[FRIAM] [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

Sun Jan 29 12:24:35 EST 2017

Steve, 

I love these biographical bits.  If a picture is worth a thousand words,
what is the value of a thousand word, word-picture!?  A million words?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2017 9:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

Eric -

I appreciate your point here.  I think the problem in *all* of our "culture
wars" is not that one side is evil and the other must fight and defeat them,
but that there is a schism  in "Ways of Knowing" which, while unresolved,
will lead to a schism in "Knowing" itself.  

I was raised in "two cultures".  

My nuclear family and community were very conservative and rural in nature.
They believed in hard work every day, self-denial (to some extent) for the
greater good, and many had one version or another of a Bible in their house
and in their place of worship, but few (if any) carried or quoted the Bible
in everyday life.  One of my best friends fathers was a lay preacher but
until I went with them for him to give a sermon to a tiny congregation an
hour's drive away, I had NO idea they were particularly religious, but his
sermon was well formed, articulated and he was charismatic.   By day he was
a skilled timber-scaler, measuring mostly by eye, how much timber was going
to come out of the trees as they marked them for cutting in the forest.  He
was a very good father and husband.   What I suppose people like to call
"salt of the earth".

I entered middle-school (then Jr. High) in a still conservative and
extractive-industry town, but large enough to have a few (more) free
thinkers, and it WAS the end of the 60's with lots of consciousness about
war, race, gender in the air.   I had been so isolated (no radio or TV
reception, very little newspapers beyond the monthly "roundup report" and
only *some* magazines (Natl Geo, Life, Reader's Digest, Farmer's Almanac).
So the "big world" landed hard on me, but mostly in a "good way".   It took
me most of 10 years past that point to reframe my world according to the
*bigger* world.  It helped that I was a DJ at the local small-time radio
station for several years and *had to* listen to a LOT of network
programming as a consequence.   I didn't produce any local news myself to
speak of but I *did* have to read it on air and realized that a lot of what
I was "saying" was a convenient falsehood that fit the local (small town)
aesthetic.   I also realized that among the several networks we had on the
wire for direct broadcast and record/rebroadcast that there were *some*
discrepancies in the "facts", or more to the point, as you bring up, the
"perspective".  I took to firing up my parent's antique Zenith "WaveMagnet"
radio after work and falling asleep to the BBC which not only had funny
"voices" but also had an entirely (to my parochial ears) different "Voice".
When they canceled draft registration a few months before I turned 18, I
decided not to leave my country of origin permanently (as planned) but
rather to take the money I'd saved up and go to a *real University* rather
than the local Community College as *most* of my fellow A/B students had
planned.  The C/D students (80%) weren't even considering higher education,
and sadly none were planning any adventures in the big world either.    My
10 year reunion was very sad, to see where *most* of them had (not) gone
with their lives.  I'm pretty sure most of them are still rooting for Trump,
even though his policies and attitudes are going to hurt THEM a lot more
than me.

My point, I suppose, is merely to reinforce what you said... and maybe add,
that the rhetoric of the Right is heavily invested in "Facts" and "Truth",
and even though *we* might see right through how those facts are cherry
picked and the truth distorted (from our perspective), that doesn't mean
they aren't earnest.   Trump supporters are nothing if not earnest!

- Steve

On 1/28/17 11:59 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

"2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central
accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a
feature of the population....  That is what worries me, and drives a sense
of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don't
understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust.  It's not the
same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose
the sense of factual truth as something larger than one's own petit
ambitions or the scope of the tribe. "

Ah, but here is the rub, isn't it? It is not the central accomplishment of
the Right. Tough men have always had a place, and "might makes right" is
hardly new. The assault on Truth over the past 70 years or so has been lead
primarily by people who describe themselves as liberals, in the name of
reducing "cultural hegemony" and "colonialism". In that context, the WWII
rhetoric about "Jewish science" vs. "German science", is not easy to
distinguish in effect from modern rhetoric about "feminist politics" vs "the
patriarchy." In both cases it is asserted that Truth is not primary, but
rather that Ways of Knowing are primary. What Dewey had was a method of
working towards the truth, and as soon as we cannot agree upon a method,
we're in trouble. 

Though they have some trouble with consistency, it is the Right that has
been fighting for "truth" as a central concept much more reliably than the
Left. They may seek it in bibles or successful businessmen, but their
boots-on-the-ground believe Truth is out there. It would be hard to say the
same for those on the left. Even the things they claim to most strongly
believe, they will typically drop in an instant if faced with an assertion
from another culture, or from someone with multiple "victim" traits. The
"your place is to listen" rhetoric, in which claims regarding individual
experience trump data, but only when those claims are made by individuals
from a "marginalized" group, cannot possibly be compatible with Dewey's
approach. 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu
<mailto:desmith at santafe.edu> > wrote:

Thank you for forwarding this Owen,

I didn't receive the original.

> So.  Let me just share one thought.  I have said a hundred times that I
think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to
problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950's  One of the elements
of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if we gather
inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully, investigate
rigorously,  we will, together , come to it.  What was, at the time of my
coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years,
a position in the argument.  The alternative to this Deweyan position seems
to be something like, "There is no truth of the matter; there is only the
exercise of power.  He who wins the argument, by whatever means, wins the
truth.  Truth is not something that is arrived at; it is won."
>
> So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that
he lies.  It has to be by demonstrating that liars don't win.

Nick, with the little clipping (done above) of what felt to me like a
digression within this gem, it seems to me perfect.  It is the return to a
clear focus on the center of the problem that I have been looking for and
not been able to express.

The thing is (acknowledging Marcus's replies also, and the ensuing
discussion of the scoping of the claim):

1. Regarding trump itself, I don't care about it except as I would care if
someone told me a vial of Marburg virus had been spilled on the kitchen
floor.  I would feel a sense of urgency to get a strong disinfectant to try
somehow to scrub it out.  If I felt I couldn't get rid of it short of
cutting out and replacing a part of the floor, that would be within bounds
of the discussion.  etc. at that level. I care a little more about several
of the craven rats in the congress, enough to be angry at them, but again
they can go into the autoclave with my blessing, and not much more interest
than that.   (I believe this is what the NYT editorial called the
dehumanizing motive of contempt, and argued is a bad choice; it feels to me
like they have more than earned the category on their own.)

2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central
accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a
feature of the population and whatever one calls the "culture" of this (and
probably several other) nation(s).  That is what worries me, and drives a
sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don't
understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust.  It's not the
same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose
the sense of factual truth as something larger than one's own petit
ambitions or the scope of the tribe.  In a big and complicated world where
people have the impact they do, losing the factual sense of truth is
commitment to an undignified form of suicide (emphasis on undignified,
otherwise do as you like), alongside a lot of other -cides that are not
morally defensible in any terms.  To have arrived at a large number of
people who have managed to somehow get on the wrong side of this point
requires a kind of blindness that it is hard to see how to break through.
The "demonstration that liars don't win" is to be a demonstration to them
(as I read Nick), to somehow flush out the narcotic that has them in this
bizarre non-mental state, and make room for the common sense they routinely
use when (for instance) not sticking their hands into the kitchen broiler or
diving head-first onto the back patio, to again become the driver of
decisions.

Any animal (that has a brain) has a part of its brain that is subservient to
the consistency of nature that we call fact (filtered and processed, of
course, but I claim still the point stands).  The heavily social animals
start to develop bigger veneers in which power starts to become a major
motivator, and partitions tasks with those motivated by an awareness of
fact.  But even as socialized as people are, as long as they are not
self-mutilators in a clinical sense, that part still seems no bigger than a
veneer.  Somehow it seems that cultures can, over decades, perform enough
decadance that the scope of control of the veneer balloons and that pattern
gets both frozen in to behavior and reified in a lot of constructed cultural
supports.  What is the manual for the needed task of jointly tearing out
what needs it, and re-building what has been built wrongly?

Eric

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