Literary Secularism

 It's pretty hard to look at all the facts, knowledge, points, and interesting data there is (are) in this world and to say that you know it all. This is something for which you probably couldn't even get a Dunning/Kruger disagreement. Nor would the person of genuine superior intellect argue. Nobody knows everything. In fact, nobody even knows MOST of everything. We are all stupider than we are smart. If you look at quotations from some of the greatest minds that ever existed on the planet, this is one concept upon which they seem to be unanimous. The more we learn, the greater understanding we have of how ignorant we are.

"The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know." That was Einstein.  How about "The more I learn, the less I realize I know?" This was Socrates. He also said, "The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing." Tolstoy said that we can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. To know everything is to know nothing, but to know nothing is to know everything. Confucius was supposed to have said that.

To calculate with any accuracy the comments, conversations, papers, novels, even doctorate theses that have originated from the same three-word phrase, "people are stupid," would stump Pythia, the great oracle of antiquity. Only last week I was in the Top Mart choosing between spaghetti and premium spaghetti. The ordinary spaghetti was 1700 won, about two bucks for a 500 gram packet. The premium spaghetti was 2,300 won for the same amount. On the premium spaghetti packet, it was written that the finest semolina was used to make this pasta. I think the regular stuff said it was made from durum wheat. Durum. It sounds like a mass produced wheat from the wheat belt of North America. But semolina conjures up a small private farm in Italy that has been handed down through many generations upon which the modest and hardworking Italian wheat farmer nurtures the grain that feeds his family and the families of his brothers. I can almost see him wearing a grey newsboy cap and white tank top emptying a handful of wheat into a storage bin and giving a sweaty, mustachioed nod of satisfaction at its quality. I bought the premium spaghetti. 

With a little brain power, I could have learned that semolina flour is made from durum wheat. There was probably no difference in the quality of the two packs of spaghetti. In fact, I've tried both brands and can taste no difference. Pasta is nothing more than crushed wheat mixed with water then made into sticks. Yet, there I was treating myself to what I thought would be a superior product and even spending a little more on it. I was doing something dumb and thinking it was smart. 

Did you know that people who were part of the Jan. 6 riot called Nancy Pelosi to ask if she'd seen belongings they'd forgotten there? "Yeah, if you could go ahead and mail them right back to our insurrectionist asses, that'd be great." They were asked their names and numbers and were assured their belongings would be returned. Idjits. 

Or how about this one. I'm afraid I probably won't be able to post a video judging by my previous post, but there was a point in the Cincinnati vs Las Vegas NFL wildcard playoff game in which Cinci scored a TD, but there was some controversy. The QB for the Bengals (Joe Burrow) appeared to have maybe stepped out of bounds before throwing the TD pass. Well video confirmed that was not the case. TD? Right? No! Someone heard another official blowing his whistle. So even though the call was correctly made, when a dumbass official makes a dumbass mistake and dumbassedly blows his/her whistle, well that just becomes more important than the whole rest of the game and what is right in the world. Evidently. The official who fucked up has remained virtually anonymous and blameless, but the ref who was probably trying to cover up his/her mistake, make the right call, maintain the integrity of the game, well he needs to be drawn and quartered! He's the anti-Christ! He's what's wrong with the NFL by golly! 

Oh, okay, I COULD post a video! When a rule is all that separates us from right and wrong, we're not allowing ourselves to climb to Kohlberg's 5th or 6th stage. Rules are made for the idiots who can't think. They need rules. The people who can handle stages 5 and 6 of morality are the people who should have the whistles. Jerome Boger is a smart person surrounded by dumbasses. And as is so often the sad state of affairs, he's in danger of losing the position he deserves because some people who can't understand that he's smarter than they are, PROTESTED VERY LOUDLY. 

I am sorry but this smacks of LV Raiders fans to me. And you know what other smack I get across the face from this? I think maybe Donald Trump's infliction of the never-accept-defeat plague across America has made people think that if they lose, but refuse the blues, they can choose to accuse. What I mean is, they are My Pillowing the game. It didn't turn out the way they wanted but fuck losing with dignity, maybe if you accuse some other entity for causing the loss, you can escape the reality that you are a loser. If you do it long enough, maybe you can make enough people believe your bullshit to ease the pain of being a loser. It doesn't work, but if you try hard enough and really believe, it'll work for you! And YOU are what matters, aren't you? Stupid is a pandemic!

I recently read that lobster, up until sometime in the 1800's was low class food eaten mostly by the poor and by prisoners. Even in the harsh penal environments of early America they had rules. Lobster was fed to inmates no more than once a week because it was considered cruel and unusual. They kind of ARE just giant sea insects after all. Then I suppose two Hans Christian Andersenesque swindlers sold somebody of considerable influence, an emperor, king or Kardashian, on the idea that lobster is the most magnificent food imaginable and that's why we now pay an average of 45 US dollars for lobster thermidor. Just like the king who wanted his hasenpfeffer and was convinced by Bugs Bunny to eat carrots, a lot of "fine dining" is just people being stupid. I mean, look what they've done to SPAM in Korea, Japan, Hawaii...

"If I didn't know this was hasenpfeffer, I'd swear it were carrots." Good old Saturday morning cartoons. All we really need to know in life. I'm not going to get into how suggestible people are (stupid) and how very often we pay too much for things that are not premium, just sold as premium by the very last people whose opinions on their quality we should trust: the people selling them. You know as well as I do, THAT list is endless. You can pay 7 million dollars for a bottle of vodka for God's sake!

Rather, I'd like to write about a couple of areas in which I believe the refusal to admit our own stupidity, or perhaps less harshly, our own ignorance, has proven a bit of an obstacle. These fields are, in my opinion, quite important to the development of mankind. Science is one I've blogged about before. I've had conversations with people in which I've basically said that some cherished and beloved branches are the hasenpfeffer of science. I'm not Neil Degrasse Tyson or even schooled in the sexy sciences like quantum physics, so a lot of the things I've found in my personal studies, I'm convinced, are taken with large grains of salt by the people to whom I tell them. But I don't think I'm wrong and I'm beginning to see more people who are starting to say some of the things I've been saying. 

Here's a Ted Talk by a guy named Stuart Firestein called "The Pursuit of Ignorance" that made me stand up and shout "YEAH!" in several spots. 

I love his joke about Marie Curie and her glow. I like his quotes too. "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." James Maxwell. I have literally read and seen on video, influential people in science talking about the "new" science that doesn't need the rigid proofs of old, transforming theory into fact just by calling it fact, virtually ignoring this ignorance, or as Firestein phrases it, "controlled neglect" of that ignorance. I even liked the quote from Schrodinger. "In an honest search for knowledge, you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period." I haven't seen enough of this in many areas of science. I think it has been detrimental. I think this has contributed to the beating all interest in science out of kids by grade 11 or 12. And I think he hits on the cause of this detriment when he says that with a puzzle, the manufacturer has guaranteed a solution, with science, there is no such guarantee. Indeed there are many of us who aren't so sure about the manufacturer. 

I've blogged at length about how I, and some far greater minds than I, consider the secularization of science, the forced removal of the mystical, spiritual, abstract and unexplained to have stunted science somewhat. "Making better ignorance" might be a less arrogant approach to science that would advance it significantly. Admitting ignorance, and admitting it exists all over the place in science and we find more of it every day, is the best place from which to begin a journey of discovery in my opinion. The example of the pear and banana smell is a good one. How the hell does that happen? It's like trying to explain instinct, or how the eye sees. We can fake it with some fancy quasi explanations, and we DO know more all the time, but the actual answer is nobody really knows. 

Leaving the spiritual, mystical, abstract and unexplained on the table, not discounting them, but admitting we just don't understand them, just might do what Nikola Tesla said it would do when he said, "The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than all the previous centuries of its existence." 

However, until recently, I haven't thought much about the effect of this same phenomenon on literature. I recently brought up Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" to a curious, young listener. 

"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners that we may see and remark and say, Whose?"

James Wood, a staff writer at the New Yorker, professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard, and one of the most esteemed literary critics alive wrote in his novel, "The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief" that the modern novel is "the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity." Not so much fact as a way for a powerful maker or breaker of literary careers to bully authors into the acceptable topics and styles, or more to the point, the topics and styles that would keep them from starvation and obscurity. 

This is but one example of how, I have read, but not yet read all the details, that even literature, a medium hyper-dependent upon emotional, even at times the absolutely sentimental, has been relegated to the stiff and I'm sorry, but, Hemingwayan prose when it comes to anything with an association to God or mysticism or spiritualism or things non-concrete.

A quote taken from David Foster Wallace, who was considered one of the atheist bullies, but whose apparent atheism may have been assailed by a Russian said, "It would probably be better to call our own art's culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level."

Making a living is more important than writing from the heart. It IS to a starving author sometimes. Wallace, like myself, was fascinated by an unnamed protagonist from a Dostoyevsky novel. The Underground Man as we will call him. His review of Joseph Frank's review (an extensive, nay compulsive volume of work I intend to tackle someday) of Dostoyevsky begins with a quote that I like. "The citizen secures himself against genius by icon worship." 

Bear in mind this was long before the state of ubiquitous icon worship we have today. Soothsayer stuff from Edward Dahlberg. The Underground Man was no icon and he probably received no worship. He was a character blended from the universal and the particular and a lot of the particular was decidedly un-heroic. But in his universal, whether we want to admit it or not, we all see some of ourselves. 

For example? Okay, how about this: "Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to SEEM like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself morally speaking?"

Try to tell me that's not universal. I can think of about 10 times today I contemplated exactly this! When I'm teaching, am I speaking to my students the way I would if I didn't care about maintaining employment or am I just tolerating people I want nothing to do with? An even more extreme example is when I meet with the scumbags for whom I work. They are using me. How can I smile and play nice when I want to stretch the edges of their fake smiles to arm's length and destroy their lying mouths?

Never had these impulses before? Wait a while. You will. The universality is so beautiful! Yet so violent. Maybe that's because we've been encouraged to hide our true natures since we can remember following rules. 

If you don't know the most famous thing about Dostoyevsky, beyond his writing, I'll retell it here. It comes to bear. He was subjected to a mock execution for his ideological anti-government activity. He was linked to a subversive group and sentenced to death by firing squad. They got to "Ready.... Aim...." and then the firing squad was called off and his sentence was commuted to 4 years in a Siberian work camp. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Raymond K. Hessel of "Fight Club" had the best breakfast of their lives the day after almost being killed. And every breakfast after that was a bonus breakfast.

A bit ironically, what this did to old Fyodor was it turned the guy who was not afraid of writing politically deadly things, things that brought him within seconds of death as it were, into a guy who was suddenly able to face the BIGGER fear and start writing from the heart. He loathed things with the passion that only Dostoyevsky could loathe with. It gave him the passion to write as passionate a character as the Underground Man. In the words of Wallace, "What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer - a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for this own literary glory - into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values... more into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete, but depraved."

Wallace concluded that fiction writers under the yoke of secular bullies dare not try to advance ideologies. People would laugh or be embarrassed for them. Dostoyevsky presented by Joseph Frank, gives a model of how it is possible to do so even today, though in its instructivity, it IS terribly iconic.

I write this not settled on one side or another. I have much to read to solidify my decision. But it is inspiring. I will need to review authors like Alice Walker (I think it pisses God off when we pass by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it), Toni Morrison (Life lessons are a free Bible to living life knowing and acknowledging who you are.) Chinua Achebe (A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground, it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.") James Joyce (Shut your eyes and see.) George Eliot (What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?) Salman Rushdie (We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.") William Faulkner (It's always the idle habits that you acquire that you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.")

I believe that geniuses have sneaked (or snuck) brilliance that is of a spiritual nature past the Great Literary Firewall of Secularism on more than one occasion. But it had to be packaged in a way that would mostly reach the literarily enlightened and those number but a few. We have no more Uncle Walts who proudly declare their discovery of the handkerchief of the Lord in blades of grass or natural phenomena. We have no more William Paleys who stub their toes on watches and assume (and rightly so (more and MORE rightly so)) a watchmaker. We have to backhandedly at best express ideas that might have religious or spiritual implications lest the mighty bullies of literature strike us down. Yet sophists who are taking popular stances they may or may not even support, like Richard Dawkins, who simplistically and spuriously mocks Paley in his book "The Blind Watchmaker," are OVERpublished. 

It's a crazy world! And I am now setting my sites on studying a great many works of literature that I need to study in order to determine to what extent spiritualism and such has been forcefully removed from literature through a kind of literary peer pressure, specifically the novel, in modern times. As I said, I haven't studied it, so it is a curiosity I will endeavor to pursue with relish. I will keep you up to date on my blog as I read the literature that is pertinent. 

I originally started school with an eye toward becoming a lawyer. I altered my goals after meeting a lawyer and confirming that I would not and COULD not do what he did. I may have judged the legal profession harshly. I still love the law and believe there MAY be some positions in the legal profession in which a person could retain dignity and maybe even morality and ethics. But I just don't think I would have had the luxury to land in such a position if I were to undertake the long and expensive journey toward the legal profession. I am very happy in my second choice. I love teaching and although it has provided the bare minimum for survival, I believe I've chosen my profession well. And as such, I think I may have the literary balls, if you will, to tackle this arduous task upon which I set myself. 

Wish me luck, mes amis.