What Up, Dog(ma)?
What Up, Dog(ma)?
Was/Not Was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCpjJa0QlnQ
Heh. I used to say things like, "Critical Thinking Is Hard (except for Naturally Pugnacious And Disobedient Folks Like Me)", and followed it with "especially when nobody wants to RTFM."
But, as I realized looking around the CR at Space X, the binders are gone. And at Google, the Algorithm is the manual, and it is proprietary and inscrutable.
As a consequence, I am less dismissive of the Anarchists, these days.
Harder to play by the rules when there aren't any.
Originally shared by Rick Wayne (Author)
Language and the Lunatic Fringe
Doris Lessing, who wrote under the name Jane Somers, was British by ancestry, although she was born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.
This essay was referenced in one of my posts from yesterday. I hadn't read it, so I dug it up this morning. It was published in the NY Times in 1992, and in many ways, it hasn't aged particularly well. But then, thinking about that and why it might be so is useful for understanding our place in things.
For example, now a generation removed from the horrors of Communism, the name doesn't conjure immediate demons as it would have to any sensible person in 1992. In fact, there seems to be a kind of nostalgia setting in. (I saw a long post on Tumblr recently, written by a young person, that asked the question 'was Communism really so bad?' with the purported answer of no.)
To some degree, this is to be expected, with Fascism rattling its chains again. You have to remember, the two grew up together and hated each other bitterly, like sibling rivals, each seemingly trying to outdo the other in extremism and atrocity.
There's a contemporary joke in there. Stalin, seeing the Holocaust, turns to Khrushchev and says "Hold my beer."
The essay is short, if you want to read the whole thing, but honestly the conclusion is the relevant bit:
A successor to Commitment is Raising Consciousness. This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. Raising Consciousness, like Commitment, like Political Correctness, is a continuation of that old bully, the Party Line.
A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is 'about' something or other. I wrote a story, 'The Fifth Child,' which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on. A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, 'Of course 'The Fifth Child' is about AIDS.' An effective conversation stopper, I assure you.
But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, 'Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,' you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be 'really' about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of story telling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.
The demand that stories must be 'about' something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.
The phrase Political Correctness was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the Political Correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.
There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art -- the arts generally -- are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but at worst persecution. It troubles me that Political Correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.
Does Political Correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe, the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.
A professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A demonstration -- they might very well have been shocked to hear -- which was a mirror of Communist behavior, an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young Communist activists.
Again and again we see in town councils or in schools councillors or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.
I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14/reviews/lessing-language.html
Was/Not Was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCpjJa0QlnQ
Heh. I used to say things like, "Critical Thinking Is Hard (except for Naturally Pugnacious And Disobedient Folks Like Me)", and followed it with "especially when nobody wants to RTFM."
But, as I realized looking around the CR at Space X, the binders are gone. And at Google, the Algorithm is the manual, and it is proprietary and inscrutable.
As a consequence, I am less dismissive of the Anarchists, these days.
Harder to play by the rules when there aren't any.
Originally shared by Rick Wayne (Author)
Language and the Lunatic Fringe
Doris Lessing, who wrote under the name Jane Somers, was British by ancestry, although she was born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.
This essay was referenced in one of my posts from yesterday. I hadn't read it, so I dug it up this morning. It was published in the NY Times in 1992, and in many ways, it hasn't aged particularly well. But then, thinking about that and why it might be so is useful for understanding our place in things.
For example, now a generation removed from the horrors of Communism, the name doesn't conjure immediate demons as it would have to any sensible person in 1992. In fact, there seems to be a kind of nostalgia setting in. (I saw a long post on Tumblr recently, written by a young person, that asked the question 'was Communism really so bad?' with the purported answer of no.)
To some degree, this is to be expected, with Fascism rattling its chains again. You have to remember, the two grew up together and hated each other bitterly, like sibling rivals, each seemingly trying to outdo the other in extremism and atrocity.
There's a contemporary joke in there. Stalin, seeing the Holocaust, turns to Khrushchev and says "Hold my beer."
The essay is short, if you want to read the whole thing, but honestly the conclusion is the relevant bit:
A successor to Commitment is Raising Consciousness. This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. Raising Consciousness, like Commitment, like Political Correctness, is a continuation of that old bully, the Party Line.
A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is 'about' something or other. I wrote a story, 'The Fifth Child,' which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on. A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, 'Of course 'The Fifth Child' is about AIDS.' An effective conversation stopper, I assure you.
But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, 'Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,' you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be 'really' about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of story telling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.
The demand that stories must be 'about' something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.
The phrase Political Correctness was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the Political Correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.
There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art -- the arts generally -- are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but at worst persecution. It troubles me that Political Correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.
Does Political Correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe, the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.
A professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A demonstration -- they might very well have been shocked to hear -- which was a mirror of Communist behavior, an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young Communist activists.
Again and again we see in town councils or in schools councillors or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.
I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14/reviews/lessing-language.html
excellent.
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