Tag: modernity

Reflections on Aphorisms #58

Ugh, I’m falling back into a rut.

I’m going to make myself go get some serious exercise tomorrow morning and cut back on caffeine to try and make things easier. I’m just having issues focusing on anything, which is not a good recipe for being productive.

With that said, let’s begin.

Aphorism 92

In summary, modernity replaced process with result and the relational with the transactional.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Bed of Procrustes

Interpretation

Newton sparked a shift in our understanding of the world toward a modern empirical “rational” model.

Jung’s work with archetypes has become so significant in our day and age, because the change is so fundamental that we left a lot of things behind in our haste.

Now, it’s worth noting that the modern view probably presents a better objective picture of the world. It’s blind to everything outside our senses, and as a result it tends to result in less bias.

However, the shift from the classical and ancient to the modern also deprived us of things.

Alchemy, for instance, when understood psychologically, provides a series of changes and alterations that can impact the mind. The four steps of classical alchemy (darkening, whitening, yellowing, reddening) each reflect a life process; losing innocence, finding virtue, and so on and so forth.

Now, there were alchemists who believed in literally making things into gold, but even they were enlightened to the psychological nature (or willfully blind to it) of the field because of the notion of “as above, so below” that pervades alchemical thought.

This “as above, so below” is what we lost in the transition to the modern age.

The alchemists associated everything with great mythical and religious mysteries. Nothing existed without a will guiding it, a divine spark of being that led it to act in the way it did.

The work of Newton and Einstein serves us a whole lot better when we wish to accomplish things, but it lacks the integration with a cohesive worldview that the alchemists enjoyed.

When Taleb says we have replaced the process with the result, he refers to how we have stripped the psychological valence from everyday things.

The word “profane” actually serves as an antonym to the word “holy” in its function. We have stripped the mysteries of life of their sacred meaning, and we do so at our own peril. Think of the mystery of conception and child-birth (now considered little more than a biological process) or the mystery of the sun and moon cycles. These dominated myth, and are often given value by even relatively secularized and ecumenical religions.

A diagram showing an overview of common sacred and profane elements over time. Made by me. The faded colors on the modern side indicate increased individual variance.

The concept of the sacred and profane still exists, though it is hidden in different language and the responses have changed. We have some common elements between them (namely, social elites are always associated with being sacred figures, outsiders or ignorant people are considered profane), but the actual functioning of this is different.

Some of this stems from the fact that individuals have a greater latitude for independent moral judgment in the modern age, creating a greater variance in what is classified as sacred or profane. Part of it is also simply down to the fact that reason-based worldviews, though often flawed, should not require as much dogmatic conviction as, say, a faith-based worldview would. In thepry, dogmatic conviction is supposed to be diametrically opposed to rational thought, though it is never too far off in practice.

One of the things that has also changed here is the relationship. Some of this has to do with increased size of social circles, but it also comes down to what is sacred.

Most “sacred” (here referring to both religious and secular cultural expressions) traditions place a strong value on the family, and this is what archetypal thought goes back into. The family serves as a model for future interactions outside the family, because it is the most familiar unit of relationships (see the etymological relation?) but also the earliest that most people have conscious experience of.

A strictly rational worldview, however, doesn’t necessarily view relationship as being terribly important. So long as one fulfills obligations, and obligations are fulfilled in return, the transaction is completed to mutual benefit.

Falling more in the ancient than the modern camp in this issue, I think that this was a defining reason for my stressed relationships with many of my more modern-minded family members. Coming from a position that I have always held where certain things are expected in a relationship (with some degree of flexibility to respect the individual; i.e. you wouldn’t ask the same things of every mother or every brother), the fact that many of my family members felt and experienced love in a more transactional way was lost on me as a youth.

Now, I don’t want to condemn this; the people that I find to be like this are often great role models, but the difference in communication creates perceived deficiencies.

I think it’s also fair to say that we’re not wholly modern. Or, perhaps, that the modern worldview has not wholly dominated the collective conscious expression of humanity.

Resolution

Be patient with those different from myself.

Don’t forget to speak the same language as other people.

Reflections on Aphorisms #46

Ugh, the last couple days have been going the wrong direction. Not in terms of my life quality, but just productivity and the like. However, I’ve managed to secure some future opportunities, so there’s always a silver lining, and in the grand scheme of things I’m still better now than I was a few weeks ago, so I’m not going to let it get me down too much.

Without doing any math, I’m setting a goal of hitting 120 aphorisms by the end of July. I have no clue how well that will pan out, because I don’t know how many I’ll need to do per day, and four’s more or less an absolute limit for me.

Aphorism 74

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.

Goethe

Interpretation

Well, this is an ironic statement from the writer of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Of course, one could argue that the affliction that befell Werther was obsession and not love, and I think that’s Goethe’s point here.

There’s two sides to this: one is discerning what love is, and the other is looking at how one should respond to it.

I’ve never really been in a serious romantic relationship. Heck, I’ve never been in a romantic relationship. I’m not someone who objects to it on principle or anything (i.e. not a celibate), but I’ve just never found the right person in part because I’ve never looked and in part because I tend to lose myself in work.

That’s probably a personal flaw, come to think of it.

Gosh, I’d be fun to psychoanalyze.

Getting back to the point, though, I have loved in a platonic and familial sense. I would sacrifice quite a bit for my students (despite my occasional jokes to the contrary), and my family and close friends get that honor as well.

The great thing about love is that sacrifice doesn’t feel like a loss. There’s some sublime beauty that enters into it and makes it into something wonderful.

It’s the ability to give something up and make the world a better place.

If you have that, you have love.

And how does one respond to love?

Gratitude, for one thing. To transmute suffering to purpose is the magnum opus of the alchemists of old. The commonest of things found within dirt where it was least expected could be said to be love–people who have no love can only find themselves trapped within a cycle of destruction, but with love even tragedy becomes a thing that drives growth and rebirth.

True gratitude instills action.

I never appreciated my father much as a child. That’s not true.

For the first few years of my life, I had no gripes with my father. We were incredibly close (him, my brother, and I; I’m a twin), but as we grew circumstances changed. When I look back at early memories, the joys of those days are fragmentary, and if I could choose the memories I would keep only those.

However, at a certain point the relationship grew more distant. As an adult, I can pinpoint these things even without really discussing them with him. He changed jobs; the new job had a longer commute. My brother and I started going to school, and had more work to complete at home. We stopped reading together, because we could read independently.

There was more stress on all sides, and by the time of my adolescence my relationship with my father was strained (it would remain so until I finished college, and even at times the rift lingers in ways I have to consciously prune).

However, when I look back at the whole picture, I am struck by the love that my father has and has always had for my brother, my mother, and I. The dedication and attention that he paid us and the multitude of ways that he showed it often went unappreciated, and there’s some awkwardness in the middle, but the model itself is solid.

When you love people, you do what you know you can to make their lives better. Making their lives perfect is beyond your means, but that’s no reason not to strive.

Resolution

Let love conquer all suffering.

Never underestimate the diversity of faces love can wear.

Remember that a good sacrifice is g0od.

Aphorism 75

We are the children of our age, but children who can never know their mother.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Interpretation

I think that the prevailing spirit of our age is Chaos. That may sound trippy and New Age, but I assure you that it’s not as far out as one would believe.

Look at our society and its rate of change, the loss of familiar icons and social structures and institutions.

Life is chaos, and as close to the platonic ideal as one will find anywhere.

We stand in the midst of things we cannot change, thinking of things we cannot understand, taking actions we cannot really do.

It is the word, order, which we live by. Even the word, however, has become scattered and confused. This is the stuff of the Tower of Babel, and we should take great caution to guard against the transformation of language. This is not because language should not change, but because we should not change it.

One of the greatest challenges we have is this:

How do we put our lives into words?

This is what great poets and thinkers have attempted since humans learned that bashing the right types and shapes of rocks into each other can leave marks that can bear information. Heck, they may have even done that before they learned how to write it down, the spoken word banishing into the oceans of unremembered past.

Really, that’s kind of incredible.

The modern age is the time when we have done away with myth. We have abolished the chains that have held us down, and sailed away on a sea of blood and tears to seek fortune among burnout desires.

Postmodernism is no better; the only difference is that they choose not to sail, or recognize that they are on a sea at all.

The problem is this:

The myth is the sum of all the gods and all the heroes.

Carl Jung had an interesting conception of the unconscious leading to the myth, and the unconscious being that thing which winds up being called God, the daemon of Socrates, spirits, and so forth.

I don’t know that I agree with him here.

However, there is a truth to the notion that the myth gave us bearing on the world, and that we have shut off part of our inner lives when we denied the myth the chance to blossom.

That is not necessarily wrong. It may lead us into a new golden age.

However, it has also cast us into the odious sea, and we will not be the same when we find shore.

Resolution

Do what you have to do to change the unknown into the known.

Embrace the myth, but don’t get lost in it.

Don’t stray too far from shore; here there are dragons.

Aphorism 76

The middle sort of historians… spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

Montaigne

Interpretation

Ah, some good stuff.

So, I actually wanted to teach history. Like, a lot. My favorite teachers in school were always my English teachers and my History teachers, and of the subjects I probably had more of an interest in the latter.

Then I learned something.

When you teach history, you don’t teach history. You teach an interpretation. You regurgitate the sludge that is currently believed by some stuffy professor who wouldn’t know what the sunlight was if it turned his bloodsucking body to dust.

If part of the price of education is selling yourself into wage slavery at the altar of educational standards (which is an oxymoron in some ways), at the very least you should feel good about what you teach.

I no longer wish to teach history. Preparing to teach it has taught me that what we call “teaching history” is indeed teaching an interpretation. This is perhaps more true at the elementary and secondary levels (my own college-level history courses were phenomenal and gave facts and context rather than interpretations), but I have never really been close to teaching history at a higher level.

It is a relief, then, to see that the wise Montaigne sees this same path that I detest as a mark of a bad historian.

The reason for this is simple.

The whole point to learn the past is so that we don’t repeat it.

However, if we had actually learned from the past, we wouldn’t be in danger of repeating it anyway.

Yet, time and again, despite historians’ efforts the world keeps going awry.

Now, you could say that it’s not the historians’ fault, or at least not the fault of their concept of history, since other people don’t listen to them.

However, there’s something interesting that you can find in the history of history. I’m something of a scholar of the 20th century, though I still can’t decide why because it always leads me down morose paths (see the previous reflection).

At the start of the 20th century, in the 00’s and 10’s, historians were making their predictions and it looked a lot like the predictions they made in the 20’s and 30’s. In the 40’s and 50’s, they made predictions that looked a lot like their predecessors.

They actually were listened to, at least the ones in mainstream academia, and yet the counsel they gave wound up making things worse.

So where’s the problem here? Where’s the disconnect?

They had top-down central planner hubris. They had the guts to believe that they knew the inscrutable secrets of the universe. They had schemas and heuristics and traditions and citations and expert testimony and blood on their hands.

And we teach the same “history” today.

Resolution

Teach only if you put your skin in the game.

Remember that the greatest judgment is reserved for those who lead others away from the right path.

If you think you see, remember that you could be wearing crummy glasses.