Coping with an increasingly secularized world

[gisiebob]

10 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

 

That is not what the myth of progress says.

 

Basically, to believe in Enlightenment progress you have to believe that non-Enlightenment institutions, traditions, practices, etc.--past and present--and the people operating under such non-Enlightenment conditions are "backwards", "barbaric", etc.

 

Therefore, progress does have a direction: away from "backwards", "barbaric" people and their cultures.

 

But if those "backwards", "barbaric" people suddenly live under "progress" they are told that they are "backwards" and "barbaric for that. Their colonial rulers make and implement anti-sodomy laws; they gain independence; then their former colonial rulers tell them that they are "backwards" and "barbaric" for having laws that they did not make! Progress!

thanks for defining what I meant. as someone who follows the rules, this is my opportunity to get stepped on, thank you for moving the goalposts for me.

[Acing It]

I feel I have more of a problem with an increasingly commercialised world, which is linked to what you explained I think.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

47 minutes ago, Acing It said:

I feel I have more of a problem with an increasingly commercialised world, which is linked to what you explained I think.

 

Definitely.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

14 hours ago, Calligraphette_Coe said:

If this is true ( and to me, it doesn't seem logcal for the reason I am about to introduce), then woudln't this be an indictment of anti-progressivism by virtue of the short life expectantcies and miserable lives of most of the human population for hundreds of centuries? I think the pursuit of longer life and the avoidance of pain and misery  is on the penulitmate human drives and a potent motiviation. Perhaps they just didn't know how and didn't know where to begin, but couldn't that be said to be due to a failing philosophical outlook and a reliance on revealed religions and dogma?

 

And what about the sea change of standards of living and the development of things like antibiotics speak to the effectiveness of the few seeking the betterment of the many through progress in just the last two centuries? How do you explain the flood gates being opened in this regard in just this short amount of time if not for the effectiveness of progress and its promulgators?

 

This is the first time that I have heard anybody say that belief in an idea of progress causes humans to behave in ways that they otherwise would not have.

 

The idea of progress has been used to justify things. But there is no evidence of a causal link between it and, oh, antibiotics.

 

And why is the idea of progress always associated with things considered by many to be good? If there is a causal link between the idea of progress and human behavior, how is it mathematically possible for it to never cause anything bad?

 

This causal link between the idea of progress and behavior is further weakened by "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn showed that history shows that science is not a seamless, cumulative progression. Rather, scientists work within paradigms and when a paradigm is exhausted there is a shift to a completely different paradigm. If the idea of progress does not apply to science, why should anybody believe that it applies to anything else? Maybe empires/civilizations are large-scale Kuhnian paradigms that, just like scientific paradigms, have a shelf life. Maybe, just like scientific paradigms, empires/civilizations are replaced by new, incommensurate empires/civilizations. Therefore, maybe, there is no progress in history. Maybe history is only complete ruptures and completely different plants taking root and growing in completely different soil and any continuity between them--any "progress"--is either an illusion or pure myth. If the U.S. collapses and China takes its place as the global hegemon, is that progress? Can there be progress without continuity? What continuity would there be between the collapsed U.S. and the newly hegemonic China?

 

Meanwhile, the idea of progress is further weakened by the fact that much of history is chance, accident, and luck. An obvious example of this is that through luck Europeans were able to conquer the New World. If the infectious diseases that Europeans brought with them did not almost completely wipe out the indigenous people of the New World things like the antibiotics you mention might not have ever been discovered. Europeans may have instead been humiliated militarily and sent back home with no illusions of ever colonizing the western hemisphere. Or they might not have made it back home--they might have all been killed, or it might have been them who became slaves domestically or were traded in a global slave market.

 

Another possibility that nobody is considering, therefore I had to come up with it myself: the idea of progress was a myth created by people inspired by their relatively good fortune, not out of recognition of how history works. In other words, the idea of progress is Western hubris.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

16 hours ago, Aebt said:

I have no idea where you get the concept that rule following is progress. Mindless rule-following does not bring progress. People often need to either break the rules, bend the rules, rewrite the rules, or make the rules irrelevant to help society progress.

 

But we are promised that if we do follow the rules progress will follow.

 

But then after we followed the rules and elected an African-American President--to two terms--we have been told that what has followed is a regress. However, we are now being told that if we will just follow the rules and nominate a non-white, female, progressive democratic socialist to oppose the incumbent, progress will follow. Sorry, Joe Biden, but you represent a regress--which puts you in the same category as Donald Trump.

 

 

16 hours ago, Aebt said:

Again, I and others have already explained how progress and science can be used to justify such oppression, but it is based on faulty reasoning. Using progress or science in that way is a misuse of the terms and ideas.

 

Even if that is what has been explained, it was a straw man or some other fallacy.

 

The argument was this: things such as millions of Native Americans being killed did happen and they did play a role in the success of Enlightenment ideas and values (without them there would be no United States of America that tested the Rule of Law for us to talk about), but if you bring up such facts Steven Pinker will say that you are an unappreciative, ungrateful "progressophobe" and, therefore, a moral failure.

 

The point was not only does following the rules mean being blamed when things turn out bad, it now means being told by an author who is praised by people like Bill Gates that you are a moral failure.

 

Progress and science being used to justify things was not the issue. The issue was the personal consequences of not giving the Enlightenment the status of a flawless god and worshipping it.

 

 

16 hours ago, Aebt said:

Would you elaborate so we can understand your perspective? Since there was little elaboration your post reads a bit like you had a mystical experience and suddenly started believing things can be subjective, if you could explain your experiences a bit we might be better able to understand you without the possibility of misunderstanding.

 

The whole inspiration for this thread was my wish to, and struggle to, live outside of the culture of capitalism in particular and Enlightenment modernity in general.

 

The push of the sacred further and further towards the margins, along with the void being filled with more and more mass-produced commodities, mass-consumption and mass culture, has left contemporary Western civilization almost completely spiritually and intellectually dead. Have you ever tried talking with co-workers about something other than NFL football or the latest episode of "Big Brother"? I have. I would have better luck talking to a wall. Have you ever heard co-workers, customers, etc. talking about the latest developments in quantum physics? All I hear them talk about is their latest vacation at a Florida beach or the newest edition of a video game.

 

Maybe what has filled the void makes some people happy. Maybe it makes them feel like they have won the evolutionary lottery and possess a one-way ticket on the train called progress that they have boarded on the way to utopia. However, it makes me sick.

 

It makes me sad about the state of our society. It makes me angry about all of the ignorance, denial, lies and myths that are never acknowledged, never owned up to, and never taken responsibility for by the overwhelming majority of people. It makes me feel hopeless about ever realizing my full potential.

 

But, in the name of secularization and progress, the physical and cultural space that we occupy is increasingly prohibited from having any outlet for spiritual and intellectual fulfillment. Even the liberal arts and sciences are being pushed to the margins and facing the threat of extinction.

 

I do not know why more people are not depressed, saddened, and angered by the increasing denaturalization of physical space and dehumanization of cultural space. Maybe they honestly believe that the world would be exponentially better without trees, fish, Plato, and the Bible.

 

It is becoming increasingly difficult to experience the spiritual and intellectual richness that makes life great for some of us.

 

However, I have had some moments outside of the denaturalized, dehumanized space that I must occupy to survive. They have never been planned. They just happened unexpectedly. More times than not, it has been when I was alone under a clear, sunny winter sky. The line between culture and nature completely disappeared. The line between subject (me) and object (everything else) did not disappear, but it was significantly blurred. The calm and serenity that I felt being under a massive, beautiful bright blue sky that made me and my worries as small as they could be can only be described, to the best of my present ability with the English language, as ecstasy.

[Sally]

17 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

 

But we are promised that if we do follow the rules progress will follow. 

Your comments are filled with talk of rules.   Now you conflate promises with rule-following and progress.

 

What I hear is anger.  Anger that you (not we, you, because only you are talking about this) have not been given what you were apparently promised.  You paid back your student loan (which was a legal commitment), but you didn't get a high-paying job, even though no one -- not the corporation who made the loan, or the government that made theloan -- promised you that you would.  Your anger prevents you from understanding that if you lived 500 years ago -- which would have been a more "natural" time, with less rules -- you would have not had that loan, and thus wouldn't have been able to go to school, and would probably had to work as a physical laborer, if you got any sort of work at all.   You also would have had a huge chance of dying of diseases for which we now have vaccines or antibiotics.   There are countless other diminutions of life that you can't imagine yourself having to deal with, now.  

 

I wonder what has produced that anger.  The confused intellectualization of your posts doesn't disguise it.  You complain about secularization (ironically, at a time when the US and other Western countries are in fact heading toward more rightist religionism).  That almost sounds like the complaint of someone who is upset that rules are being loosened, not tightened; religions are replete with rules.  

 

 

[Alawyn-Aebt]

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

But we are promised that if we do follow the rules progress will follow.

[...]

if we will just follow the rules and nominate a non-white, female, progressive democratic socialist to oppose the incumbent, progress will follow.

Again, I have no idea where you are getting the ideas that progress=rule following. I agree that saying that electing someone solely based on their ethnicity, race, or gender will change thing is a bit ridiculous. One did not decide their ethnicity, nor their race, nor their gender at birth. Electing people off their ideas however would be a correct way to go, since it is ideas that change the world, not merely how someone looks.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

Even if [emphasis mine] that is what has been explained, it was a straw man or some other fallacy.

I see you took care to make sure to attempt to understand what others have said to you. If what I said was a strawman, please actually read what I and others said, rather than ignoring what we say, and point out the mistake. Declaring something to be a fallacy without having read the argument is not conducive to a thorough understand of the points at hand.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

The argument was this: things such as millions of Native Americans being killed did happen and they did play a role in the success of Enlightenment ideas and values (without them there would be no United States of America that tested the Rule of Law for us to talk about), but if you bring up such facts Steven Pinker will say that you are an unappreciative, ungrateful "progressophobe" and, therefore, a moral failure.

Again, others and myself have already responded to this assertion, to which you in the above comment stated you never read what we said and then declared our arguments to be fallacious. If you want me to go back and copy and paste the argument I used I can do that, or you could just go back to the first page and read what everyone responded to you with.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

The push of the sacred further and further towards the margins, along with the void being filled with more and more mass-produced commodities, mass-consumption and mass culture, has left contemporary Western civilization almost completely spiritually and intellectually dead.

Is it bad that the "spiritual" and the "sacred" are getting pushed further away as you suppose? I am glad witch-doctors do not run around anymore proclaiming that if you praise the divine is just the right way you will be healed. I am glad that instead of dressing up in bizarre attire as during the Black Death, we are protected by medical progress, allowing more people to live into adulthood and at least have a possibility to achieve their potential.

8 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

Have you ever tried talking with co-workers about something other than NFL football or the latest episode of "Big Brother"? I have. I would have better luck talking to a wall. Have you ever heard co-workers, customers, etc. talking about the latest developments in quantum physics?

Actually I have, I engage in multiple interesting conversations with my co-workers almost every day I work. I have discussed the morality of murder, the economics of Henry George, the relation between Time and Physics, etc., with co-workers, on top of discussing personal ambitions for the future with my co-workers. I am sorry you have been unable to find people with which to discuss such interesting things with.

Certainly there are some people who take no interest in understanding the world and would rather live in their bubble of boredom (or false consciousness, or religion, or whatever else people hide behind), but plenty do.

8 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

But, in the name of secularization and progress, the physical and cultural space that we occupy is increasingly prohibited from having any outlet for spiritual and intellectual fulfillment. Even the liberal arts and sciences are being pushed to the margins and facing the threat of extinction.

I have no idea where you assume liberal arts and sciences are being extinguished, to my mind they are flourishing, especially the sciences. Intellectual fulfillment I similarly find still existing. Spiritual fulfillment I have no idea about because I never understood the idea of having an internal sense of spirituality so I cannot comment, but spirituality/religion still has a major role in life in the USA.

8 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

Maybe they honestly believe that the world would be exponentially better without trees, fish, Plato, and the Bible.

Again, I have no idea where you are getting your information from. Where I live trees are being planted all the time, the environment is getting cleaned up, more people than ever have a college education and raise questions that could shake humanity to its core, religion is alive and evolving. I know in other parts of the world there are an abundance of issues that need fixed, there are even issues where I live that need fixed, but there are substantially less issues that need fixing than say 100-150 years ago.

 

Do we have issues today, absolutely, but progress has enabled us to move past them, eliminating some issues and allowing us to focus on new ones.

[gisiebob]

dude you can put a puzzle together however which way you want if you want to force pieces together, but don't blame us when the picture you forced doesn't make sense. if you say you want to die fighting on some specific hill, someone's gotta fight ya. if you want us to be wrong and oppressive, I mean ok, i guess. but do try to remember that the worlds last postman never did deliver any lettets.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

4 hours ago, gisiebob said:

dude you can put a puzzle together however which way you want if you want to force pieces together, but don't blame us when the picture you forced doesn't make sense. if you say you want to die fighting on some specific hill, someone's gotta fight ya. if you want us to be wrong and oppressive, I mean ok, i guess. but do try to remember that the worlds last postman never did deliver any lettets.

 

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment." -- Immanuel Kant

[gisiebob]

5 minutes ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

 

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment." -- Immanuel Kant

ah, yes it does seem like you are not 'enlightened' then.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

12 hours ago, Aebt said:

Again, I have no idea where you are getting the ideas that progress=rule following. I agree that saying that electing someone solely based on their ethnicity, race, or gender will change thing is a bit ridiculous. One did not decide their ethnicity, nor their race, nor their gender at birth. Electing people off their ideas however would be a correct way to go, since it is ideas that change the world, not merely how someone looks.

 

This is what happens when people do not listen: we get hair splitting over things like following rules vs. progress.

 

If you will reread my original post you will see that I feel like maybe I--and a lot of other people--am a fool who has been duped.

 

It is not much different from journalists who regretted not being tougher on the Bush administration after 9/11 and more thoroughly scrutinizing decisions such as invading Iraq over the supposed presence of WMD's. A lot of them felt like either they had been duped or they let their passions and feelings in those tense moments in history compromise their journalistic judgement. Either way, they probably felt like fools--and some seemed to say so on the air.

 

It is like I have awakened from a dream in which I had bought into a narrative that said if I did all the right things the world would be a better place, only to see that the narrative was a racist, sexist, imperialist tool; many of the things I had done were not really the right things to do; I was being treated like crap for the things that I had done, and that few others do, that were/are the right thing to do; and that the better world that was promised was nothing like the more just, kinder, cleaner, more rational, more tolerant, and more liberal in the truest sense of liberal democracy world that I had imagined.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

4 hours ago, gisiebob said:

ah, yes it does seem like you are not 'enlightened' then.

 

If that is true then that makes 7.7 billion of us.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

15 hours ago, Aebt said:

I see you took care to make sure to attempt to understand what others have said to you. If what I said was a strawman, please actually read what I and others said, rather than ignoring what we say, and point out the mistake. Declaring something to be a fallacy without having read the argument is not conducive to a thorough understand of the points at hand.

 

Desperate times call for desperate measures, especially when it is late, you have not had much sleep lately, you have already spent two hours tediously composing and editing on a phone, you still have to walk home, and you have to be up at 8:15 to work 10am-10pm.

 

But if you want to provide a rephrased synopsis I will give it my full attention.

 

 

15 hours ago, Aebt said:

Is it bad that the "spiritual" and the "sacred" are getting pushed further away as you suppose?

 

According to at least one philosopher I read several years ago in "Philosophy Now", yes. He may not have used words like "pushed" or "margins", but his thesis was about the negative effects of the loss of the sacred. And he was a professor at a secular university.

 

Meanwhile, I read years ago about, if I recall correctly, a golf course being built on what was, I believe, a Native American burial mound in Newark, Ohio. The descendants of those resting there could not do anything to stop it. Economic development trumped preserving the sacred. Not only is that bad, it is tragic.

 

 

15 hours ago, Aebt said:

I am sorry you have been unable to find people with which to discuss such interesting things with.

 

It is not me I am worried about, it is our civilization.

 

The only way that people seem to be able to thrive is in the role of capitalist consumer.

 

They can't cook healthy meals for themselves, think for themselves, etc. They depend on specialists to do everything for them in exchange for a fee.

 

Everything is reduced to its most convenient, superficial, homogeneous, marketable, disposable state. Barely anything is unique. Not many things are made to have lasting value.

 

If the NFL is what people are interested in, fine, I am happy to talk about it for hours. But then when I start to talk in great depth about history, colorful personalities, iconic venues, the evolution of the game, etc., they get lost and bored and have nothing to contribute.

 

If the overwhelming majority of people can only function minimally at having perspective, appreciation, the ability to criticize, etc. do you have a human civilization or a robot colony?

 

 

15 hours ago, Aebt said:

I have no idea where you assume liberal arts and sciences are being extinguished, to my mind they are flourishing, especially the sciences.

 

It is not an assumption.

 

It is widely known that the fine arts, humanities and social sciences are being targeted for elimination at research universities, and that liberal arts colleges are threatened with extinction. To try to survive, liberal arts colleges are eliminating programs like Music and adding programs like Sports Management.

 

The hard sciences probably should not feel safe. Anything that does not have immediate commercial applications, such as historical geology, will likely be targeted for elimination eventually.

 

One of the campuses in the University of Wisconsin system not too long ago eliminated majors in several departments like History and Philosophy.

[Sally]

44 minutes ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

The only way that people seem to be able to thrive is in the role of capitalist consumer.

 

They can't cook healthy meals for themselves, think for themselves, etc. They depend on specialists to do everything for them in exchange for a fee.

 

Everything is reduced to its most convenient, superficial, homogeneous, marketable, disposable state. Barely anything is unique. Not many things are made to have lasting value.

 

If the NFL is what people are interested in, fine, I am happy to talk about it for hours. But then when I start to talk in great depth about history, colorful personalities, iconic venues, the evolution of the game, etc., they get lost and bored and have nothing to contribute.

 

If the overwhelming majority of people can only function minimally at having perspective, appreciation, the ability to criticize, etc. do you have a human civilization or a robot colony?

 

The only thing that I can conclude is that you spend your time selectively reading books that further alarm you, rather than actually pursuing IRL spaces where people exist who are NOT afflicted with the lives you postulate above.   My friends are not, most of my family are not, the people I live around are not, and the people I meet in groups I belong to are not.  

 

Maybe you should  try to get out a little more.  

[Skycaptain]

Back to the thread title. How do I cope in an increasingly secularised world? Suits me fine, personally I don't believe in spirituality, deities etc. Others do, and find comfort from that, that's great, but just not my cup of tea 

[Alawyn-Aebt]

10 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

If you will reread my original post you will see that I feel like maybe I--and a lot of other people--am a fool who has been duped.

I remember without having to reread it that that was one of your major points. Certainly I think everyone is sadly duped to some extent, although duped by the myth of progress as you say I am less certain about.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

But if you want to provide a rephrased synopsis I will give it my full attention.

It is fine, we can move on in the discussion to greater things, if you are interested it is on the first page towards the bottom. But as the conversation has veered away from that topic we might as well not start repeating what has already been stated.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

According to at least one philosopher I read several years ago in "Philosophy Now", yes. He may not have used words like "pushed" or "margins", but his thesis was about the negative effects of the loss of the sacred. And he was a professor at a secular university.

I do not care what some philosopher has to say. He can say whatever he wants to say and I can agree or disagree with his reasoning, but that was not my question; I am asking your opinion.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

Meanwhile, I read years ago about, if I recall correctly, a golf course being built on what was, I believe, a Native American burial mound in Newark, Ohio. The descendants of those resting there could not do anything to stop it. Economic development trumped preserving the sacred. Not only is that bad, it is tragic.

But is that bad because of the sacred, or is it bad for other reasons? I agree that it is tragic, but not because of sacred reasons. I think it was tragic because of the loss of history and the carelessness in which people toss our collective achievements and memories into the abyss of ignorance.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

It is not me I am worried about, it is our civilization.

I understand your concern, and if I felt that my experience backed up what you say (or if I had hard data to back your claims up) I would agree with you completely and fear for civilization. But I do not feel my experience supports what you claim. Do I think there are many people who fit your idea of the unthinking who are solely interested in consumption rather than seeking to create or understand? Absolutely, but I find plenty who are equally if not more so interested in creation and understanding. Maybe I have just been lucky with my interpersonal connections and you have been unlucky.

7 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

One of the campuses in the University of Wisconsin system not too long ago eliminated majors in several departments like History and Philosophy.

That is interesting and sad. I do wonder what people are thinking when they eliminate majors so openly and seemingly without remorse. This is running counter to my own experiences though, I am pretty sure the University System of Maryland has increased its number of majors in recent years across multiple departments and multiple universities.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

16 hours ago, Skycaptain said:

Back to the thread title. How do I cope in an increasingly secularised world? Suits me fine, personally I don't believe in spirituality, deities etc. Others do, and find comfort from that, that's great, but just not my cup of tea 

 

It is not about comfort.

 

It is about living a good, full life.

 

It is about flourishing personally and as a society.

 

It is about stewardship.

 

It is my understanding that Muslim clerics preserved the work of Aristotle that was rediscovered by Europeans during the Renaissance.

 

This culture that we have that fills the voids left by secularization seems to be determined to destroy everything sacred and replace it with disposable things valued only for their instrumental value.

 

[daveb]

15 minutes ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

It is about living a good, full life.

 

It is about flourishing personally and as a society.

 

It is about stewardship.

There's nothing about secularism that precludes any of that.

[gisiebob]

16 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

It is not about comfort.

  

It is about living a good, full life.

 

It is about flourishing personally and as a society.

 

It is about stewardship. 

 

It is my understanding that Muslim clerics preserved the work of Aristotle that was rediscovered by Europeans during the Renaissance. 

♪ one of these things is not like the other ♪

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

20 hours ago, daveb said:

There's nothing about secularism that precludes any of that.

 

Correct.

 

Secularization simply removes anything arbitrarily categorized as religion from public space and relegates it to private space.

 

But that leaves a void.

 

From my perspective that is a void growing bigger and bigger and filling more and more space with increasingly destructive things that are detrimental to personal and group flourishing.

[daveb]

As an atheist and a secular humanist I don't think lack of religion is a problem. There are plenty of other ways to bring things like ethics, awe, and many of the things people get from religion, without depending on religion for it. Of course, there has always been and always will be people who ascribe any failings or negative events (such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.) to lack of religion. We are seeing it currently with people claiming the mass shootings are happening because we don't have enough god in our lives and public spaces.

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

4 hours ago, daveb said:

As an atheist and a secular humanist I don't think lack of religion is a problem.

 

Secularization does not mean the eradication of religion. It means religion--however it is arbitrarily defined at the moment--being relegated to private space.

 

Furthermore, from my perspective, and apparently the perspective of at least one professor of philosophy I encountered several years ago, it is not just about "religion"--it is about the sacred.

 

I did an experiment yesterday. In a Google search field I typed "Fenway Park" and "sacred". Then I searched. Unsurprisingly, I got a first page full of "Fenway Park is sacred" content.

 

However, from my vantage point it is beginning to look like nothing is sacred anymore. Everything now is a disposable object including, apparently the way transhumanists see it, the human body.

 

Not only is nothing sacred now, if you believe that anything should be preserved you are, it seems, going to be told that you are a moral failure who is impeding progress.

 

If all of this is good news to you, I have even better news: In "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" Jonathan Crary seems to say that if some people have their way sleep will be eradicated and you will be required to participate in this secular space and its production and consumption of disposable objects 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

[Sally]

2 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

 

Secularization does not mean the eradication of religion. It means religion--however it is arbitrarily defined at the moment--being relegated to private space.

 

Furthermore, from my perspective, and apparently the perspective of at least one professor of philosophy I encountered several years ago, it is not just about "religion"--it is about the sacred.

 

I did an experiment yesterday. In a Google search field I typed "Fenway Park" and "sacred". Then I searched. Unsurprisingly, I got a first page full of "Fenway Park is sacred" content.

 

However, from my vantage point it is beginning to look like nothing is sacred anymore. Everything now is a disposable object including, apparently the way transhumanists see it, the human body.

 

Not only is nothing sacred now, if you believe that anything should be preserved you are, it seems, going to be told that you are a moral failure who is impeding progress.

 

If all of this is good news to you, I have even better news: In "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" Jonathan Crary seems to say that if some people have their way sleep will be eradicated and you will be required to participate in this secular space and its production and consumption of disposable objects 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

Some unwanted advice:  Stop reading books and articles for a while.  Go to a park or a field or a meadow by yourself and think.  

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

On 8/4/2019 at 9:55 AM, Aebt said:

Are you saying they are suffering from false consciousness?

 

I would say that the narcissism identified by Lasch in "The Culture of Narcissism" is a better candidate from the academic world than Marxist false consciousness.

 

As for my own view, when I hear people say that they absolutely love this way of life, as if they think they have won the evolutionary lottery, it sounds scripted/rehearsed. It does not sound like anything from the heart. Meanwhile, often it is accompanied by some assertion about how they intend to enjoy life, so keep your problems to yourself, or something like that.

 

It is more like they love themselves and this way of life greatly serves their love of self.

 

Then again, I do not know what it is like to love a way of life, so I am commenting on something that I am not even a novice at. I love people. I love other life forms. I love the Earth. Etc.

[Alawyn-Aebt]

18 minutes ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

I would say that the narcissism identified by Lasch in "The Culture of Narcissism" is a better candidate from the academic world than Marxist false consciousness.

Considering Lasch had his fair share of Marxist connections, (if I remember correctly he fits in well with the Marxist Frankfurt School and with more than a passing connection to the socially-conservative Neo-Marxists [which I admit is an odd combination, conservative Marxism seems to be a contradiction of terms]) what he termed narcissism was heavily rooted in Marxist theory of False Consciousness. In fact his view of history was a heavily Marxist one -- the idea that economic shifts brought on social changes which in turn brought on a change in the culture. That is basically a Marxist reading of history in a nutshell. He does differ from Marxist ideas in other ways but those are irrelevant to the point being made now.

 

False Consciousness is being mislead into acting against your own interests, narcissism is excessive self-love. I would say it is probably a bit of both, although narcissism as described by Lasch is so similar to Marxist theories I suspect they might effectively be synonyms in this context.

 

Also interesting you say Lasch hails from the academic world while, by comparison, Marx does not, Marx rears his head in untold number of fields in all numbers of subjects in the social sciences and humanities, and that is even before one dives into the deep end of focusing solely on Marxism. Lasch on the other hand receives certainly less academic influence.

34 minutes ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

Meanwhile, often it is accompanied by some assertion about how they intend to enjoy life, so keep your problems to yourself, or something like that.

I will agree that if people end with that phrase, then they do not enjoy life, they merely live life. Living life is different from actively enjoying life.

35 minutes ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

Then again, I do not know what it is like to love a way of life, so I am commenting on something that I am not even a novice at. I love people. I love other life forms. I love the Earth.

But isn't that taken together life? If you combine everything you experience in life and collectively enjoy it all, do you not love life? I agree that people overuse the phrase without thinking about all it actually entails, but just because people misuse it that does not mean that there are not those who truly enjoy life.

[Atheno]

Sorry, just sort of skimmed this.

My two cents:

Sort of a matter of language but I wouldn't necessarily define anything as "sacred" personally.  However, to at least a small degree, I think I'm somewhat with you.  Because there are things that are more conducive to one's mental and physical health than others.  I would tend to agree that in a capitalist society, certain things are emphasized-- there's a lot of mindless work-- for me, anyway.  I guess this is the price of getting to have a computer, etc. etc. (and not applying myself in college)

I think philosophy is a good topic, though I've never made a serious study of it.  From the little I've read, a lot of it seems wrongheaded but it's good to read things and think critically I suppose.  But you're right that a lot of society simply doesn't have time for philosophy or history or whatever.

To an extent, I'd say this is okay.  Philosophy isn't everyone's cup of tea and not entirely mine.  If people just sort of work and watch TV, that's okay if they're okay.

I'm not great myself.  I work a little and watch TV (on said computer) and read the occasional novel.  I should probably try writing stories more, I do almost none of that.  Enjoying nature's great too; then, so is air conditioning.

Ultimately, I don't see any real meaning to life, somewhat what you make of it, though I'm not that cheery and optimistic as a lot of bad stuff can happen despite one's best attitude and efforts.  Which is why I'll never procreate.

There are a lot of trade-offs.  *shrug*  

[InDefenseOfPOMO]

On 8/4/2019 at 7:00 AM, Whatsis said:

It's not so uncommon to fixate on some random abstract concept and just throw all of one's fears and resentments and anger onto that scapegoat, or lightning rod. "Progress" may be as serviceable as any, especially if someone is of a particular bent.

 

It is not random or abstract.

 

It is called the Idea of Progress.

 

Many thinkers/scholars believe that the evidence shows that it is a myth, therefore it is most commonly called the Myth of Progress.

 

Not only does it have a name agreed on by everybody, it has an origin recognized by everybody: the European Enlightenment.

 

Just a little investigating will show that it is a controversial topic in the same way that Darwinian evolution by natural selection, anthropogenic climate change, and gender are controversial topics.

 

Just a little investigating will show that it is one of the biggest--if not the biggest--theoretical/ideological underpinnings of Western Civilization the last several centuries, along with Natural Law; Marx's dialectic materialism; etc. The West cannot be understood without understanding the Idea of Progress.

 

An extensive investigation might possibly show that like Marxism it has been distorted, revised, etc. and has been abused in a manner that its originators did not intend or imagine.

 

Some of us do not believe that ignorance is bliss. Identifying, exposing, evaluating, criticising, etc. something is not "throwing all of one's fear, resentments and anger onto a scapegoat". It is being a responsible moral agent. It is being a responsible citizen. It is being fully human and seeking to live the best, fullest life possible. It is seeking wisdom.

 

Disciples of the Enlightenment worldview tell us that those past and present living without Enlightenment ideals, values and institutions were/are prisoners of stifling myth and superstition and oppressive dogma. Some of us have taken the Enlightenment creed seriously and thought outside of the received wisdom and dominant paradigms of our lives. The result is to be attacked for not bowing before liberal democracy, free markets, science and technology. The result is being admonished for not appreciating things like the "predictive power" of science, the "miracles" of modern medicine, etc. Some of us have extensively investigated the Idea of Progress and seen that the evidence overwhelmingly says that it is a racist, sexist, imperialist myth. Add it all up and the Enlightenment looks like stifling myth and superstition and oppressive dogma itself.

 

It is kind of like the joke about the church congregation that prayed that a nearby nightclub be destroyed. When the nightclub was destroyed by fire, the owner sued the church, the church denied any responsibility, and the judge then said that the nightclub owner was the only one who believed in prayer. A lot of the disciples and proponents of the Enlightenment are like that church congregation: when reason shows that much of the Enlightenment, such as its Idea of Progress, is myth, suddenly they are against reason.

 

The only thing that I have done here with respect to the Idea of Progress is inject my own original (as far as I know) observation: when things do not turn out well those who did what they were told to do are blamed, and rather than acknowledge failure those who made the rules move the goal posts.

 

What response have I received? The responses have varied in nature, but some have included "you must be an angry person", "your problem is your own creation", "you need to stop reading books and get out more", and "you are fixating on some random, abstract concept and making it a scapegoat for all your fears, resentments and anger".

 

You would think that if people truly believe in reason they would defend those who extensively employ it. You would think that if people truly believe in autonomy from authority and dogma they would defend those who practice it.

 

However, the gravity of the situation goes well beyond hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, stupidity, and irrationality. I presented the gravity of the situation at the outset: a lot of people simply are not nice.

 

Really, that is the tragedy of a world where nothing is sacred: basic human decency and kindness are just two more things to either be objectified, commodified and exchanged by self-interested agents seeking to maximize their utility, or ignored if they cannot be objectified.

[Sally]

1 hour ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

 

Many thinkers/scholars believe that the evidence shows that it is a myth

And many don't.  

[mausgrau]

This is a mess.

 

@InDefenseOfPOMO, you chide people for not being thankful enough, and then you criticize them when they express their simple appreciation for modern life. In one post you claim to love people, when your whole splenetic intellectualizing just drips with contempt for your contemporaries. People should pay more attention to inherent sacredness in things, but not respond to the spirit of your argumentative upbraiding...

 

I don't see good sense in this, nor kindness.

[gisiebob]

16 hours ago, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

You would think that if people truly believe in reason they would defend those who extensively employ it.

would you say that someone who believes in reason should berate someone who incorrectly claims to employ it?