idiotropic

Walking down a security-compromised dark alleyway near the Elbo Room last Saturday, my friend and I were approached by a scraggly old fellow who was bearded, toothless, Caucasian but black with dirt, and holding a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor. Addressing us with a profound slur, he wanted to find a good place to sleep. I pointed towards a porto-potty across the street and suggested he take the luxurious bathroom suite over there. Pleased, he began to walk in that direction, which was — crucially — away from us. Noticing a Ducati sport bike on his way, he had to return and discuss it with us:

“Hey man…You see that fuckin Doookahtee over there?! I’m a motherfuckin Hell’s Angel prospect man and I hate motherfuckin crotchrockets man mother fucking Hell’s Angels prospect, man… man I hate motherfuckin crotchrockets… but i love fuckin Doookahtees man.”

He repeated the above several times.

We tried to make him go away. But then he wanted to talk about Jesus.

“You know what else I fucking love, man, mother fucking Jesus Christ man. I love Jesus man, Jesus got people like us man. He was one of us man. Jesus Christ… that guy, you know he was hanging out with guys like us man, with whores, and killers… and bikers, man.”

Jesus Christ was hanging out with bikers. This was his message. Jesus was on his side; Jesus was a bad-ass, he subverted the status quo of the Jewish and Roman ruling class, and he did it by shacking up with hustlers, turning water to malt liquor, and cruising on his hog.

At this point the Prospect wanted to show us the way Jesus did things. He slipped his hand under his vest, revealing the belt that held up his dirtbag pants, and caressed what appeared to be the chrome butt of some kind of firearm. He asked, “Do you pray?!” Swaggering, caressing the chrome, he repeated “Do you pray?!”

I said no. My friend said, “Sometimes.” He didn’t like “sometimes.” He wanted to know how often. I jumped in with “Wednesdays and Sundays.” He asked “What do you pray for?” My friend said “My family.” The Prospect said “Why don’t you pray right now?!” I said “Its not Sunday yet,” though it probably was.

Somehow, we eventually got this guy to start laughing and he backed off and we got the fuck out of there. Moral of the story is: Jesus Christ may save your soul, but you’ve got to save your own ass from his followers.

I’m becoming ever more interested in advocating the cause of atheism in America. Especially when I read quotes like this one from Katherine Harris:

We have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.

and when I see polls that report 53% of Americans say they would not vote for an atheist (10% more than the group that wouldn’t vote for a homosexual!). Maybe Obama knew about these figures when he joined Trinity United Church.

I acknowledge that being atheist is only like being a racial minority to the degree that intelligence is heritable. Regardless, I am starting to feel oppressed to the point that I think we need stronger atheist advocacy groups in this country. And with end times theology increasingly shaping American foreign policy, our safety may depend on it.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes of “Unconditional Duties”:

All those who feel they need the strongest words and sounds, the most eloquent gestures and postures, in order to be effective at all…talk of “duties,” and actually always of duties that are supposed to be unconditional. Without that they would lack the justification for their great pathos, and they understand this very well. Thus they reach for moral philosophies that preach some categorical imperative, or they ingest a goodly piece of religion….Because they desire the unconditional confidence of others, they need first of all to develop unconditional self-confidence on the basis of some ultimate and indisputable commandment that is inherently sublime, and they want to feel like, and be accepted as, its servants and instruments.

Two years prior, in 1880, Dostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov, whose famous chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” ruminates on a very similar theme. In this intensely ironic parable in which the Grand Inquisitor addresses Christ, Dostoevsky writes:

In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.

The Grand Inquisitor informs Jesus that the Church has had to perfect his work by adding to it the kind of spiritual bondage that allows people to live untroubled, in service to commandments that are — on the Church’s authority — inherently sublime.

These passages share a subtext, namely this: that religion functions primarily as a means to negate the fundamental freedom that comes with existence, because that freedom is too heavy for most to bare. By its simple imperatives, its categories of good and evil, it lifts from its adherents the burden of being arbiter of their own lives.

I agree that religion so functions, but is that necessarily cause for contempt? The inability of the average human to deal with the complex ambiguities of life is independent of religion; if he had not this mechanism of self-indenture, he would devise another. In light of this, it might be inevitable for there to exist various ways for us to indenture ourselves (indeed there are others besides religion, capitalism for one). But religion goes further. Not only does it enslave, it claims to exalt. It claims to empower as it thrives on subjugation. It demands respect for the ignoble task of making the feeble-minded absolutely certain of truths that do not exist.

I have to side with Nietzsche in contempt of religion; not only does it feed the “will to ignorance,” but it deceitfully claims to do the opposite. If we are going to throw ourselves into bondage out of some profound ennui, we should at least be honest with ourselves about it (cf. Heidegger’s Being & Time). Digging deeper into this honest interpretation of life may lead us to better understand the very condition in which we find ourselves — questions and answers over which religion pretends to have ultimate authority.

…and the Death of the Throwback to Positivism.

Robert Kagan has been all over the media promoting his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (dun dun dun…!). Based only on hearing him speak, I think I agree with the central thesis of his book, which is totally contra his earlier thought and pronounces a shocking death sentence to neoconservatism. Turns out democracy is NOT the inevitable manifestation of the perfect movement of history. (!) What a hilarious revelation, ironically reached five years after the inevitable movement of history accidentally moved the American military into Iraq! Mr. Kagan has finally realized, after founding the Project for the New American Century with William Kristol and laying various other groundwork for the divine global democratic nirvana that he envisioned after the Cold War, that we’re not living in 1880s Europe and history is not driven by teleological forces. “The End of Dreams” is apt — indeed, history has ended his.

Congratulations to Mr. Kagan for catching up with 1960s social theory. What he thinks of as “The Return of History” is, to me, the end of the return of history. Namely, it is the end of that return to the positivism of the Modern period — called neoconservatism — in which history was considered a science and liberal democracy as a force akin to gravity in the holy evolution of society. While the rest of the neocons continue on in their solipsistic worlds, at least Kagan is a realist enough to see the failure of his experiment in the science of history and accomodate his worldview accordingly.

Over the past several days, I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that the burning fire of my political interest burns cooler without being stoked by antipathy towards the duplicitous Clintons. Of all things, I suppose it is the absurd that truly interests me, and I think it was the vociferous absurdity of her campaign that ultimately drew me to the primary race. The ridiculous assertions that were sort of factual yet totally disingenuous — these were the sweet morsels of preposterousness that fed my interest in the Clintons and their pals. Looking forward, I realize I may be somewhat starved for absurdity in the remaining presidential campaign. Unless, of course, John McCain wins.

Obviously, I’m still enthusiastic about Obama, his judicial ability to deal with nuance, and his journalistic ability at self-analysis. As he addressed supporters in St. Paul after the Montana and South Dakota primaries, I was able to envision, for the first time, an Obama administration. I was inspired by the fact that I was inspired to maybe think about applying to work for his government — working for government being something I had never under any other circumstance considered.

I’m fairly confident that Obama will win in November. But not totally confident. However, this match-up of McCain vs. Obama is uninteresting because there’s really no contest. What I’ve said before about the primaries is really true here: this is not a test of Obama or of McCain, it’s a test of the American political system. The correct answer to the question “Who should be the next President?” is so obvious that we don’t even need the teacher’s exam key. Election Day ‘08 will not be the day that Obama and McCain find out who did better on the test for the Presidency, it will be the day that we find out if our country passes or fails the test of whether it still functions.

Apparently, this is old news, but I don’t often follow local stories, so I just heard about it on the BBC world service…

I simply want to congratulate the City of Vallejo. In declaring chapter 9 bankruptcy, it has officially made the road sign that greets Highway 37 motorists as they enter (and mostly pass through) this forlorn municipality one of the world’s most ironic. It reads:

“Welcome to Vallejo: City of Opportunity”

I’ll get a picture next time I’m passing through, unless they’ve taken it down, which they probably should.

Words of wisdom on Hil’s last stand from Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of truthdig.org (transcribed from KCRW’s Left, Right & Center):

“What really is at stake here is not whether she stays in. If she stayed in and had an honorable discussion about the issues and their policy differences — fine — we can applaud that and democracy needs that. But what’s happening here is that she’s…playing up the race and gender issues in a way that is not helpful. And to be campaigning that you are in fact the one who can swing unenlightened white voters…at a time when she should say, by the way, that if anyone votes for me because they can’t bring themselves to vote for a black man or a half-black man, that’s racism and I don’t want your support. She’s actually using code language to say that “I can bring over racists.” And one of the alarming things is that here you have Democrats, a significant percentage…saying they won’t vote for a black person. Well, why don’t we meet that head on? Just the same way…when we finally have a woman candidate that can carry the day, we’re going to have to meet sexism head on. But you don’t surrender to that, you don’t pander to that, and you don’t brag that you’re the candidate of uneducated, racist white voters.”

Swigging bottles of Stella Artois, swaggering in such a serious way, approaching the microphone stand as if it were the steering wheel of his ill-fated car, Dan Bejar had these things to say from the stage of the Independent last night:

“Did you guys eat dinner? Fuck Dinner.”

~~

“This is about a song…in Los Angeles…that I wrote…about two days ago…when I was there.”

~~

“This is the part of the show where we play another song…”

I realize the quotes don’t convey the besotted slur with which they were uttered. But this isn’t to say the show was a mess. Bejar completely maintained musical fidelity despite his loopy banter and threats from his sober bandmates — all the more reason to love Destroyer. Which everyone should.

________

Fittingly, I found this picture of Dan Bejar (’s legs) on someone’s flickr:

From logical fallacies of induction to evolutionary epistemology, Kpop’s like ‘Yo! the sun might not rise tomorrow’ and ‘Yo! Hume’s psychology is primitive’ and ‘Yo! sometimes we perish by our unconfirmed hypotheses’. Break it down Karl…

“Hume himself confused the problem of induction with the problem of the necessary connection between cause and effect; and Kant saw in the problem of the a priori validity of the causal law one of the most fundamental problems of metaphysics. But Hume must be credited with the formulation of the pure logical problem of induction and its solutions…He writes, for example, that we have no reason to believe ‘that those instances, of which we have no experience, [are likely to] resemble those, of which we have had experience’.

…All that is assumed is that we have empirical evidence of the truth of certain instances, and it is asserted that this does not entitle us to conclude to or extrapolate to analogous experiences at other instances (whether in the past or in the future).

This, then, in all its purity, is what I have christened ‘Hume’s [logical] problem of induction’.

Hume’s answer is as clear as can be: there is no argument or reason which permits an inference from one case to another, however similar the conditions may be; and I completely agree with him in this respect.

I believe, however, that Hume is wrong when he thinks that in practice we make such inferences, on the basis of repetition or habit. I assert that his psychology is primitive. What we do in practice is to jump to a conclusion; that is to say, to quite inconclusive hypotheses to which we often cling, and with which we may perish, unless we are able to correct them, which is possible especially if, on the human level, they are formulated exosomatically in written form, and submitted to criticism.

The assertion that we have an irrational inclination to be impressed by habit and repetition is something quite different from the assertion that we have a drive to try out bold hypotheses which we may have to correct if we are not to perish. The first describes a typically Lamarckian procedure of instruction; the second a Darwinian procedure of selection. The first one is, as Hume observed, irrational, while the second seems to have nothing irrational in it.”

from Objective Knowledge, Ch. 2, §30: Muddles Connected with the Problem of Induction

lately, as temperatures in san francisco have been so perfect as to cause one to forget temperature exists at all, i’ve been suffering from an inability to totally comprehend the beauty around me. i work on the twelfth floor in a high-rise that stands on the peak of parnassus heights; the floor-to-ceiling windows of our howard hughes-funded research facility look out over golden gate park, ocean beach, and mt. tamalpais. standing behind that tempered glass i can’t even absorb the splendor, but rather stand unfulfilled, analyzing and not experiencing the profundity of what i’m seeing. i want to merge myself with the view; and i wonder if a life not spent learning to do this is a bit wasted.

sometimes i want to capture it with a photograph, but the photograph presents exactly the problem: with it i can capture the image, not necessarily the experience. a photo of a person can capture the experience of the subject, but how do you capture the experience of the photographer, as the strokes of the brush capture that of the painter? here i tried to use angles and exposure to represent the experience of being overwhelmed and unable to capture the fullness of the scene: