culture - Sam Kitonyi on Diigo

01 Feb 09

Debord developed a notion of the spectacle that ran directly parallel to Marx's notion of the commodity; for Debord, the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images (and vice versa). The spectacle is the form taken by society once the instruments of cultural production have become wholly commoditized and exposed to circulation.

01 Aug 08

Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr | Britannica Blog

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literature reading culture criticism technology web

Carr calls me an optimist, which is true. Here’s why: Every past technology I know of that has increased the number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity.
Nietzsche’s writing style changed with the typewriter, but was this change for the better or the worse? There is a melodramatic reference to Nietzsche being “under the sway of the machine,” but surely he was just as much under the sway of pen and ink before?

Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr | Britannica Blog

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shirky literature web culture history technology

Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name.
And this, I think, is the real anxiety behind the essay: having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.
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- William Sayoran once remarked, “Everybody has got to die … but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Luddism is a social version of that, where people are encouraged to believe that change is inevitable, except, perhaps, this time. This wish for stasis is bad for society, though not because it succeeds.
- our older habits of consumption weren’t virtuous, they were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access. Nostalgia for the accidental scarcity we’ve just emerged from is just a sideshow; the main event is trying to shape the greatest expansion of expressive capability the world has ever known.

16 Jun 08

Cities for Living by Roger Scruton, City Journal Spring 2008

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architecture culture modernism design city urbanplanning

“Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions.”
Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster—between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities—live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience.
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- Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: separating load-bearing and outward-facing parts. Once buildings become curtains hung on invisible frames, all of the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings lose out. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical facade, it is a pretend facade, with only a blank expression.
- Moreover, such buildings use no architectural vocabulary, so that one cannot “read” them as one does classical buildings. The passerby experiences this as a kind of rudeness. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification.
- There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines—lines that may come to an end but that achieve no closure.
- The lack of vocabulary explains the alienating effect of a modern airport, such as Newark or Heathrow. Unlike the classical railway station, which guides the traveler securely and reassuringly to the ticket office, to the platform, and to the public concourse, the typical airport is a mass of written signs, all competing for attention, all amplifying the sense of urgency, yet nowhere offering a point of visual repose.
- Krier’s solution is to replace the “downtown plus suburbs” system with that of the polycentric settlement. If people move out, then let it be to new urban centers, with their own public spaces, public buildings, and places of work and leisure: let the new settlements grow, as Poundbury has grown next to Dorchester, not as suburbs but as towns. For then they will recapture the true goal of settlement, which is the human community in a place that is “ours” rather than individual plots scattered over a place that is no one’s.
- Where God is at home, so, too, are we; the real meaning of the modernist forms is that there is no God and that Big Brother is now in charge. Krier is inclined to agree with me; but the problem, he says, is to find ways of building that will enable people to rediscover truth for themselves. To try to impose a comprehensive vision against the instincts and the plans of ordinary people is simply to repeat the error of the modernists.

15 Jun 08

Inconspicuous Consumption

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culture fashion race economics

African Americans don’t necessarily have different tastes from whites. They’re just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.
for today’s educated elites,

it’s virtuous to spend $25,000 on your bathroom, but it’s vulgar to spend $15,000 on a sound system and a wide-screen TV. It’s decadent to spend $10,000 on an outdoor Jacuzzi, but if you’re not spending twice that on an oversized slate shower stall, it’s a sign that you probably haven’t learned to appreciate the simple rhythms of life.

06 Jun 08

Bruce Sterling. The Wonderful Power of Storytelling

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culture gaming sf technology *for-anthony forgetting

The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all
your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection
that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice,
the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you
down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums
again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a
culture nut.

But if you buy a CD player you can bundle up all those records
and put them in attic boxes without so much guilt. You can
pretend that you've stepped up a level, that now you're even
more intensely into music than you ever were; but on a practical
level what you're really doing is weeding this junk out of your
life. By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to
the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a
relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it
take up disk-space in your head.
I rather imagine something like an LSD backlash occuring there;
something along the lines of: "Hey we have something here that
can really seriously boost your imagination!" "Well, Mr
Developer, I'm afraid we here in the Food Drug and Software
Administration don't really approve of that." That could happen.
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- A lot of our
  art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to
  be digital...

02 Apr 08

Nigeria's immorality is about hypocrisy, not miniskirts | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Africa Culture Gender History Morality Religion

But assuming that we agree that there is such a thing as a "pure" culture and that we would like to return to it, then we would go back to pre-colonial west Africa when gender roles were fluid, when there was little gender differentiation in Yorubaland, and when Igbo women could marry women. The culture-preserving senator would be surprised if she were transported back to her home in 1800. Never mind low-cut blouses. The women trading in the markets would be bare-breasted.

13 Aug 07

Allocution à l'Université de Dakar - Présidence de la République

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africa colonialism culture france history speech

Jeunes d'Afrique, la civilisation européenne a eu tort de se croire supérieure à celle de vos ancêtres, mais désormais la civilisation européenne vous appartient aussi.

Jeunes d'Afrique, ne cédez pas à la tentation de la pureté parce qu'elle est une maladie, une maladie de l'intelligence, et qui est ce qu'il y a de plus dangereux au monde.

Jeunes d'Afrique, ne vous coupez pas de ce qui vous enrichit, ne vous amputez pas d'une part de vous-même. La pureté est un enfermement, la pureté est une intolérance. La pureté
est un fantasme qui conduit au fanatisme.
Le drame de l'Afrique, c'est que l'homme africain n'est pas assez entré dans l'histoire. Le paysan africain, qui depuis des millénaires, vit avec les saisons, dont l'idéal de vie est
d'être en harmonie avec la nature, ne connaît que l'éternel recommencement du temps rythmé par la répétition sans fin des mêmes gestes et des mêmes paroles.
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- Le problème de l'Afrique, c'est de cesser de toujours répéter, de toujours ressasser, de se libérer du mythe de l'éternel retour, c'est de prendre conscience que l'âge d'or
  qu'elle ne cesse de regretter, ne reviendra pas pour la raison qu'il n'a jamais existé.

27 Jul 07

Responding to Responses to: "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace"

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class culture essay networking sns social web

Consider a brand like Coach. You'll find that this is consumed heavily by both rich and poor, but not by middle class. Why is this? Why is having "elite" brands a marker of success in poorer communities? I'm always astounded by the teens who can tell that my knock-off accessories are precisely that. And those are never the middle class teens.

26 Jul 07

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part One)

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culture democracy media politics theory us web

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent....
I guess I'd define spectacle as a dream performed, or perhaps, a fantasy on display. Spectacle animates an abstraction and realizes what reality often times cannot represent. But I also like to use the term in a broader way: to describe a way of making an argument, not through appeals to reason and fact (though these certainly can, and should, be part of spectacle) but through stories and myth, imagination and fantasy.
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- So what separates my "ethical" spectacles from these? It's a complicated question and I spend about a third of my book exploring it, but if I had to sum up the core value of an ethical spectacle in one word it would be this: democracy.
- Ethical spectacle fools no one. It is at its best when it is obvious what it is: just a spectacle. Like the architecture of Las Vegas or the campy performance of pro wrestling, one can also stage spectacles that don't pretend to be reality but wear their constructed nature on their sleeve. They are spectacles which present themselves as spectacles. As such, these dreams performed become, in their own way, real. Illusion may be a necessary part of politics but delusion need not be.
- Why the Dems are so clueless is a bit of a mystery. Part of it has to do with the history of Liberalism in this country which comes out of elite reform movements like Prohibition (a once progressive idea, along with eugenics!) as much as it arises out of labor and social movements (both of which are more interested in equality and justice than morality and culture). But this shying away from pop culture, I think, also has a lot to do with an abiding Enlightenment faith in the superiority of rationality and reason, and a deep suspicion of desire and fantasy - the very things, of course, which drive pop culture. This is a political problem since so much of politics is based in fantasy and desire and Liberals these days are simply not very skilled in operating on this terrain.

20 Jul 07

Private law « Wildly Parenthetical

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culture theory

This theft, in the end, is privilege: the ability to claim that I am who I am alone, without others: that I am white all on my own (as if I didn’t need racialised others for ‘white’ to make sense), that I am male all on my own (as if I didn’t need women to be my mirror), that I am normal (as if this did not rely upon others being deemed abnormal), that I am able-bodied (as if this were not a claim made possible only because others are not), that I am unambiguously sexed (as if that didn’t depend on intersexed and trans people to mean anything at all), that I am straight all on my own (without the defining queerness)…
Privilege doesn’t just affect an individual; it squashes and reduces others and their difference into being nothing more than a mirror that reproduces that privilege (which in the end gives all of us fewer ways to be not to mention lots more paranoia and hurt).
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- Forgetting the generosity of others, not least the difference that allows them to be. Assuming that they are, actually, simply self-sufficient individuals naturally accorded the benefits they bear which they don’t recognise as such, because they’re supposedly just the result of the natural way for individuals to be: if you’re white, you naturally get money and recognition and acceptance; if you’re straight, you naturally get the protection of the state for your relationships and kids. And so on.

19 Jul 07

k-punk: Epistemic privilege of the proletariat

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class culture theory

But the working class never experience their own lives and behaviours as natural or normal in the way the dominant class does. The encounter with the education system immediately makes working class people aware that their use of language differs from - i.e. is inferior to - the 'standard'.
In epistemic terms - i.e. in terms of knowledge of the true nature of the social - the subordinate group is in the privileged position precisely because its experience is incommensurate and discontinous, precisely, you might say, because it experience is not (a consistent or quasi-natural) experience at all.
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- the economic is not a Marxist concept; it is, rather, the pre-eminent category of capitalist realism. It is political economy that is the crucial Marxist notion
- we can see the indivisbility of politics and economics, of affect, belief and class position, very clearly in relation to attitudes to debt. The working class traditionally abominated debt, whereas the middle classes have always understood that you must 'speculate to accumulate', that money borrowed is not a fixed substantival sum, but a mutagenic agent that can be induced to work and grow.

k-punk: Punishment enough

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class culture k-punk theory

Social confidence is not based on achievements but on intrinsic ontological status: the ruling class are taught to see themselves as essentially talented and intelligent, irrespective of either achievements or failures. (Witness the forlorn but indefatigable figure of twice-bankrupted Rory on this year's Apprentice for an example of this syndrome). Hence Oxbridge types will happily call themselves novelists even if they have never written a novel, or curators even if they have never curated any events. The working class, meanwhile, tend to be more existentialist, believing that status has to be earned, and continually earned.

11 Jul 07

The Society of the Spectacle/Chapter 4 - Wikisource

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communism culture history marxism theory

Stalinism was also a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terrorism on which this class’s power was based inevitably came to strike the class itself, because this class has no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized status as an owning class which could be extended to each of its members. Its ownership has to be masked because it is based on false consciousness. This false consciousness can maintain its total power only by means of a total reign of terror in which all real motives are ultimately obscured.
Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the central seal of legitimacy provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation in its “socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate. Although the bureaucrats are collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of the ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a member of the ruling bureaucracy — who should be considered a “proletarian in power” and who branded “a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.”
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- When ideology has become total through its possession of total power, and has changed from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is determined solely by its police.
- Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crisis or disillusioned by the socialist movement’s failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is — a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism.

The Society of the Spectacle/Chapter 1 - Wikisource

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*for-brandon criticism culture philosophy poetry stevens theory

Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation.
Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.”
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- The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.
- t. But the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content. If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the “mass media” that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics.
- The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

The Society of the Spectacle/Chapter 3 - Wikisource

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culture marxism theory

Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.
But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.

61

The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the succession of things. The stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different personality types, actually show each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the entire realm of consumption.
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- Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.
- Here each individual commodity is justified in the name of the grandeur of the total commodity production, of which the spectacle is a laudatory catalog. Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy’s unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to preserve those districts as tourist attractions. The already dubious satisfaction alleged to be obtained from the consumption of the whole is thus constantly being disappointed because the actual consumer can directly access only a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven, fragments which invariably lack the quality attributed to the whole.
- The satisfaction that no longer comes from using the commodities produced in abundance is now sought through recognition of their value as commodities. Consumers are filled with religious fervor for the sovereign freedom of commodities whose use has become an end in itself. Waves of enthusiasm for particular products are propagated by all the communications media. A film sparks a fashion craze; a magazine publicizes night spots which in turn spin off different lines of products. The proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity. Trinkets such as key chains which come as free bonuses with the purchase of some luxury product, but which end up being traded back and forth as valued collectibles in their own right, reflect a mystical self-abandonment to commodity transcendence. Those who collect the trinkets that have been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating commodity indulgences — glorious tokens of the commodity’s real presence among the faithful. Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.
- The image of blissful social unification through consumption merely postpones the consumer’s awareness of the actual divisions until his next disillusionment with some particular commodity. Each new product is ceremoniously acclaimed as a unique creation offering a dramatic shortcut to the promised land of total consummation. But as with the fashionable adoption of seemingly aristocratic first names which end up being given to virtually all individuals of the same age, the objects that promise uniqueness can be offered up for mass consumption only if they have been mass-produced. The prestigiousness of mediocre objects of this kind is solely due to the fact that they have been placed, however briefly, at the center of social life and hailed as a revelation of the unfathomable purposes of production. But the object that was prestigious in the spectacle becomes mundane as soon as it is taken home by its consumer — and by all its other consumers. Too late, it reveals its essential poverty, a poverty that inevitably reflects the poverty of its production. Meanwhile, some other object is already replacing it as representative of the system and demanding its own moment of acclaim.
- Each new lie of the advertising industry is an admission of its previous lie.

03 Jul 07

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: How Class Shapes Social Networking Sites...

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aesthetics culture networking social technology theory web2.0

The patterns she identify here are familiar to anyone who has read Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, which develops a sociological theory of how taste and aesthetic judgements get mapped onto class differences in very powerful ways. Tastes, he argues, are systems of choices, which point towards a basic division between bourgeois restraint and working class excess, rather than individual or local decisions. Anyone who wants to see this dramatized should check out the classic 1930 melodrama, Stella Dallas, where a mother, who is proud of her "stacks of style" (as played out in excessive make-up, jewelry, and fru-fru clothing) must ultimately distance herself from her more "tastefully" restrained daughter if she is to insure the girl's class mobility.

02 Jul 07

Value and Capital in Bourdieu and Marx

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capitalism culture marxism theory

On this basis, it is possible to understand both the structure of the social field and the various position takings within it in terms of the differing absolute volumes of capital held by particular agents and of the differing composition of particular agents' capital assets, which will be made up of varying proportions of cultural and economic capital (as in the chart in Distinction 128-129). Class hierarchy (and class alliances or disputes) can therefore be understood in terms of multi-dimensional space, rather than in terms of simple linearity.
The notion of cultural capital's convertibility with economic capital also enables struggles within a particular class to be understood now as struggles over "the conservation or transformation of the 'exchange rate' between different kinds of capitals"
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- Pragmatically, one could imagine that political phenomena such as populism, in which agents appear to contradict their class interests, could now be understood without reference to theories of "false consciousness" that simply reintroduce an absolute (yet, ironically, reductionist) account of the distinction between the economic and the cultural.
- If there is a parallelism between the cultural and the economic marked by the presence of specific forms of capital in both fields, rather than a dependency of the former on the latter, then what is at issue is the determination of the economic within the cultural, in other words the nature of cultural capital itself.
- he seems remarkably close to Marxist orthodoxy as he provides what is essentially the labor theory of value:
  
  Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its "incorporated," embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.
- the essence of the labor theory of value is that it defines value as accumulated labor. But value is quite distinct from capital (even if capital depends upon value) in that capital, for Marx, is the result of a process in which "value . . . becomes value in process . . . and as such capital"
- Both use value and exchange value are implied in any economic exchange. Marx points out that consumers exchange in order to obtain goods (food, clothing) whose value lies in the use that the consumer can make of them; the capitalist, on the other hand, exchanges in order to realize capital, expressed in the exchange value of the goods sold.
- " both aesthetics and economics were founded in contradistinction to the concept of use value" (Guillory, Cultural Capital 302). The aesthetic disposition demands a disavowal of utility--and hence what Bourdieu will criticize as the cult of disinterest. Thus both Kant in aesthetics and Adam Smith in economics bracketed utility to establish their fields of study.
- Bourdieu's innovation is to reintroduce use value through the concept of cultural capital into the discourses of both aesthetics and economics, unsettling and potentially "debasing" each. The introduction of "cultural capital" to analysis of the cultural field enables the argument that cultural appreciation is far from disinterested, that indeed taste conforms to a market system if with its own logic and its own specific form of capital.
- In both the cultural and economic fields, concrete time defines utility, and thus has to be bracketed.
- Aesthetics suggests that the appreciation of culture is immediate and hence disinterested and leads to what Bourdieu terms the "ideology" or "cult of the 'gift'" that denies the time-consuming labor of "apprenticeship" required to accumulate cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction 129, 130).
- for Bourdieu this is only the beginning of the story: selecting and then reading the book require a certain amount of cultural (particularly linguistic) capital, and the benefits of such investment yield an amount of cultural capital which may acquire a new form of exchangeable value at an academic dinner party or job interview, or if I pass an exam or am granted an educational diploma.
- Thus whereas for an orthodox economist the choice of Great Expectations over Neuromancer or the reading history of the customer are of no concern, for the economist of cultural capital such distinctions are the essential points of analysis.
- this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power. . . . it is a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. (Marx, Capital 300-1)
- As the commodities produced in this process are sold by capitalists to realize this surplus, the labor they incorporate is alienated from the workers, presented to them (in the market) as an object for consumption; the total value of the commodities is measured in terms of the amount of dead labor time they incorporate.
- Cultural capital arises from the fact that only a certain proportion of the activities that make up the concrete time of use value are valorized by the agents of cultural accreditation.
- cultural struggles over valorization for "non-canonical" works or subaltern cultural practices are also struggles over the proportion of surplus to "socially necessary" activity in the everyday lives of the masses of the population.
- Attempts to expand the canon or to introduce to it works or practices that are more widely read or seen or performed are thus attempts to ensure their valorization. They are a demand that the time that these practices entail should be recognized, above all by the institutions of accreditation charged with the consecration, and as such valorization, of cultural production.

01 Jul 07

Mark Kleiman | A Sermon on Doubt

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culture del.icio.us imported furl

Doubt is the chastity of the mind.
Taking religious language as poetic rather than prosaic means that simple categories of truth and falsehood don’t directly apply. That’s what allows the mystics to claim that they all see the same transcendent reality, while each affirms as well his or her own adherence to a particular faith tradition. And once we understand traditional moral teachings as deserving of respect merely as the traditions of the group – more or less like Constitutional law – their authority is no longer entirely bound up with the passages in various sacred texts that seem to embody factual assertions about cosmology, biology, or history, or even to the obsolete moral content of those same texts.
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- Starting from a strong set of beliefs backed by divine sanction, it’s possible to reason oneself into a less dogmatic frame of mind, while maintaining the intensity that came from the original dogmatism. But can such a sophisticated belief set be passed down from generation to generation? Children are highly imaginative, but also strongly literal-minded. If you don’t teach a child that, say, Methodism, is true (in a sense that means that the alternatives are false) then how serious a Methodist is he likely to be? It has been asserted – I don’t know with how much accuracy – that third-generation Reform Jews are very rare.
- It’s just not clear that one can sustain a church over time without claiming more special access to truth than an appropriate epistemological and theological humility would allow. Consider how Buddhism and Taoism, each started in a purifying reaction (from Hinduism and Chinese ritual practice, respectively), have become encrusted with elaborate superstition.
- I too have a creed. (Can I get a grant?) As far as I know, it was first preached by Socrates, though I learned it from my parents and first read it in one of Bertrand Russell’s books. Here it is:
  
  Believing false things is wrong.
- Or to put the matter more bluntly, I think that false belief is sinful. Human nature makes that sin inevitable, but each instance of it is to be repented with a firm purpose of amendment, and the will should be trained to resist it insofar as possible. Error (material heresy) is venial; stubbornness in error (formal heresy) is mortal.
- My attitude toward truth might fairly be described as piety, but it’s a polytheistic sort of piety; justice, beauty, and eudaimonaia (human flourishing) also compete for my devotional attention. As Socrates pointed out to Euthyphro, any given action may be pleasing to some of the gods and hateful to others.

13 Jun 07

Rocknerd | The Rap Against Rockism

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Sam Kitonyi's Library tagged culture → View Popular

Commodity fetishism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr | Britannica Blog

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