in the long run either. Which makes me say, again, your actions are basically amoral here.

So as for what you can do: it's up to you.

Certainly, if you continue to go, tell the girl that the massages hurt. You can say it in Korean: "Wa! Apuhyo!" (Oh! It hurts!) You can ask her why the new setup is better, and explain to her things you liked about the old setup. You can even explain that you think the new setup is part of the reason the clients are all gone. You can get her to teach you phrases in Korean (a favorite pastime of mine when dealing with Koreans in the service industry). Or, you can find yourself a new barbershop.

I'm curious about what you end up doing. Please do let me know! And if you want, I can give you some more polite but entertaining Korean phrases you can use, which will probably make your visits much more entertaining if you do decide to keep going there.

Marvin,

To start with: all is okay in Jeonju. My computer is screwed, so I am not posting in the most comfortable of circumstances; I'm in a PC room, paying about a dollar fifty and hour, but sitting in this chair that is not mine, typing on a keyboard way too high for comfort, and assailed from all angles by video game soundtracks and crappy Korean pop music, barely held at bay by the tunes on my Minidisc player (for the last while, Bill Laswell's beautiful remixes of Bob Marley songs, currently the very appropriate No Woman No Cry).

Also starting note: I posted a comment to 2 Blowhards, directing them to your commentary as well as posting my own! (And I did it from this same PC Room, and under the same conditions... meaning I may have gotten us into some trouble by shooting off my mouth. Anyway!)

I'm going to try address what you wrote in Seriously, though... Part IV and move on from there, and worry about the posts on Postmodernism another night, after this long dark weekend of the soul, ie. my first weekend in Jeonju. By the way I was just having beer with John Tallman and Myoung and Mer, so it may be a little hazy and meandering, this post. Anyway...

I shan't pay much more mind to your comment about poetry, except to say that, my own pedantry aside, you may be onto something there. More in a bit about that. To get to the moment where I can say what I want to say about that, I need to look at what you say about what happens

when language becomes provincialized by ideology, by community, by shared interests and professions, by social cliques. Religious language is jargon in the sense that it appropriates and recontexualizes ordinary language for it's specific purposes, and also in the way that it invents bits of language that have little meaning outside its specific context. But being jargon doesn't alone make language religious. Actual religion is required for that. So along with the question, "What is language," we also need to address the question, "What is religion?" And also, "Are all religions sufficiently similar that a term 'religious language' can presume to describe all of them?"

Here is where I shall plug a book I am only about 70 pages into, but which with some confidence I can recommend: Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. This book attempts to do what makes your head hurt too much to try do: to evolve a sensible evolutionary explanation for the variety and also the consistency of religious concepts and beliefs among humans. One thing this book offers which isn't present in Campbell's work (I've only read some of it) is an attempt to look at humans themselves as the receivers and transmitters of religious ideas.

One of the interesting notions encompasses lanaguge as discussed by Stephen Pinker, and religious ideas a discussed by Boyer. That is, that there are certain ontological processing systems that are simply hardwired into the human consciousness. To invoke Dawkins' notion of memes doesn't get one too far because it only says, well, look, these ideas spread better. Why? Boyer's tackling those questions. Why does the idea of an omnipotent God spread while the idea of bathrooms that give the user good luck simply don't? According to Boyer, the answer is complex, but some of the spelunking I've read so far, where he explores things like ontological templates and how they determine a lot of the under-the-hood-work of human cognition, make a hell of a lot of sense.

One thing that emerges for me is the insight that religious language works in some ways much as other kinds of language, and that processes of religious belief are comparable to all kinds of other processes of belief, such as those of the way we understand animals and physics and the functioning of tools and so on. The processes are not so very different, just refocused and panned to accept certain deviations from the expected norms of reality. But I'll have more to say once I finish that book. Anyway, it is worthwhile to note that Boyer goes far in covering some of the ground you mention when you write about thinking about

cannibal Neolithic cavemen and Aztec human sacrifices and Borneo headhunters and Easter Island and Pollen-Boy and those beautiful cave-paintings in France and Stonehenge and Ainu bear-sacrifice, too, and I think: these things are not all the same. Not unless by "God" one knowingly refers to the dank and mortal crevices of the psyche.

According to Boyer, religions don't even necessarily (in your words)

address the same issues: the meaning of life, the origin and ultimate fate of the universe, the origin and content of values, the customs of the people, etc.

Some religions just describe a bizarre reality that finds bizarre causal relationships which, once you understand the working assumptions, of course make absolutely perfect sense and from which our own natural inferences produce comparable results, or at least results which we can infer to make sense, given basic starting assumptions. Boyer's thinking (and it makes sense to me) is that commonalities between religions lie not in the contents of the religions, but in the way that each of these highly variant systems works within the constrained, and universal, mechanics of the human mind. The systems which make religion possible among humans, systems which involve the mechanics of our own cognition, are what's important. So again, the question is not about religion, but about us in whom religions live (or don't live).

I'm not sure what the implications of this are for religious language, except to say that it makes sense for religions to use secular language. For most cultures, the line between sacred and secular doesn't even exist linguistically. We were chatting earlier about whether there is or ought to be some etiquette restricting religious people from telling nonreligious people that they prayed for them. For the atheist, being prayed for can come across as profoundly presumptuous, or flattering, or just plain annoying. For the religious, it can be an act of compassion or (as I am sure C.S. Lewis would be quick to remind us) a prideful act as well, especially when announced to the object of one's prayers. Still, the fact is that the starting assumption of the atheist is that prayer is unnecessary, and to the theist that it can be good or even necessary.

And what interests me about this is that the same basic thinking and approaches to understanding reality on a deep level underlie the processing by which each individual reached his or her opinion.

What this raises as a question is, how valid can this statement be?

So to be religious language it must be a jargon that discusses religious subjects, but it must also be a jargon that discusses religious subjects in a manner identifiably religious (as opposed to scientific or critical, say). So what is this "religious manner?"

Boyer's an expert and is still willing to note that it's a bloody thorny question, that. The best answer is that it is complex and involves beliefs. It's not even always about practice, because sometimes one's precepts don't guide one's actions but they are held as moral precepts. Religious language, it seems to me, is inseparable from other language, except that is. It is schismed from secular language... for us, anyway. Of course, the myth of a homogenous culture can't be credited, but many cultures in history have not had the degree of plurality available to make a secular world available as an alternative to other options.

I'm starting to question my idea that religion co-opts culture, and starting to think maybe religions are co-opted by culture more crucially. I'm not sure, it's complicated, but it makes sense to me in the kind of Christians I have encountered who search the Bible for passages to use to damn gays and other "sinners" when after all, post-New Testament it's supposed to be a religion of love and forgiveness. But rejection of alternative sexuality (or sexualities), or their confinement of it to a certain social role, and perception of it as "special" and "different", seems to me to be pretty universal. Maybe people don't learn morality from religion, maybe the morality of this or that kind is usually around, innate in social animals, and while the particularities of morals may vary, they would anyway, regardless of the specificities of religious doctrines.

I'm starting to wonder then whether langauge is actually all that important beyond being a transmission for religious concepts? Of course, once the transmission has failed or succeeded, then follows the problems of communicating across the chasms of different beliefs. Then again, this also applies to adherents of different philosophical schools, to members of different cultures (even when a language is held in common), and according to Boyer even memebrs of different social classes (Zulu businessmen and Chinese businessmen seem to have more in common than Zulu farmers and Zulu businessmen, for example, according to Boyer... that's not an exact quote but you get the idea).

This is of course crucial to the questions you raise about politics and our gregariousness, but... we didn't evolve in large societies, but rather in families, likely in more authoritative structures. We may not have evolved to believe in gods, but it's possible to imagine we evolved to allow for slight variations of expected phenomena, and that a capacity to cope with this also allows for a glitch in the programming that allows people to believe in wacky shit. (Like the people who speak in tongues in the church in front of my new apartment building.)

I have to disagree with this:

Phenotypically speaking, then, I hypothesize that we evolved to believe in whatever best suits our needs and feelings at a given point in time.

I think religious thinking profoundly complicates life sometimes, and I think it's more complicated than you're allowing for here. However, your notion that we should

approach religious language not as something different and separate from secular language, but as a kind of "larger than life" instance of language generally, where the use of language to define reality and to assert or seize authority is written in great big letters,

makes more sense. The only problem is that nasty question: "Who is it that is supposedly seizing authority?" Of course, in the European tradition we can say, the Pope. ths or that leader. But for religion in general I think there's not always a clear powergrabber... that it's more a kind of Foucauldian process, to which everyone is subject and which is under nobody's clear control.

The atheist's conclusion is derived from an empirical observation: if you share and practice common values about behavior, then you can get along despite irreconcilable differences of theological dogma.

Not always. Some atheists are as ornery in their belief that religious are all crap. Maybe this is why I am nervous about embracing an atheist position at all... because so much o the bulwarks of it depend on noncommunication across that boundary. I don't believe in any god or gods, but I do think sometimes people who do are worth communicating with and aren't necessarily out of their trees. Wrong, maybe, but not necessarily out of their trees. (Until they start speaking in tongues, anyway.)

As for the good and bad of the kind of erosion caused by global culture, that's something I will get to later, after posting about Foucault and your other thoughts. For now, I need to get home and go to bed!

Gord! I hope all is well in Jeonju.

In view of my last post I feel slightly giddy to be able to post a link to this nifty passage at 2blowhards.com: Postmodernism for Dummies. Perhaps this sense of novelty will wear off once I become a more seasoned blogonaut. Anyway, I thought this was a fine example of the kind of criticism to which postmodernism is heir while at the same time illustrating a bit of the postmodernist sensibility itself. On the one hand, the writer suggests that postmodernism exists to give France a way to defend its right to feel like the cultural and intellectual center of the world despite its turbulent history for the last several centuries. On the other, he doesn't bother to engage any of postmodernism's ideas except as taken-for-granted illustrations of the embarrassing depths to which the citizens of an ex-power will stoop to maintain their dignity. He exposes postmodernism as a French cultural power-play. (How very postmodern of him, one is tempted to say.)

But seriously, I will say, "How very like Foucault!" In Discipline and Punish Foucault tracks the historical transition of western social controls from one model to another. In places he sneers as though in disapproval, as though he thinks we have all allowed ourselves to be duped by "the man" into accepting as the illusion of freedom the reality of universal surveillance (i.e. panopticon)...but he never says why anyone should want to chuck the modern more-or-less egalitarian institutions so that we can return to a past in which peasants may have the freedom to smuggle and trespass on the King's grounds so long as they don't take undue advantage of the privilege and force Him to exert His authority by flaying them alive in the town square.

In both cases we see an author offering what may be a valuable insight into the origin of an institution or school of thought, regard the object of his study with something of a sneer, and finish without yielding a new and better truth. If you're a socialist postmodern you may read Foucault and understand intuitively that "the man" is still out to get you and must be resisted. If you're a more red-blooded American type, you may read Mr. Blowhard and understand intuitively that those wiley French still can't be trusted not to twist everything until it doesn't mean anything, so who cares about them, right?

But if you're neither person and you're hoping for guidance on how to weigh public safety vs. privacy (Foucault) or for guidance on how to approach issues of meaning and truth without relying on the Word of God as the fount of all wisdom (Mr. Blowhard)...you're left in the lurch.

Hi Gord. Here are those comments about Foucault, power, etc. that I promised earlier...

Consider three titles:

• Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
• Foucault, The Archaeology of [various cultural institutions]
• Campbell, Toward a Natural History of Gods and Heroes (prologue to his Masks of God)

In each case the author is stating up front that certain and perhaps all facets of culture, including some things traditionally considered beyond the scope of empirical understanding, are in fact the product of natural forces. "Power" is a recurring theme in the works of all three men, though in Campbell's work it is filtered through Jungian psychology and is handled in a more matter-of-fact way. Foucault and Nietzsche, by contrast, can be thanked—along with Marx, I suppose, though Nietzsche would find the connection repellant— for making an obsessive preoccupation with power central to the contemporary study of culture, society, language, and belief.

To ascribe all motivations to some variation on the "Will to Power" has become a commonplace used to justify attitudes of universal cynicism in graduate students everywhere, not to mention their professors. Sometimes it seems that no matter what you say, your intentions (and thus conclusions) can be discredited by appeal to this principle. To read some postmodernism is to be told that even science can be discredited in this way as having no truth-value because its practitioners are just trying to dominate the world. (Never mind that science made possible the word-processor on which these sentiments were written.)

I'm portraying the extreme case here, of course. But it's a common enough case that it has become easy for postmodern and academic cultural studies to be dismissed out of hand by an awful lot of people. And yet there is a real problem that needs to be addressed: where do values and beliefs come from, and what do they mean, if you don't give credence to the idea that they have an "objective" religious or mystical origin? One doesn't have to observe human beings for very long to see that our desire to exert control, or to at least feel in control, of our lives and the world plays a huge role in what we decide to believe and say, and even see. But if this "will to power" is a natural phenomenon, an ordinary component of the human psyche, then it must be regarded as a morally neutral force. One can't discredit—or claim to understand— someone's beliefs simply by referring to it.

In Discipline and Punish Foucault lays out an argument that in western society's transition from one model of social control—general neglect combined with cruel and excessive aristocratic punishments for certain crimes—to another—humane punishment combined with prevention of crime achieved by near-universal education and surveillance—we sacrificed a set of libertarian freedoms (the fact that aristocrats don't give a damn what the peasants do as a rule) for a set of constant authoritarian social constraints. Cruel and unusual punishment was phased out and it its place there is now a program of universal discipline achieved by the fact that one is constantly monitored (by educators, employers, bank officers) for signs that one might be criminally inclined. Reliable prevention of crime (as opposed to mere punishment) requires broad surveillance and a conceptual scheme by which the criminally-inclined can be detected or deterred before they act.

Now, I think Foucault's broad historical analysis has merit, although I'd be interested in seeing if the church, with its weekly Mass and confession, combined with small-town pressures for social conformity didn't play the role of universal surveillor in the time of benign neglect that Foucault seems nostalgically to miss. And I think that Foucault is dead-on correct when he observes that the science of psychology with respect to criminalistics has tended to absorb and regurgitate social prejudices against gays, the poor, free-thinkers, and racial minorities as criteria for criminality. Just look at America's drug wars and "Patriot" acts to see such forces at play. (I suspect that some postmodernists have taken this criticism of a particular subset of science and, in ignorance of the differences between early psychology and modern chemistry, say, concluded that all scientific knowledge can be similarly dismissed.)

But as you point out below, Gord:

...what Foucault didn't really give us was any kind of sense of remedy or solution. I have tried to be patient with the postmodernists' solution, which is to build a whole new vocabulary (and grammar, to some degree), but it's a failure. It leads, it seems to me, away from communication. And at the diametric opposite of that, I see poetry. Poetry, not as in verse but as in the sensitive, careful recontextualization of specific elements of language which, when isolated and combined, communicate something otherwise incommunicable using those words (or any words, perhaps).

The difficulty I see in postmodernism is that it is a system/method/approach that allows us to carefully deconstruct conventional language and culture and belief-systems but which doesn't provide the tools needed to evaluate language and culture and belief. Evaluation requires a standard. That standard will be subject in turn to deconstruction, and so on. Postmodernism fails when, like a man with only a hammer, it tries to see all problems as nails. The problem of how we come to believe, do, and say certain things is not the same as the problem of what one ought to believe, do, and say. The first problem can be addressed in terms of anthropology, archaeology, philology, biology, psychology, and so on. The latter throws in two wrinkles: (a) it's about the future, which cannot be analyzed in strictly empirical terms (not yet, anyway), and (b) it's about desire, what we want, which may be a product of past events but which is not logically reducible to past events (not yet, anyway). We can use science to help predict the consequences of adopting certain values, but science will not tell us what is in itself good or right, or if things that are good and right in and of themselves even exist. (However, it can certainly strongly suggest that the things that we experience as good and right can only exist through a happy conjunction of our biological nature and physical surrounds...no deities required.)

But I'm with Carl Sagan when he suggests that turning the scientific method on the subject of human happiness is the place to start. It can't provide values ex nihilo but it can go a along way towards revealing when our beliefs about our values are incorrect or inconsistent, or rooted in bias rather than fact. And I think your appeal to the poetic is consistent with thinkers like Nietzsche and Campbell, who recognize the need to creatively invent new ways of being and having meaning as science revolutionizes our self-understanding. I think that "will to power" is as good a term as any to describe the psychological forces that will keep us pressing forward to remake our world and ourselves in the images that we desire. And I think that postmodernism can be a powerful tool for the social sciences as long as it recognizes the limits inherent in its project.

Considering the subject, I'm sure the foregoing is entirely too brief and shallow to do much good. But I think our mutual dissatisfactions with religion and postmodernism lead our thoughts in similar directions, so I wanted to throw that out as flog for the blog, so to speak. Cheers,

Marv

Dear Gord,

Ain't Hedwig grand? I confess: my comment about true communication being like poetry makes no sense on its face. I think I had in my mind an idealized concept of those moments when words seem to become transparent and make the way clear from one heart to another...but how to understand that sure as hell isn't encapsulated in the word "poetry" in any conventional sense. So, please pay no mind to that bit, ok?

Ok. Now, starting with one of the kernels of your last post...

My slowly-approached point is that religious language is simply language, except that it's all recontextualized, and more-or-less successfully appropriated. .... This is not, as you well know and are probably preparing to point out, a process that religions alone do.

I think these statements are basically accurate. I think you've described what happens, to greater or lesser degrees, when language becomes provincialized by ideology, by community, by shared interests and professions, by social cliques. Religious language is jargon in the sense that it appropriates and recontexualizes ordinary language for it's specific purposes, and also in the way that it invents bits of language that have little meaning outside its specific context. But being jargon doesn't alone make language religious. Actual religion is required for that. So along with the question, "What is language," we also need to address the question, "What is religion?" And also, "Are all religions sufficiently similar that a term 'religious language' can presume to describe all of them?"

The thought of trying to define "religion" here makes my head hurt, so I won't. (Instead I'll recommend Joseph Campbell's Masks of God, all four books, which offers an anthropology of religion in a manner similar to but far more thorough and far less vitriolic than Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals.) I will say, however, that I don't think all religions are alike. Usually when people say that they're thinking of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic trio plus maybe Buddhism to the degree that it preaches goodwill towards one's neighbor. (That or they've already granted that all religions are metaphor.) But I tend to think of cannibal Neolithic cavemen and Aztec human sacrifices and Borneo headhunters and Easter Island and Pollen-Boy and those beautiful cave-paintings in France and Stonehenge and Ainu bear-sacrifice, too, and I think: these things are not all the same. Not unless by "God" one knowingly refers to the dank and mortal crevices of the psyche.

Nevertheless all religions tend to address the same issues: the meaning of life, the origin and ultimate fate of the universe, the origin and content of values, the customs of the people, etc. But they don't do it the same way. If "true" means "is a fact," then Buddhism and Christianity cannot both be true, to say nothing of Aztec religion and Christianity. The Christian universe is linear and inhabited by a personal deity. The Buddhist universe is cyclical and is not so inhabited, though depending on which flavor you choose there may be myriad enlightened demi-gods running around. In the Christian universe God bleeds so that all men may live. In the Aztec universe men must bleed so that the world doesn't come to an end. And so on.

I believe that if one thinks these differences matter, then one can't in good faith say all religion is equivalent. And if one says they don't matter, then one can't in good faith claim that any particular religion is true in any non-metaphorical, non-poetic (ahem) way. To say one religion is equivalent with another is to place a belief about religion above belief in the content of religion itself, an act that reduces religion to literature. Skepticism is inherent in the act.

To bring this back around to the topic of religious language, I think this means that we can't identify religious language because it happens to say a particular thing that happens to be in accord with a particular religion. One can say that talk about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is Christian language and thus a subset of religious language, but religious language cannot be identified on the basis that it will invariably accommodate belief in the Unfriendly Equestrians. One might say, then, that religious language is a jargon that includes discussion of eschatology. But then we run into cosmology and debates about open and closed universes, which certainly take place in technical jargon and which discuss the end of the universe, but which aren't really religious in nature.

So to be religious language it must be a jargon that discusses religious subjects, but it must also be a jargon that discusses religious subjects in a manner identifiably religious (as opposed to scientific or critical, say). So what is this "religious manner?" I'm thinking it must be a manner in which some set of religious propositions are taken to be given as true. Some text or tradition must be held as above question. But even that doesn't quite work, because one can approach religion in a mystical fashion that explicitly denies the truth of religious words while accepting on faith that a worthwhile truth will emerge from religious practice itself.

This last observation leads me to conclude that religious language is just that language which, whatever other characteristics it may have, serves to illuminate some person's religious practice. It cannot be identified just because it says a particular thing, nor can it necessarily be identified by the way it says things (which is not to say that there aren't religious statements and manners that are easily identified as such); the one constant is that religious language in some way informs a religious practice. Which seems a rather circular definition, doesn't it? What is religious practice? An attempt to attune oneself to the gods or God. But there are so many kinds of gods...which brings us around to that tendency of religion to co-opt culture and language so that nondogmatic gods are turned into demons and nondogmatic practices into superstition and witchcraft. And now my head has begun to hurt....

To bring all of this to an abrupt conclusion, I'm inclined to think that the difference between religious and secular language is not in the tendency of one more than the other to co-opt and appropriate culture and language to its own ends; the difference is that religious language (as a rule) explicitly tries to address topics which secular language either avoids or, as science, recasts as a new and more specialized kind of knowledge.

And what does all this have to do with the psyche and the politics inherent in the evolution of human minds and cultures? I find, after writing all the foregoing matter, that when I look at the idea that we evolved to believe in gods, I think: maybe not. Beings with language and culture need ways to organize themselves and understand themselves. The universe is almost infinitely complex but our needs are immediate and specific and, compared to much of science, rather simple and straightforward. It does Cro-Magnon little good to invent a complex astrology, so he doesn't; Babylonian and Egyptian priests, however, with more sophisticated societies and agricultural customs to coordinate, find it useful to put deistic powers in a regularly repeating night sky. In other words, we evolved to organize the universe into the simplest manner possible to meet our needs for action and understanding. How easy it is to reduce politics, for example, to a few convenient stereotypes that reaffirm my self-esteem while excusing my relative impotence in the world!

Phenotypically speaking, then, I hypothesize that we evolved to believe in whatever best suits our needs and feelings at a given point in time. Gods have traditionally been easy to squeeze into that psychological niche, and whenever we discover something new and complex and frightening we always try to dumb it down a little so that it will be of use to us. We've evolved to work within simple authoritative (if not authoritarian) systems, hence our tendency to create and destroy little gods (celebrities, ideologies, proverbial generalizations) for ourselves almost at a whim. For the study of language, to me this means that we approach religious language not as something different and separate from secular language, but as a kind of "larger than life" instance of language generally, where the use of language to define reality and to assert or seize authority is written in great big letters. Studying this, one then turns to deciphering the less flamboyant "small print" language of "secular" speech.

It seems to me that my hypothesis is useful for looking at cross-cultural communication, too. When people with different cultures and educations and mindsets find a way to communicate, it's not usually because they write complex linguistic essays to one another; rather, they find or create a new simple ideology, if you will, something that encapsulates enough of the things held in common to serve as an alternate "meme" system to be used in those new contexts to which cross-culture communication applies. Christians and Buddhists can say, "Our beliefs about the nature of the universe and the human souls are greatly at odds, but we believe in concepts of loving-kindness and spiritual discipline that can carry us past the doctrinal differences." The theist says, "We must be worshipping the same God." The atheist says, "See, you didn't need God to get along after all."

(Postscript: When I originally wrote this I forgot to point out the difference between these two perspectives, and the reason I prefer the atheist's. The theist's perspective involves ignoring the core unprovable assumptions of his faith, the dogmatic assertions that define Christianity as such, for example. It also falsifies to some degree the core dogmatic assumptions of Buddhism by positing that Buddhism is about God. By contrast, the atheist's conclusion is derived from an empirical observation: if you share and practice common values about behavior, then you can get along despite irreconcilable differences of theological dogma. This is a fact that is demonstrated when Christians and Buddhists and Muslims in America place the First Amendment above their respective religions' evangelistic prerogatives and thereby succeed in cooperative ventures based on shared values.)

Coda: "On the other hand..."

In another post, my response to which I'm going to wrap brazenly into this one, you say

Maybe communication ought to be difficult? Maybe if it gets too easy because of shared assumptions, things are going to be a slough of stagnant thinking? Hmmmm. This needs more consideration, I think. I don't know about that.

If communication becomes "too easy because of shared assumptions," it means that one is communicating in clichés and therefore not really thinking—or communicating—at all. That's how I'm reading you, anyway. And I think it's true that the process of struggling to learn a new language and culture throws into relief one's own assumptions and habits of thought; if you take away the opportunity for that struggle, you deprive people of an opportunity to learn about the conditional and circumstantial nature of their own acquired thought-habits. The alternative is to make people study history and philosophy and cultural anthropology, I suppose. I think it's inevitable in the long run that global culture will erode differences and increase the number of assumptions shared across cultures. In some ways this will be a good thing; but we need to make sure we don't forget all the lessons we're being forced to pick up along the way.

I want to address Foucault and power and what-not in another, separate post. Signing off for now,

Marv

Gord!

I shall reply to your heroic posts below when I have a little more time, probably over the weekend, and when I've concocted a means to tap-dance my way around the sophmoric ahem lunacy of my comments about poetry vs. prose.

In the meantime I wish to lay before you an ethical and cultural conundrum that you might be in a unique position to appreciate. My barbershop has been bought by Koreans.

This is not intrinsically a bad thing, but I went to that barber shop for a specific reason: because it resembled the barber shops I grew up with and because I don't trust any of the people who work in franchise shops like "SuperCuts" and because I don't understand the things that go on in "Salons." The talky-kind excepted, of course. Before I go further I feel I must explain the before and after pictures.

Before:

• Carpet
• Rustic decor of fishing plaques, quaint Americana, pet birds, a fishtank
• Cash transactions take place out of old cigar boxes the barbers keep at their workstations
• National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, Car & Driver, Guns & Ammo, Field & Stream, American Sportsman, the local newspaper, and occasionally something slightly racy like GQ or Maxim.
• Four old guys as barbers (Gene, Roger, Bob, & Tom, I think - I mostly used Gene) and one woman (the "new girl" who talks a little too much about her kids at school and not quite enough about fishing and the housing market but a good gal just the same)
• A clientele of mostly middle-aged and older men, younger men who clearly grew up frequenting such barber shops with their parents, and wee lads being brought up by the younger men to appreciate the bouquet of just this kind of establishment
• A back room/office where you can go grab a cup of coffee while you wait on a busy Saturday morning
• Mechanical massage-gloves the barbers use to relax your shoulders after the trimming is done

After:

• Black and white checkered tile
• Lots more mirrors and the kind of electrically lit landscape art that seems to be popular in Asian restaurants.
• Brand-new high-tech barber equipment that even has built-in vacuums to whoosh away hair clippings
• Korean-language fashion magazines plus a lot more of the not-quite-porn "men's magazine" category of literature...
• ...including some computer magazines, for which I give props
• Transactions take place at a cash register, centrally and prominently located
• No more old white guy barbers: just the new girl, a newer girl named Cheong, and a Korean man who is never visible long enough for a person to get to know him
• The back room has an "Off limits" sign where the aforementioned gentleman seems to spend most of his time
• The ranks of the clientele have been drastically thinned.
• Cheong fancies herself, somewhat prematurely, a skilled masseuse—no gloves

I've been in twice now since the transfer of ownership, once several months ago and before much had changed—the old guys were all still there (except Gene, my favorite)—and once a couple of weeks ago after the transformation was complete. I will say this: Cheong cuts a mean head of hair. I've used her twice and she does a great job. She deftly trims with a straight razor, too, a skill I admire considerably. Unfortunately she insists on trying to give a shoulder massage afterwards, and it feels like she's practicing Tae Kwon Do back there. (Note: as I have recently enjoyed a very good massage, and as I did in fact spar TKD practitioners back in my karate days, I feel quite competent to judge the distinction.) Last time she said, "See? Isn't that better than the machines?" And I wanted to scream, "No! Bring back the machines, skillfully used by gentle old guys who know what they're doing! You're killing me!" Being the tight-lipped stoic I am, however, I didn't say anything.

I think Cheong is concerned about business. When they bought the place it was a busy shop, full of customers, especially on Saturday mornings when all good barbershops become Symposiums of old geezers who sit around and talk and sip coffee while the hair gets cut. Two Saturdays ago, however, the place was deserted. Me, another couple of young guys in the time I was there, and no geezers 't'all. I don't blame her for being worried.

It's tempting to chalk the desertion of customers up to bigotry pure and simple. Old white southern guys, new Korean owners—do the math, right? But that conclusion depends on an assumption: that the new owners have worked to make the barbershop attractive to their former clientele. When in fact they haven't, and could not have embarked on a more ambitious programme of alienating those customers if they had tried (I'm assuming they did not in fact drive them away intentionally). Old-fashioned barbershops thrive on the atmosphere of comfortable familiarity, like the old easy chair your dad's had forever and refuses to throw away, and on the friendly relationships built up between the customers and the barbers and between the customers themselves. By letting all the old barbers go, by totally redecorating the place, by the owners' refusal to make himself available for casual conversation, they have removed 90% of the incentive for those particular guys to come to this particular barbershop.

These customers weren't coming to this shop because they wanted fancy haircuts. They didn't want to be "styled." They wanted to be served in a particular atmosphere that reminded them of home. This is the barbershop equivalent, I'm thinking, of General Motors trying to sell cars in Japan but refusing to build cars with the steering wheel on the right side of the vehicle. Unless maybe the new owners are specifically hoping to get a big boost from the local Korean community (which is not very numerous in that neighborhood, I might add). But if that's the case I wouldn't expect them to lament the loss of their white old-guy customers; I'd expect them to have planned for it. What did they think was going to happen?

Anyway, I'm torn. I miss the old place. At the same time I don't want to be some kind of chauvanist, and I feel a vaguely capitalistic obligation to reward Cheong for giving what really are very fine haircuts, all other considerations aside.

But she kind of pisses me off, too:

"See how we have redecorated? We got rid of the old carpet, put in new equipment...don't you agree that a Korean barbershop is a better place? Mmmm?"

"Well, I don't know...."

Plus, they hung a sign out that says, "Under new Management." You don't do that unless you're tacitly admitting the previous management sucked. It's rude (unless it was true, but in this case it wasn't).

You see the problem? I don't want to be a bigoted, insensitive jerk, but I kinda-sorta get the feeling that the new owners are kinda-sorta being...am I allowed to say it? The conundrum for me is, how far out of my way do I need to go to make sure I'm being fair to these new owners? Any thoughts?

... this just occurred to me. No matter what difficulties we face regarding communication across unconnected worldviews, we definitely have it easier than it has been in the past. I was playing a language-centered role playing game with my kids in class one day. Kids would pick out a piece of paper from a hat, and on the paper was the kid's "job". Jobs included things like supermodel, farmer, gangster, and pizza delivery boy.

When the job "wizard" came up, I explained what it was. The kids who didn't understand got a rapid and amusing translation: "Hari Pota gateun saram" (literally: a Harry Potter-like person).

I had to be careful, because the game was one I'd designed for adult students, so I couldn't very well give a twelve-year-old girl a paper reading, "Russian nightclub dancer" (read: migrant strip club dancer) without risking her going into tears. But, I decided to risk "North Korean Spy", and the result was amusing.

I said, "A person who comes from North Korea, to South Korea, takes a secret, and goes back north." They didn't get it, so I said the same in Korean. They still kind of didn't get it, so I said, "A bad man," banking on the kind of fear that people have told me kids that age felt ten years ago about North Korean spies.

I was getting nowhere, until one boy - in fact, the dumbest boy in the class - suddenly had a mental flash: "Gong-gong-chill?" he asked me, with this oh-my-God-I-think-I-know-what-he-means-for-once look on his face.

"Yes," I said. Gong-gong-chill." Quickly, he informed the rest of the class of what "North Korean Spy" meant, and soon enough everyone understood. Of course, their understanding was flawed: I heard "Migook" and "goon-in" in the explanation... "American" and "soldier" don't apply to the spy we were talking about, but I figured, despite all the misunderstanding, something had actually gotten through from my side of the wall to the side where those kids were desperately trying to figure out what the hell big crazy white man teacher was talking about this time.

And it was thanks to what? To pop culture media. Gong is the Korean word for zero, and chill is the Chinese-rooted word for the number seven. Gong-gong-chill... thank you Sean Connery.

Then again, I could also point my criticisms squarely at Hollywood, at the world order it implicitly promotes and glorifies. Hmmm. Maybe communication ought to be difficult? Maybe if it gets too easy because of shared assumptions, things are going to be a slough of stangnant thinking? Hmmmm. This needs more consideration, I think. I don't know about that.

Dear Marvin,

I have no real way of knowing if this computer stability is going to last, or whether it's temporary. So I am just taking this chance to post while I can. :)

One tiny note: I don't think that my Korean students would find it "tacky and overbearing" in the same way that you think, for a Korean Christian to assume the rest of her group would know, even if they don't believe it, that Jesus "saved the world". The most singleminded Christians I've ever met, I've met in Korea; people who wake at 5 a.m. to go to daily prayer services... and that's everyday, and these are laity, not clergy. Even the less hardcore Christians in Korea, the ones who dance and hang out at night with friends, and date, still often do not drink, or if they do, they get in trouble at home for it. Christianity is an intensely full-on thing here, totalizing and learned in a rather close-knit and also totalizing family structure in a way that simply makes it easy to imagine why some of the faithful cannot even imagine another way of thinking.

Which is not to say that I didn't find it tacky and overbearing. But I'm a teacher, and part of my job is giving people tools to communicate, even when what they want to communicate is singleminded or extreme. Having been raised Catholic, in a Catholic school, I had the experience where (almost) everyone I knew was raised Catholic, but I also met people outside of school and realized there were antitheophytes like myself all over, as well as people who didn't even consider the question of "God: Yes or No?" at all. But some people have a very limited experience and make all their friends at Church, cutting off friendships that aren't rooted in the same faith. I've heard that here, anyway. (It's not universally true, but it seems not uncommon.)

Additionally, in Korea religion seems to be a universal. People often ask me, not, "Do you have a religion?" but rather, "What is your religion?"... this question being as acceptable on first meeting as, say, "What's your age?" (a standard first-meeting question in Korea) or "Where do you come from?" or "Do you like Korea?"

Regarding the image that came to your mind from Flash Gordon, I will simply tell you my immediate reaction, which was to think that, well, yeah, some forms of Christianity do make me think of the Earth within the crosshairs of some weapon sight. We can perhaps return to that aspect of the challenges of communicating across worldview incompatibility.

But as you say, this is supposed to be about language and evolution and the psyche and what-not. So, considering your thoughts:

I agree, discussing the differences between religious language and "secular" language would be profitable. Why not let's begin with that?

First off, I think the nature of language itself is important to think about. Here are a few basic precepts, let me know if any of them are objectionable:

Language conveys ideas, and facilitates communication of concepts. It also facilitates instantiation of ideas in the hearer, such as ideas never considered before. Language is meaningful when there is a communicator and an an audience. Language is always contextual.

The last note is important because, within a religious worldview, the context is agreed upon. How does this come to be?

It comes to be via a process of linguistic trademarking and coopting by religions. Religions adopt certain linguistic gestures and vocabulary as their own. For example, marriage is not a Christian tradition. Marriage is a rather universal practice varying from culture to culture, but in all human cultures existing as a regulatory institution governing the union of man and woman in sexual and domestic existence. Christian marriage is a Christian tradition (or, rather, a rather more similar set of Christian traditions with some variation but a lot of similarities), but Christian marriage is not all "marriage".

Except, that for two Christians, the word marriage" means "Christian marriage". Isn't that curious?

Not really. Religions are sets of ideas, really. (I hesitate to go into calling them memeplexes, though it's a fitting one to my mind, because the idea of memes has not only the tone of dozens of half-value webpundits, but also a dismissive quality to many people, a dismissive quality which registers a tone I don't wish to risk people seeing here.) A religion can have mysteries, things that are inexplicable - and in fact I think these are absolutely essential for a religion, because if everything is explicable, what's the religion for? (Again I am simplifying. I think what you get when you remove the inexplicable - and thus the supernatural - from religion is moral philosophy.)

My slowly-approached point is that religious language is simply language, except that it's all recontextualized, and more-or-less sucessfully appropriated. The word "vision" has become a religious word because Christians took it and made it mean that. They did so because it is the Latinate word for the more profane Germanic "sight". Of course, in jest we sometimes say that someone who looks beautiful is "a vision of loveliness", but even there the hyper-elevated status conferred on the word by religion is not lost... that's why it's a slightly amusing thing to say.

E.O. Wilson's (?) notion that humans evolved to believe in gods, not science, has some value. I have a pretty interesting-looking book about that in a box in my new apartment in Jeonju which is on that topic. That is, what are the predisposing factors in man's genetic (and resultant phenotypical) makeup that make religion such a successful and widespread approach to thinking of the world. But it should be said that, as much as they revered gods and totem beasts and spirits, early humans also experimented to a shocking degree with all kinds of plants around them. They found not only what was edible but also, to whatever degree was possible for them, what was medicinal, which animals lived near them, where they tended to grow, and so on. Humankind's classification of the world didn't begin with Darwin, and our experimenting with medicine did not begin with the ancient Greeks... it goes back much farther than that, far back into the shadowy world of prehistory.

Needing to say this, to whatever degree I need to, shows the power by which religions do appropriate whole vocabularies. This is not, as you well know and are probably preparing to point out, a process that religions alone do. In Korean, to become a government official you need to be able to read hanja (Chinese characters) very well. Official documents puzzle us foreigners because you see Chinese words spelled out in Korean script. You can read the sounds but have no idea what these alien words mean. "Why don't they just write 'ilreum' for name, instead of this Chinese stuff?" we ask, but of course one look at a Canadian bureaucratic document would reveal it's not just a practice in Asia. Bureaucrats are officious the world over, and more importantly, all authoritative institutions - educational, governmental, religious, military, and financial - practice linguistic appropriation in this way. (Even non-authoritative ones do it, though their attempts at completely and wholly appropriating language are far less successful. And then, there are also unfixed cultural-aesthetic movements that very successfully do this: consider the kind of meaning the word "love" carries, for example.)

By the way, I don't consider myself a leftist. I think the whole binary is depoliticizing and insulting to human intelligence. Apply my comments about appropriation of language to the structure of the left-right binary and you'll see wat I mean. Making all politics fit into that dysfunctional shape doesn't make sense to me at all. Additionally, I have a newfound respect for what religion can be, through some close friends I know who are both religious and profoundly intelligent, thoughtful, and genuine people. (And from some readings of C.S. Lewis, whose work, however flawed by his sometimes muddled thinking, was at times astonishingly moving on the subject.) I may still be a staunch atheist - though philosophically, rejecting the question altogether I suppose I'd actually be a contragnostic or something - but I do see religion as more than just ""a bizarre aberration of the species, the thing that makes us hate and kill each other. I'm inclined to think that those tendencies precede religion and that religion simply justifies and 'explains' in its fashion why we do such things." I do however find it tragic when religious upbringing sometimes hobbles the imagination, as it does from time to time.

You wrote:

I'm inclined to believe that the idiosyncracies of religious language are actually quite common, embedded in the many ways in which human beings routinely simplify the world to make it easier to grasp. Religion simply represents one of the "deep ends" of that tendency.

I'm curious about whether you see any fit between that and the more institutional-pocedural kind of process that I'm more concerned about. It seems to me that your thoughts on the political nature of human minds is the connecting line, the way of linking these two notions. Maybe you were already thinking that? I don't know.

As for this comment:

I'm tempted to say that all true communication is poetry, even prose, except when poetry is forced to act like prose. That might make a good definition of fanaticism: an abhorence of the poetic. The insistence that religion be true.

Marvin, no, no! Don't go there! Most verse isn't even poetry! Besides, most prose, if you think about it, is also chock full of intentional deception, or rather, constructive deception. (There's a writer who's recently dug into the idea of falsehood and deemed it a fundamental communicative mode crucial to modern life... I was looking at his book in Seoul but it looked too big to fit in my bag, and also pricey - as hardcovers are in Korea - so I didn't buy it. Seems to me some of it would be mere commonsense.)

Ha. That is to say, I am very leery about the words "poetic" and "prosaic" being substituted for "figurative" and "literalist" because, essentially, "poetry" and "prose" are words that have similarly been appropriated and warped by the same processes we're talking about here. Prose is very often as figurative as poetry. Even in bureacratic documents! Think about the character Hedwig in the wonderful rock opera Hedwig and the Angry Inch: when filling out a government document, does Hedwig check male, or female? How about transgendered people? How about hermaphrodites? The idea that "He made them male and female, and saw that it was good" has resulted in a romanticization of human biology and psychology. And that too is part of the whole process.

The kind of linguistic appropriation I'm talking about is what a computer programmer would call a destructive procedure. They take the word, copy it into the specialized vocabulary, and in doing so necessarily delete - that is to say, obliterate - it from the profane vocabulary. This has been, to some degree, successful. Many of the modes by which we express concepts of emotion, or deeper nature, are either supernatural ("soul" or "the human spirit") or diagnostic ("neurosis" and "mental illness"). I think I'm approaching Foucault through some kind of weird linguistic-analysis backdoor, but it does seem a process of power of the kind he talked about incessantly.

But what Foucault didn't really give us was any kind of sense of remedy or solution. I have tried to be patient with the postmodernists' solution, which is to build a whole new vocabulary (and grammar, to some degree), but it's a failure. It leads, it seems to me, away from communication. And at the diametric opposite of that, I see poetry. Poetry, not as in verse but as in the sensitive, careful recontextualization of specific elements of language which, when isolated and combined, communicate something otherwise incommunicable using those words (or any words, perhaps).

And that's where I am trying to go with this idea of "misuse" of language. Some gestures toward that idea, which I am still working out, follow:

• The problem with communication is that, as gregarious animals, it doesn't matter what moment in the historical process we appear, we need to communicate; it's a fundamental need of human beings. The story of the Buddha speaking about finding an arrow in one's chest speaks volumes: one's immediate concern is to deal with the critical issue, and later work out how the hell it got to be that way. Both are important, but with an arrow in your chest, you need to get it out before you worry about who shot it. Similarly, we need to communicate, even if most of the language we have to use has been appropriated. If I need to use the word vision because everyone around me is a Christian, well, I may as well, carefully, use that word, and then show them how it's not a Christian vision. This does, doesn't it, involve a kind of intentional, constructive (because temporary) deception? Arguably, all metaphor is deception. Then again, arguably, all declaration is deception too. (Though that's a hairier problem and on a different order; not hermeneutical but, uh, ontological or something, isn't it?) More importantly, I think it is through constructive deceptions like metaphor that language does what I stated earlier, which is that it "facilitates instantiation of ideas in the hearer, such as ideas never considered before."
• The bigger project might be a kind of recovery of language from absolute meanings. I don't know where the hell to go with that, whether it's a strictly artistic process, or something achievable in small increments, or what. I really don't know. I'll have to think about it. I think it stands a better chance than, say, postmodernist writing because, at least piece by piece, cleverly done, it could be performed through popular media. But it's a big and difficult question.

Son House, huh? I am pretty sure mine is Blind Willie Johnson (and in the mess of this moving house business I haven't time to look), but my copy is powerful too. Good stuff. But right now, I am taking a break from Apples in Stereo with a little neo-traditional kayagum music. Think Japanese koto. Think, aaaaaaaaaah.

May the Lord restore your computer to health! In the interest of consolation, may I recommend the following? Make sure you get the sound.

http://www.astonishedhead.com/images/OVOID.swf

(It's even better if you've seen the original commercial.)

And I can't help but recommend this happy fun little lesson in European drivers' education...

Marv

When I read about your Pictionnaire's juxtaposition of cross and globe, my first thought was of the teaser scene that opens the movie Flash Gordon. Earth is pictured in the crosshairs of some alien device while Max Von Sydow (Ming the Merciless) intones,

"Klytus, I'm bored. What pleasure can you offer me today?"

"An obscure body in the Escade system, your Majesty. The inhabitants call it...Earth."

If I wanted to draw a picture of the salvation of the world in a Christian idiom, I would probably try to sketch an image of the ubiquitous picture of Aryan!Jesus that my grandparents had on their bedroom wall for as long as I can remember. If I wanted an Old-Testament idiom I suppose I'd use a rainbow or dove. I wonder if it's really fair, though to say that one's teammates should have guessed the Christian theme of the picture. If I were to find myself playing Pictionary at, say, a church function, I wouldn't expect my teammates to go out of their way to pick specifically religions themes. I would consider it, and expect others to consider it, tacky and overbearing to do so. And because I was raised Episcopalian I would expect my teammates to go out of their way to avoid being overbearing. (Tacky is a whole 'nother ball game.)

But this is supposed to be about language and evolution and the psyche and what-not. A couple of thoughts...

• It would be interesting to devote a discussion to just how religious language is different from the secular. I think E. O. Wilson said that humans evolved to believe in gods, not science; if that idea is accurate, then it might be proper to regard secular language as the peculiar oddball of human development. We liberal types and secular humanists and atheists and mental perverts in general tend to like to think of religion (and religious language) as a bizarre aberration of the species, the thing that makes us hate and kill each other. I'm inclined to think that those tendencies precede religion and that religion simply justifies and "explains" in its fashion why we do such things. A common theme among disgruntled lefties is our bewilderment about why all those religious fanatics are so weird. Maybe they aren't. Maybe we, the secular skeptical types, really are the weird ones by the closest thing the human race has to an objective standard—the results and pattern of our evolution. I'm inclined to believe that the idiosyncracies of religious language are actually quite common, embedded in the many ways in which human beings routinely simplify the world to make it easier to grasp. Religion simply represents one of the "deep ends" of that tendency.
• I believe that politics is built into the evolution of humans and of those other creatures that exist in pack-like community structures. The competition for influence, power, and reproduction that takes place in one generation shapes the next. The mechanics of evolution are those actions and accidents that permit or prevent survival and propagation. If the ability to compete in the social arena effects one's odds, then evolution is political. Which is not to say that evolution favors any particular political theory or structure. (Even if it did, that would be no proof that one ought to follow such a path. Suppose it is shown in some way that evolution favors hierarchies of dominance, or that all artificially engineered social structues inevitably tend to revert to this default. That wouldn't make social Darwinists "right." It would just make them pragmatic. The universe may be entropic but there's no moral value in its eventual heat-death.) Maybe evolution isn't political for flatworms. But for humans, definitely. I tend to take it as given that certain aspects human cultural and social behaviors—which from an anthropological perspective certainly seem to reiterate in every human society in certain predictable ways—are deeply biologically based.

I have a CD with Son House singing John the Revelator. It's a powerful, powerful song. I like what you say at the end of your post about the use and "misuse" of language to make a point. The use of the word "misuse" is curious, though. What constitutes a misuse of language in a context where you aren't intentionally trying to deceive? There may be inadequate use of language, or inept use—a failure to make one's point— but if we give up the idea of an objective universal truth along with God, then does it make any sense to say that secular language is more accurate than the religious? If language is a means to an end, and if religious language works the way you want it to, then what's wrong about it? That it fails to describe reality? But which reality?

I'm tempted to say that all true communication is poetry, even prose, except when poetry is forced to act like prose. That might make a good definition of fanaticism: an abhorence of the poetic. The insistence that religion be true.

Toodles,

Marv

Marvin... computer died. Resurrection in progress. Lost all the revisions I made to the static pages. Hoping to be back online tonight, but suspecting it's hardware, as a full wipe still hasn't sorted all the problems.

Talk soon. Thanks for the consoling email.

Marvin!

Seriously, though, there is a question floating around in my brain. It comes to me from an experience I had today, and while it's still fresh, and while I have some time (I'm stuck at school for 1.5 hours, and I need to kill some time here), I'd like to post it as I think it is illustrative of the kind of dilemma I think we might talk about eventually.

We were trying to provide an entertaining time for the teachers who are doing this Teacher Training Workshop. After all, we've worked them somewhat hard for the last three weeks, and they're here during their holidays... it's like they are beginning to wilt, they all look so tired. So anyway, we were playing Pictionary in large teams. The teams were competing against one another and each team member was taking turns drawing. Well, on my team (and, as it turns out, on at least one other team) the person who happened to be drawing the picture sketched a picture of the world, and then drew a cross.

The rest of my team (and of the other team, apparently) had no idea what this was supposed to signify. "Is it a 'T'?" "A cross?" "Across the world?" Of course, this image made perfect sense to the Christians, but to other people, it was a sign seen from outside the worldview. For a Christian it can (and often does) signify the saving power of Jesus. But for people outside the faith, it only means "Christianity."

Religious language is different from secular language. If I were to draw a picture of the notion "save the world" it would be a superhero, or maybe a spaceship, or something like that. Probably the Christians would understand this, as would the secular people. And the non-Christians in my group probably just weren't well-versed enough to understand what the cross means in Christianty, since they knew the rest of the phrase was "... the world". In the case of the student, and in the case of her teammates, they both failed to communicate effectively because their own assumptions, and their failure to take into account the assumptions of their teammate, came into play. And they should have been able to guess it, for after all one of the first things that particular student told me was, "I am a Christian and all of my friends are Christian. Almost nobody I know isn't Christian."

I'll leave aside comments on how this kind of social life is mentally stifling... and how analogues to it exist in terms of politics, ethnic and cultural features, gender, education level, and so on. Rather, I would like to suggest that it is illustrative of a very important thing to consider. In our emails, Marvin, you asked how one can talk about experiences that are powerful and meaningful, experiences which push us beyond ourselves and which reach out into something bigger than us - experiences traditionally understood as "religious" - without resorting to religious language and metaphor.

I'm sitting here in Korea, with the problem of communication and understanding facing me at the outset of nearly every conversation I have. This leads me to think about communication more in terms of effectiveness. I used to be worried that I would have to use language from a belief system that I didn't believe in, and as a result that I would promulgate some of its assumptions against my will. I still worry about that some, but I also am profoundly concerned with getting my point across, and I am becoming more and more convinced that this thing we do when explaining words to ESL students is the key: I always always teach my students not to hunt for the perfect parallel word in English for some sophisticated word in Korean. Rather, they should get at it by using context and metaphor; explain the situation and then describe what the thing, idea, or feeling is like. Usually an anglophone gets more out of that than some badly-used related-but-inappropriate English word dug out of a dictionary. And, inevitably, that word is going to come out of the experience and understanding of the student, the cultural and ideological frame of reference of the student. The thing about and English teacher is that they get better, after a while, figuring out which kind of mapping is probably going on and decoding the kinds of cross-linguistic similes and metaphors that create nonsense in English but make sense to the ESL student.

What am I saying?

I am beginning, in a way, to suggest that one of the big barriers to effective communication is, if you will, the hardwiring to our thought processes themselves that are determined by language and culture. Now, sometimes this causes great difficulty in communication. Mr. Kwak will never really understand why I told him it was his turn to cook his wife breakfast. He may get to the point where he understands that in my culture an enlightened man does not, all things be equal, expect his wife to cook for him regularly without him taking his turn. He may fully understand that, and find amusement in my telling him he ought to embrace this idea - for it was said as a joke, albeit a pointed one. But he will never quite understand what I mean the way one of my foreign co-workers probably would have, overhearing the same joke... the pointedness of it along with the humor and the gentle teasing.

And yet, some things are the same everywhere. I say expressions and when my students figure out what they mean, they repeat the Korean analogue back. All men are the same. Every cloud has a silver lining. Easy come, easy go. Birds of a feather flock together. These are the things that my postmodernist friends bang into, that invisible but everpresent barrier that prevents them falling of the so-called edge of the earth, and out into the postmodernist space in which no commonality can exist that isn't deconstructible or politicizable in some way.

Evolution is not political, right? I mean, theories of evolution can be, the education about it that happens in many places often is, and evolution impacts on politics (as it does on everything). The idea of evolution has even been adopted by just about every political group or movement in the world at some point or other as a kind of proof of their righteousness and virtue. But the mechanics of the process, and our general understanding of it so far, suggests there is no politics in it. Skin pigmentation relates to long term effects of climate and latitude upon the phenotypes of members of various historically separate gene pools. The epicanthic fold on Asian eyes is related to dust and desert life (so I've read). These adaptations are the exact opposite of politics, they are pure natural pragmatism (of a kind human minds are ever so rarely capable). But the people who are caught up with these minor surface differences (and I mean surface in the sense of superficial, since of course numbers of muscle fibers and distributions of blood type are also correlated to "race", whatever that means) are all the more likely to forget how beautifully the human machine's universal basic (unplanned, on-the-evolutionary-fly) design - the same basic default design we all are based on - works. It's served us well, for all its quirks and fallibilities.

The human psyche is not separate from that. Deeper than the superficialities of culture, there is a mass of wiring, tendencies and potentials and cognitive systems that are universally present. Culture affects those, and hell, even nutrition affects it - in some villages in the Yunnan province in China (where the bubonic plague is said to have originated), more than half the population suffers from mental retardation. And of course, Mr. Kwak thinks as he does because of a whole set of personal experiences, from childhood to the present, that he uses to define as normal. Now, note my wording: he is active in this process, he uses those experiences to define normal. There is agency involved here.

And so it is when we communicate. I'm not sure I have enough to time really make my point here, but the generality is this: that maybe communication is not something we should be prima donnas about. Of course, this can amount to a kind of "turn the other cheek" when dealing with people who will purposefully misread your statements. Using religious language is something I shy away from when talking with religious people who I think will misunderstand me. I feel a tendency to phrase everything in an aggressively secular way to avoid miscommunication.

But isn't part of communication about translation? If I say I had a kind of revelation, I think sometimes I am saying the most powerfully expressive word of my experience. When I broke up with my last girlfriend, it felt as if the end of the world had come, manifested in my gut, and clawed its way through the rest of me to the brain. I got drunk on some Korean soju (think sweet-potato vodka) and railed against the world, confessing pains and fear and loathing of everything to my friends, and a day later, ever so slightly hung over, I woke to this profound, gigantic peace. The tremendous, powerful, tidal emotions in me - themselves a revelation of my nature, and of human nature - had swept down into the deepest places, become part of the anchor of me to the world outside me. I saw myself and the world more clearly, through that hazy mild hangover, and while I felt no abiding presence of some loving omnipotence watching over me, I did feel peace, and calm, and I felt something about the universe that I hadn't felt in ages.

To speak of revelation usually implies someone who is revealing the revealed... "the revelator", as the old Blind Willie Johnson (I think it was him) song about St. John goes. But to say "realization" doesn't convey what it was. It was transformative, and yet not constructed. It was not an epiphany. It was the kind of revelation that an atheist experiences.

Maybe I am saying that forcefully misusing language is one way to achieve the kind of communication you were talking about. I am perhaps suggesting a more poetical, metaphorical way of using language, and while I am at it a more open-minded and creative way of interpreting utterance. We need to listen creatively, listen for how the particulars of someone's experience inform the deeper psychic structures we share in common, map from there.

I know that doesn't work in communication with religious fanatics, but then I usually don't communicate with them anyway. And of course even in good friendships clarification is necessary: "You know, I am an atheist, but... it was like a revelation of some kind, you know?" However, I think for real communication to happen, sometimes, we have to be willing to surrender a little of the ego, of the "I", for the sake of the conveyance of the idea.

Thoughts? (I shall have more to say but perhaps it shall have to wait until after Japan. Who knows, though?)

Cheers,
Gord