How it ends*

Looking forward, this essay sees the end-point of our civilization:

The planet’s metabolism has altered. The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch — mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality — will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion.
An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries. 

Much of the material discussed in this review is drawn from Morris Berman's three volume epic.

That is indeed what Morris Berman concludes in his three-volume survey of America’s decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why America Failed (2011). 

The articulation of the inner truth that is being worked out in our history:

Berman seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animatingGeist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is … hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. 

The economic Moloch (Moloch symbolises murder of infants), also named Mammon (usually symbolises Money) in the essay, and the possessive individualism.  We have singularity now, and we know it as individualism.  The true singularity would maybe cause a great union.**

Hat tip: The Dish - a great smorgasboard blog, part of my daily diet.

* 'How it ends' [Scriptshadow] is a screenplay of the end of the world in which things begin shutting down, and falling down around America, and no one wants to make the sacrifices to save it, and many are delighted to watch it burn.

**Society is like a big game of prisoner's dilemma - you can usually benefit reliably by cheating, but greater benefits are available at the higher risk of trusting. Knowing you will play forever, or even knowing that the end is not likely enough, will make an equilibrium of trust a valid play.  But if the benefits of trust are lowered steadily (by hard economic times, for example), the threshold for thinking the end has arrived is lowered too.

Real, Symbolic, Imaginary

Further to my terrible Lumpish 'theory' of mind, 'Resolution, or This is That', I just realised that I could lump Lacan's Real, Symbolic and Imaginary into this diagram - the Imaginary being the play space between the Real (handled in Perception and Recognition), and the Symbolic (where reflecting abstraction analyses, orders and relates handles), presents unrecognized monsters and gives new judgements or resolutions to the recognizer. The Imaginary is the space of rising unrecognized monster and the descending symbol-laden image (metaphor), or judgement of resolution.

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Learning

My little son is 6 months old tomorrow.  He is on the way to sitting up - he can balance on his rump if he's holding my fingers or leaned against the back of the couch.  One of the interesting things watching him, is that he doesn't know what sitting is.  It isn't a specific thing he does.  When he tips over, there's no event - no change from doing one thing to doing something else.  All he really is consciously doing is seeing things and trying to grab them, and hopefully, put them in his mouth.  He can do that while on his side, and the whole time he's tipping over onto his side.

Heidegger aimed to give an account of our interaction with the world without intentional content, so that we would seamlessly or effortlessly deal with or cope with the world, except in breakdown cases. I think Heidegger is weak on learning: it's obviously necessary, but its necessarily a dynamic process which he wants to find a static structure underneath. And I think if he had thought more about learning, he might have had some trouble, because there is a time when a skill becomes a thing - it puts on a handle and becomes a group or a super-group, that can be called on by the for-the-sake-of-which, which is the ineffable purpose or project that is enough to make use of us and makes us us.  I guess I think there is a faculty of reflection which includes a rationality, and which is linked with our symbolic faculty.  The handling of a pattern of practices is like the inner world's equivalent experience to naming.

My son has no handle on sitting; the first sitting comes before the handle on it.

(I could go on and on:

• about his for-the-sake-of-which at this early stage which is what I think Hegel calls satisfaction in a very raw form.
• about the research I saw the other day about how anaesthetic works by interrupting the interaction between the rear of the brain (where the world is recognized and the body mobilized, controlled and maintained) and the front of the brain (where reasoning and symbolic processing are conducted) and consciousness collapses when you stop the relation (me) between the recognizing and acting parts (me) and the reasoning and symbolising parts (also me). (Kierkegaard reference.)
• enough.)

This is That Recognised

It was about halfway through the 40th lecture of J Bernstien's Hegel course. He dropped a Hegel quote, and I realised that I had just been reconstructing him from Heidegger, Searle and others.
The quotes:
+Man Is Recognition.
+Spirit: the we that is an I, the I that is a we.
+And Bernstein - Hegel wants to say (of the universality of the work of reason in the finite mind) 'It's institutions all the way down...' (institutions are how we become I, two become one)

So all that Resolution, and This is That talk was just me badly reconstructing Hegel from Heidegger, Searle and the New Testament.
Those posts were:

• This is That
• This is That Too
• Eccentric, Deluded - the diagram and statement is here
• What do I mean by Resolution
• Why am I so excited about Resolution (answer: because not sensible)
• Reflections II  (& G.W as Reflections I)
• Computational Theology
• Spirituality

These are by no means a guide to what Hegel says. But as I am starting to get what Hegel is saying, these seem more successful (where they resemble things Hegel says) and less (because they don't resemble it very clearly or coherently).

And so, this is that in another way.  This blog is what I accused Sam Harris of. Publishing before doing the reading.

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