From: John Beasley (beasley@austarnet.com.au)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 13:45:40 BST
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I am developing a sense of where the big hole is in a world which treats
language in the way Rorty recommends. However, this whole thing is so subtle
I could quite easily be wrong.
MATT: "I'm not sure yet how to respond to Blackmore's, John's, and my own
charge. But I think it has something to do with why a meme survives in the
meme pool: because we like it. We like equality and democracy. There's
nothing intrinsically great about equality or democracy, but they help us
cope with our environment. They allow us to form groups where avoidance of
bloodshed is a foregone conclusion."
In this quote your argument that memes survive because we like them got me
thinking.
My background as a child was to grow up in the 'Bible Belt' of Australia,
with an uncle who was a fundamentalist preacher in the same town for some
years. So I saw a lot of what even as a child I judged to be human
gullibility. Now the people who liked this sort of thing did not see it as
gullibility. Their faith was sufficient for them to live through events that
might seriously have challenged a more thoughtful person to question that
form of faith. So a lady who is ill is proclaimed to be cured through her
faith in God. A year later, having refused to go to the doctor since she
knows she is cured, she is dead of cancer. Somehow this sort of thing,
combined with reading Mark Twain, and exploring a few of the strange stories
found in any community and discovering that there was an alternative to
belief in magic; a way of explaining the perceived strange outcomes, which
was matter of ordinary fact, or science, or whatever, left me with pretty
strong views on human credulity. Living in a traditonal Papuan culture for
nine years gave me a further insight into cultural patterns of fear and
magical devices to deal with this fear.
Later I became interested in the humanist therapies and trained as a Gestalt
therapist. Again I saw in my own and others behaviour that people can do the
most darn fool stupid things thinking they are fine. I learned just how
pervasive fantasy (in the technical sense of unjustified beliefs about the
way things are) can be. Fritz Perls in his old age opined that 90% of what
we see is fantasy, and I would tend to agree.
So my view of the world is shaped by experiences that suggest to me that
what people say can be quite different to what is going on at another level.
I have also learned techniques which seemingly do work to test what someone
is saying against a reality independant of their words. As a science teacher
in Papua New Guinea I saw how experiment could influence belief structures.
Students actually took fertilizer home to their villages to experiment with
the outcomes of using fertilizer compared with using traditional spells to
assist yams to grow. I still find it hard to accept that this was simply a
change in their discourse, or some such.
I'm not sure I can fully justify the next statement, but I'll make it
anyway. If Rorty is right, I think what he has done is endorse a naive
hedonism, that suits the consumer culture we live in, and those who prosper
from it, but serves to disempower individuals within it. It is our ability
to test our beliefs and fantasies through experiment (in the broadest sense)
which allows us to navigate in a world increasingly shaped by advertising
and spin doctors of all persuasions. As Susan Blackmore points out, it is
only recently in human affairs that people have constructed memeplexes quite
calculatedly for profit. But in an information age we are not necessarily
better informed, and our inbuilt crap detectors (Hemingway's phrase) are
increasingly tested by more and more refined propaganda.
The assumption by Davidson, who assumes that "we are, always and everywhere,
'in touch with the world'" seems quite naive for this reason. Language forms
a metaworld, at one remove from immediate experience. Bateson explores just
this in his "Last Lecture", where he says "Now that discovery, that the
first and most fundamental step of mental life - the receipt of news from
the outside - depends upon difference, and that the differences are in fact
ratios, is basic for epistemology .... We can only know by virtue of
difference. This means that our entire mental life is one degree more
abstract than the physical world around us. We deal in what mathematicians
call derivatives, and not in quantities - in ratios between quantities but
not in quantities." The assumption that language is more real than what it
seeks to communicate, that language is just a manipulative tool like any
other, seems to ignore this. The knee-jerk reaction is to say that poor old
Bateson is just mired in SOM and needs an MOQ inplant. But that is to
underestimate him, in my view. He asks his audience to take time to look at
their hands, not as a collection of five fingers, etc, but as products of
relationships, which he explores a little, and then goes on to say, "I am
suggesting to you, first, that language is very deceptive, and, second, that
if you begin even without much knowledge to adventure into what it would be
like to look at the world with a biological epistemology ... you will meet
beauty and ugliness. These may be real components in the world that you as a
living creature live in." (A Sacred Unity, pp309 - 311)
What I suspect is that immersion in language in the way Rorty proposes loses
us an ability that may be critical for survival. And though I could be
wrong, I don't think this is just talking meta-narratives.
I recognise that this is incredibly subtle stuff, and that I might have
blindly missed the linguistic turn, but I see a parallel in the way science
works. The essence of science is to play off theories, constructed in
language, with experiments which, (while mediated by language), are
operating in a different realm. It is the to and fro motion between these
two realms that gives science its incredible success and robustness. The
linguistic turn would seem to me to deny the fundamental difference of
theory and experiment.
I'll be surprised if you can follow my argument here as I am struggling to
clarify what is only vaguely apparent to myself. Hopefully I can refine
these arguments in time, or perhaps you can show me why I am wrong.
Regards,
John B
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