2015 — 9 June: Tuesday
Today strikes me1 as a good day to tidy up the garage ahead of tomorrow's grand "new door" fitting adventure. If — hollow laughter — this means disturbing my world-class collection of cobwebs then so be it.
But, again, not before a nice, fresh cuppa, of course. One doesn't wish to rush into things. Besides, I first need to find a broom. [Pause] Chilly start, followed by showers? Sounds about right for June.
Groan
It's a neat summary. Doesn't mean it isn't depressing:
There is simple ignorance and there is willful ignorance, which is simple ignorance coupled with the decision to remain ignorant...
It is sad that the modern attack on truth started in the academy — in the humanities, where the stakes may have initially seemed low in holding that there are multiple ways to read a text or that one
cannot understand a book without taking account of the political beliefs of its author.
That disrespect, however, has metastasized into outrageous claims about the natural sciences.
What's a book? [Pause] Could be better not to ask!
...participants read passages from either a book about wizards (from the Harry Potter series) or a book about vampires (from the Twilight series). Both implicit and explicit measures revealed that participants who read about wizards psychologically became wizards, whereas those who read about vampires psychologically became vampires. The results also suggested that narrative collective assimilation is psychologically meaningful and relates to the basic human need for connection...
(Link.)
Nurse! More meds! Quickly!
The trick to a successful "tip" experience is, it turns out, to arrive 10 minutes before they open the gates at 09:00 in the morning. I shall venture out again. Sadly, however, there will be no garage cleaning ahead of tomorrow. The catastrophic failure of the door's mechanism has seen to that.
Five bags?
The level of the heap of remaining garden waste looks, if anything, bigger than it did before. Tell me it's not growing in situ! I demand a cuppa, dagnabbit! And, come to think of it, isn't "lemonses" about due? Mole has been working very hard all morning.
Meanwhile, returning...
... to today's starting topic, recall that new word "Agnotology" — the study of the cultural production of ignorance — I learned back in 2008? And indeed a whole book on that topic? From the synopsis:
Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.
I'm tempted to ask how we can "know" that some "form of knowing" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) has been lost. But that's Stanford scholars for you. Apparently, "nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship". Sounds like my sort of field. Probably inexhaustible, too. (Link.)
Further scratching...
... at some of this nonsense, I recalled the quote I've long hosted (in a truncated form) under the letter "I" (though I could no longer tell you for certain why that letter seemed appropriate)...
Postmodernism, in fact, constitutes an explicit rejection of the element of sapientia in homo sapiens, as evidenced by the epistemological nihilism in the literary critic Jane Tompkins's remark that "there really are no facts except as they are embedded in some particular way of seeing the world". Such a claim denies the facticity of facts, reduces facts to the status of received beliefs. This would be mere relativism except that a paragraph later, Tompkins insists, "This doesn't mean that you have to accept just anybody's facts. You can show that what someone else asserts to be a fact is false." The obvious question, though, is: How?
Goldblatt's text came from what I have to confess I assumed at the time was a humour piece titled "Can Humanists Talk to Postmodernists?" Unsurprisingly, perhaps, his conclusion was "No!"... However, now consider that modern master craftsman — Donald Rumsfeld. In another piece by Goldblatt, we can savour Rummy on the subject of negative media reports coming out of Iraq in late 2003:
"And do I think ultimately truth wins out? You bet. I mean, our whole system is based on that, that we can take untruth and, over time, the truth is heard, and it begins to register, and people begin to
behave off it."
Implicit in Rumsfeld's comments is what philosophers call epistemological optimism. It's the belief that truth — defined as the correspondence between what's thought or said with a reality that exists
independently of what's thought or said — can be had... The suggestion that truth wins out has been dismissed by a steady stream of continental thinkers, and their American disciples, as the
height of intellectual naïveté. In their minds, what determines truth is not correspondence with reality but political utility; we decide a proposition is true only if it directly or indirectly
serves our interests.
So, that's how it works? What a system! Goebbels would be so proud.