Oct 14 2009
Good vs. Evil
I came across this yesterday and thought it fit right in with the discussion we had at the end of class, particularly in reference to skepticism as it seeks to break from dualism.
Lynne Layton writes:
John Powers says of Lynch’s [Blue Velvet] “Such a dichotomy is typical…it would be wrong to criticize Blue Velvet and the others for dramatizing the excluded middle, for not finding alternatives to the extremes of good and evil that give them their spark. Literary gothicism is distinguished by similar stylization; it does with the territory. Nevertheless, one suspects these films don’t dramatize alternatives because they can’t imagine alternatives. ”
…
Perhaps the patriarchal dominant is the psychology and politics of this split world, a world with no alternatives to black-and-white thinking because so much vulnerability is kept secret. As anxiety heightens, splitting intensifies.
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Briefly – In life-and-death decisions, there are usually (but not always) two options. In Glorious Appearing, too, there is no middle ground. A person can either accept or reject creed and therefore be damned or saved. The Rapture is preceded by great turbulence, likely a time of anxiety, in which the “splitting” Layton talks about is apparent.
Thought/comments?
“For me, skepticism is the means to question the status quo that keeps us from acts of self and societal creativity.”
Lee, I don’t understand what you mean here by “creativity.”
Keep me apprised of said research.
This morning I was thinking about a biological/mathematical foundation for dualism.
I came up with:
In genetics: Genes are either turned on or off. There is no middle state. There can be middle phenotypes, though. But fundamentally, either you have the gene (or a variation of it) or you don’t.
In computer science: Machine language (the language closest to the hardware) is in binary. The computer knows only a 0 or 1, which translates to an on or off switch for some electromagentic impulse I know nothing about.
Of course, at the atomic level, this is confounded by superposition theory, something Daniel would know about. Atoms can exist in two places at once, but we can also never know exactly where they are…
Aside from this atomic idea, it seems there are fundamentally two options, but as you get more removed from the parts, other options come into focus. Does this make sense?
I’ll read the Brooks piece and comment later.
Thanks for this interesting take on the “middle ground,” Leah. You asked me about the basis of secular ethics in class, and I don’t think I answered very well so I want to expand on it a bit. My first book was on such an ethics, based on the idea of care for the self and other as an interactive process that forges individual and collective freedom as its objective. I called it an “aesthetics of liberty” because it sees the process of individual and societal freedom-building as a work of art. I discussed several key American thinkers/writers who advocated such a view, starting with Thomas Jefferson, and going through Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau for the 19th century and Maxine Hong Kingston and June Jordan for the 20th. For me, skepticism is the means to question the status quo that keeps us from acts of self and societal creativity.
Here’s another approach to the question of human nature as fixed or not by way of David Brooks: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13brooks.html?_r=1&sq=young%20and%20neuro&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1255536009-naBS3nfFT7t0Fd2ZQ+pMaQ
What I was particularly interested in was the research on how cultural practices affect biology. Maybe free will means getting rewired.
The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”
Kurt Vonnegut – Hocus Pocus (1990)
Though I have argued that dualism is inherently human, I’m currently conducting more research to verify this.
The answer will probably be an amalgamation of both theories or like every good lawyer knows to answer: it depends.