Horizon

Yesyesyes, and I'm all in favor of keeping theological fantasy out of the Grand Canyon visitors' center, but moderation in all things. The Enlightenment isn't the answer to every question even if it is/was largely Good.

Foucault was crazy in many ways but also right about several things. One was that exaggerated worship of rationalism is itself a kind of irrationality that can lead to cruel "scientific" programs of locking people up for perceived disorderliness or defectiveness. Opposites meet. Over-worship of the idea of rational improvement can lead back into the mystical and murderous via, for example, eugenics.

To observe Godwin's Law and change the subject slightly, we can think about all those amazingly early "mad scientist" stories as products of real uneasiness about what the Enlightenment was doing to the normal world.

There's also this point (not my own, but I can't remember the source right now -- probably a NYRB writer?) that present-day fundamentalisms -- including the hypertoxic terrorist kinds -- are only superficially anti-modern & in many ways are products of modernity themselves. I mean, just for example there's the modernity of the Taliban types' insistence on uniformity -- not only in public but inside private households and, if they had their druthers, in private thought. Uniforms and uniformity are modern. And the insistence on uniformity is a product of a kind of thought-invading rationality-worship that never really is a return to old ways. The older, less technological world, whatever its many faults, did tolerate some kinds of irregularity. Yes, I know, I know, not other kinds of irregularity: village witch-hunters were part of the older world. But eccentricity was possible to an extent that for example the Taliban wouldn't tolerate.

Walter Benjamin shuddered almost equally at the uniformity imposed on soldiers, factory workers, and chorus-line dancers. He'd certainly find a required uniform of burqas and beards equally horrifying.

So all I'm saying is, yes, we've absolutely got to defend the scientific method, which *is* on the ropes, but let's not deify Rationality and Science in the process.

Safest, I think, not to deify anything.

Safest, I think, not to deify anything.

I'm not sure I would wholly agree with that. I think Chesterton said that: "When people stop believing in God, it's not that they believe in nothing; it's that they believe in anything". I don't think that's the answer per se, but I do think he had a point.

Alan's been reading John Shelby Spong, I see.

A thousand welcomes to you, Ben, and you will tell us, won't you, who in the blazes is John Shelby Spong?

Isn't he the author that goes *bing*?

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

So all I'm saying is, yes, we've absolutely got to defend the scientific method, which *is* on the ropes, but let's not deify Rationality and Science in the process.

I often get this feeling when reading through articles on the The Skeptic's Dictionary and similar stuff. Can't help thinking to myself "Yes, but" all the time. Reason and scientific method are specialized tools and should not be used for swatting flies, driving nails, deciding what to wear.

But if people have to decide matters of life and death and reason isn't invoked, then, as Alan points out, something else will be. If some have tried to use Rationality to cover their violent and racist tendencies, that proves very little.

Foucault got famous mainly because he helped to revitalize the age-old aesthetic device of the intellectual conceit. Hence things like "...knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."

Or so it seems to me.

Click here.

Spong's the retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, and is author of a number of popular books like _Why Christianity Must Change or Die_ and _Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism_. He is to modernist theology and higher criticism what Dr. John Graves, PhD is to gender studies and sociolinguistics -- oversimplifications and generalizations galore.

At any rate, he's very fond of making rationalistic assertions that end up just looking silly. I remember one being that ancient men believed in a God who was physically above the sky, but since we know that outer space is above the sky, the Ascension is impossible for a modern person to believe in. To me this sort of thing replaces a belief in the power of the supernatural with a belief in Reason (and some dubious implications thereof) that's just as untenable.

Most annoying to this nit-picker, is that he labels his position as postmodern, when it's Fordist modernism at its most grandiose. Bishop Spong wouldn't know postmodernism if it bit him on the ass.

And my reference to Spong and Alan was that Spong seems like a textbook example of Chesterton's maxim, not that Spong would say anything that clever. Or that Alan reads trite pop-theology of any stripe.

I thought Foucault got famous because he helped put labels on the carceral patterns that are common to both literal institutions and the policing of daily life. Things like the way poor urban "sin districts" function as open-air prison dayrooms.

But then Foucault has been used "for cutting" a lot in the po-mo hairsplitting wars, hasn't he?

As for not deifying things, etc., of course you've got to approach problems rationally, but it's basic that rational analysis has to be balanced with irreducibly moral kinds of judgment. [Insert lifeboat quandary here.]

Lemurs to be addressed under separate cover. ;--)

Ben wrote:

...Bishop Spong wouldn't know postmodernism if it bit him on the ass.

Thank you. I enjoyed that. And thanks for the explanation.

Wot Chesterton maxim? This?

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

Not bad. You know, I've read probably two paragraphs of Chesterton and a half-dozen quotes, but know hardly a thing about him other than that Orwell usually detested him. Any recommendations?

I'm not the one to ask. Read The Man Who Was Thursday once and thought it was a few notches worse than C.S. Lewis.

Wotzis about a maxim?

Sorry -- the quote in comment #2 of this thread. A quick google reveals the full version to be: "It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. Alas, it is worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they can believe in anything."

I'm actually not sure about that quote -- I saw a number of paraphrases of it, and the Chesterton society's quotations page doesn't include it.
http://www.chesterton.org/discover/quotations.html

Right -- nevermind on that quote:

The Quotemeister has become convinced that the source of the fugitive quotation is Emile Cammaerts, whose ambiguous typography misled Christopher Hollis and through him others (including, at last, all of the rest of us) into the mistaken conviction that a thought repeated over and over by Chesterton had a specific epigrammatic form that Chesterton never precisely gave it.

The Quotemeister confidently asserts to all future inquirers that the source of the fugitive epigram is "The Oracle of the Dog" as codified by Emile Cammaerts.

From:
http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister2/any-everything.htm

Oh, well. I prefer the most recent version I've seen: "The Internet: Where Everything is True!"

Right -- nevermind on that quote:

Interesting - thanks Ben. I guess this is the Chestertonian equivalent of Orwell's 'Rough Men'.

Or, apparently, Burke's "...for good men to do nothing." C/o Buck in one of several BadAttitudes comments sections, where we have been talking, via Orwell, about whether hares really do box in the young corn.

Pardon me, I hope you don't mind if I wade in slowly, the pool may be too deep for me here, but Jerome's going to run me out froom for me in his-never could handle the deep end there anyway.
I grew up in the nether regions of the depth of the South, Dante might find it more hospitable than another place we've heard from him on, at any rate, hope you all don't mind if I put on my boxing gloves, I hope there's a medic around, because I'll probably need him sooner rather than later.
If you don't mind though, I'll give this a try.

Well, that was a great start wasn't it, the first sentence is more snarled than the traffic in Washington, hope you don't mind if I don't post an email address. If thats a problem, I'll set one up somewhere.

Welcome. No need for boxing gloves here I don't think.

But you'll keep on posting at BadAttitudes, right?

I couldn't get by without my bad attitudes, of course.

I thought Foucault got famous because he helped put labels on the carceral patterns that are common to both literal institutions and the policing of daily life. Things like the way poor urban "sin districts" function as open-air prison dayrooms.

I'm getting out of my range here, but it seems to me that this, quite apart from whether it's a useful way of casting things, is exactly the kind of conceit that I mean. It's no wonder he's so popular in rhetoric departments.

Could you explain a little more what you mean by "conceit," then?

I mean "an elaborate or strained metaphor" (M-W).

John Donne's The Flea is one famous example of a poetic conceit.

No, I don't find the carceral/dayroom idea strained at all. Not in a poor neighborhood where many people "known to the police" spend a lot of their time outdoors due to their private living space being insalubrious or nonexistent. You see officers doing the same rounds day after day, stopping by to warn/warrant-check/ticket/arrest the same people over and over again. Watchers and watched get to be on a first-name basis with each other in what almost become family relationships. Which doesn't necessarily make the relationships healthy: some families are, after all, abusive. There are these tolerance-ghetto kinds of neighborhoods, like the Boston "Combat Zone," where offenses like drug dealing and prostitution are really more regulated than interdicted, and where people aren't bothered for simply looking poor -- whereas anyone who looks poor in a happier adjacent neighborhood is likely to be herded back into the ghetto (whether that person's poverty has anything to do with criminality or not). In such places there really is this sense that anyone wanted for questioning or as a suspect in a real crime can be easily brought in, especially as those on probation or parole have their rights against unreasonable search and seizure formally suspended.

P.S. Ugh. That flea poem with its naive casualness about bodily fluids is just plain creepy in a discussion of Foucault.

I think comparing a neighborhood--even a bad one--to a prison is a stretch no matter how apt it is in some ways. Why do I think that I'm right in thinking this? Because of the aesthetic effect it has. That said, I have no doubt that everything you say is true.

And, let me say again, I don't know much about it so I could be off in this case. But I'm pretty sure that this is something F did regularly and that it has something to do with his popularity.

"Aesthetic effect"? Seen the Alemany projects lately?

Re: your other point, yeah, he was good at being catchy. Too good at it. I don't have to like him or agree with all his views or acts to think he was right about some things.