New Sophists' Almanac

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

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?

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

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

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.