[lit-ideas] Re: News via the web
- From: Scribe1865@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 18:03:23 EST
Phil writes: "It makes no sense to talk about the complexity of life without
some
reference to topoi, places or contexts which identify what is important
and what is not and why each is what they are. Put differently, how is
it possible to know that life is complex?"
This is true. Identifying significance is important. Images, sounds, and tone
of voice are important developmental cues. They are prerequisites as you say.
Yet part of appreciating complexity is knowing where the map ends and one's
life begins, just as maturity involves knowing when to disregard authority.
We may be instinctive scanners of the environment. Our species may have
developed its habit of conscious attention by watching for the shadows of
predators
in the long grass. Spot the lion and you have a chance to reproduce.
Maybe this same scanning and mapping process underlies politics, snap
judgments, hate speech between partisans, stereotypes, makes a Baathist cry
"Viva,
Mujahadeen!" every time a bomb goes off, or a soldier report that he has "taken
out a hostile" every time his bullet connects with a lurching figure in
shadows, makes someone a compulsive Bush-hater and another a Liberal-hater.
Phil writes: " One might as well claim that language simplifies the world
because words are not the same as things."
Makes sense to me. Symbols and imagery often have a real downside we gloss
over. Money, for example, which has no intrinsic value, gets bombs to al-Qaeda
and moves B-52 bombers around. Money also stops many valuable projects dead in
their tracks. Money starves this child and allows that pederast to get a
topnotch legal defense. Money simplifies the world by reducing all decisions to
profit and loss, helping to create the violent garbage dump our ancestors will
populate.
Wittgenstein's " 7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in
silence." is not necessarily about shutting up. More likely it relates to the
limits
of language, maps, imagery, and other games of thought. The lion is still out
in the long grass, whether or not we have money to buy expensive binoculars.
Eric
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