Postmodernity and Buddhism

[Pye]

Though it is an urban myth that incest in one generation will produce a cretinous being, it is true that it will happen over time, of things born down upon in restricted circumstances - doing all their mating and multiplying and dividing there; the weakness, ineffectualism, the stench. I think we can say this of writing only for the academy, too. As with long-line incest, some of its products can stand without wobbling, and the rare burst of a healthy king might also occur. But over time, there's impotence, hemophilia . . . ineffectual birth . . . .

[daybrown]

I can see the academic utility of instruction in appreciation of art, music, literature. Nbody expects to write like Shakespeare, but find it interesting to parse out how he did it. But whatever, modern art, modern music, modern literature have all been so urban, so urbane.

But partly because of satellite TV and Internet, there is a dispersion out of the urban centers to country villas, with a post modern sensibility in the architecture- returning to natural materials. Or native artistic motif, or Celtic Music & Dance. The modern has always been associated with the high rise, and no matter where you were, New York, Chicago, LA, Houston, it all looked and operated the same.

Likewise, corporations could move people around like pawns, plugged in anywhere. But every country villa reflects the climate, terrain, and ecosystem of a particular place. There's also a cosmological revolution, from the idea of a single set of ideas for all mankind, to the particular set which was ancestral, and reflective of the particular conditions of living in a particular place with particular people and their livestock.

[brokenhead]

Pye wrote:

I’ve often thought this problem similar to what happened to jazz once it got taken off the streets and put into university music programs. Knocked the life out of it, I think. Becomes a pattern instead of discovery/creation and even improvisation (as you will ironically note) is dissected for its most successful elements and taught the same. All these new jazz “greats” that I hear are so smooooooth, so technically proficient, so purely antiseptic to the art form as to have rendered it as gassy as classical music taught the same way.

When I first read that, I agreed with it. It does seem sometimes that you have to kill something in order to study it. It would be unpleasant, to say the least, to dissect a living cat, for example.

But killing might just be a "for instance."

We always affect what we study.

Jazz has not been killed; rather, jazz is being explored.

I've often thought how future generations will describe this one. "Postmodern" is just an oxymoron, no? How would someone from the year 2050 describe our present age? Would that perspective be as valid as the one we feel we have of the mid-20th Century?

I've often thought the biggest shock to me if I were plucked from now and thrust into, say, 1930's Berlin would not be that there are cords on all the telephones and everyone is speaking German and my, aren't all these antique cars and everything quaint. I would be shocked to realize there was color. "Hey, Dad - you mean the Thirties weren't in black and white?"

[David Quinn]

In this sense, I’ve found it unfortunate that to write here, one is either identified as an absolutist or “postmodern,” as though only these two in irremediable duality can express the thinking range. Every absolutist here has to deal with the soundness of the tools (words/minds) and perhaps not every postmodern thinker is a’marching against notions of truth, but they have hardly dissolved all effort toward meaning, even if it is to ask after the meaning of meaning. Maybe someday, David, Kevin, and Dan can subtlelize their own understandings of this. The mere sniff of an “I-don’t-know-about-that” in opposition to their absolutism always produces the same knee-jerk results. You are either on board with what they have concluded - absolutely - or you're postmodern, the dirty word.

I think it is incumbent upon postmodernists to make that transition themselves. They are the ones who are resolutely black-and-white when it comes to these deeper issues. I have yet to meet a postmodernist who isn't absolutist in his conviction that absolute truth can never be known.

I agree with you that it is perfectly possible for a person to engage in both postmodernist and absolutist thought. I can easily do both myself. Sometimes, it is useful to step back and observe things in terms of "narratives" - as you say, it enables one to tease out knowledge of historical patterns and observe how certain kinds of memes evolved, etc. The trouble only begins when people lock themselves within this one approach and try to judge everything in its light, regardless of whether it is appropriate or not. That is when it ceases to be a useful intellectual approach and becomes a form of fundamentalism.

Just as some people lock themselves entirely within the scientific approach and try to judge everything with that particular method alone - and in the process, blinding themselves to everything that falls out of its scope and range - postmodernists have locked themselves within a very limited outlook on life. By contrast, a quality thinker is able to call upon all sorts of different approaches to fit the occasion. He is scientific when the matter before him is scientific; he is postmodernist when he wants to look at historical development; he is absolutist when he wants to reason about the nature of Reality; and so on.

So if a postmodernist is open to the possibility of becoming conscious of absolute truth, then great, I can treat him as a human being and have a meaningful discussion with him. But if he just wants to dogmatically assert that postmodernism is the only valid approach there is, then I will have no choice but to dismiss him as a fundamentalist.

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[ZenMuadDib]

That's the answer, dude. It works equally well in both capacities. :)

Wait till I analyze social struggle using quantum mechanics! Each power-group, you see, is a state vector of indeterminate dimensionality, and if you define your observables in phallic terms, then you can figure the mutual orthogonality of sociopolitical observable from the relative spin of each vector's quarkness! you then decompose their superposition as it decoheres from the contact with the social-studies observer, remaining in entangled state with its non-local power-group brethren and sistren! Dude, this opens a whole new dimension of social theory!

Quantum socio-dynamics, dude! it's the latest fad! All the kool kids are doing it!

And it is so much more complex and socially relevant than some silly math thing those dorky physicists and mathematicians are studying, too!

You are an extremely arrogant ****** ***** *****. Thought I'd point that out for you.

[vicdan]

Yeah, we science geeks tend to see the PoMo crowd as brainless poseurs. Deal with it. You children can do nothing but babble.

[ZenMuadDib]

Yeah, we science geeks tend to see the PoMo crowd as brainless poseurs. Deal with it. You children can do nothing but babble.

I'm not going to fight with you since it seems you are happy to leave understanding at 1+1=2 instead of delving any deeper.

[ZenMuadDib]

I just want to make clear that I am not a "PoMo", whatever that is and however someone is I don't know. As to postmodernism being contradictory, modernism is a specific time in human history, very recent, that had specific goals and principles. Now that we seem to be emerging from those, postmodernism is one attempt at understanding where we are now, but it is not the only attempt.

[Ataraxia]

My father-an engineer -sent me this link years ago.I don't think much has changed since.

http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

[vicdan]

Fuck, this is awesome! i started laughing at 'the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor'.

[daybrown]

My father-an engineer -sent me this link years ago.I don't think much has changed since.

http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

Cute, but what I see going on is not deconstruction, but reconstruction. There are several synergistic reasons.
1- The violence in the near East drove European scholars and archaeologists out, making them shift to Europe and the Silk Road at the same time when new forensic tools have come online to make much more of what is found.
2- Native Europeans are beginning to see the hypocrisy of Levantine pulpits that have always preached peace while using scripture to justify violence, and they see as well the example of Native Americans and other tribes recover their own ancient spiritual traditions.
3- The human genome & DNA data not only shows that there never was an Abraham for the 'Chosen People' to descend from, but along with the brain structure and biochemistry of the mind explains why violence exists, and that therefore "sin" is no longer a useful concept. So, people do not need the redemption of Jesus.
4- Geopolitically, China has again opened up, and with that interest in Oriental philosophy which cant be deconstructed in the same way as Occidental. Moreover, the ancient documents found along the Silk Road show the interaction of Oriental and Occidental thinking. We have been here before.

Further, consider the example of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in which an elite restricted access. Now, compare that to the ongoing efforts between the Brits and Chinese to post jpgs of 100,000 artifacts and documents found along the Silk Road. Students will no longer have to kiss a professor's ass to gain access to original sources. Further, they're able to publish work online without worry about disturbing the politically correct, Christian, or social sensibilities of an academic committee.

Not that Buddhism is not in for challenges as well. I have a copy of the Maitreyasamiti Texts in Tocharian A, which is a conversation between the living Buddha and the Gautamid Queen of Kucha. The document was found with a hidden library and dates from the 5th century. I have no opinion on when the conversation actually took place. http://books.google.com/books?id=sluKZf ... CDqTxS32rY
says Kucha was mentioned in Chinese texts from the 2nd cent BC. Suffice to say however, and despite the comment in the link, if Kucha had a king at the time, the Buddha would have been talking to him.

And the whole tenure of the document, in sharp contrast to that long tradition where some authority dispenses wisdom and law, here we see a search for consensus. This sound like the Buddha you know? So, it begs questions about whose Buddhism is going to come out of this research.

[Jamesh]

Chomsky: There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass….

Vicdan: Anyway, whatever else you can accuse Chomsky of, lacking intellectual horsepower is not it. If Chomsky doesn't get it, chances are there's nothing to get.

Chomsky shows a lack of understanding of reality. If neutrinos have an internal structure, as they do if we can observe their action with modern tools of science, then they have mass - end of story. If they are only observed through maths, then they may not exist.

Anti-neutrinos, are probably not separate to the structure of the known types of neutrino, but rather it is the nucleus of the neutrino - the part of the structure of a neutrino where the contracting force is stronger than the expansionary force. The mass is the net value of all such ratios of force within the whole neutrino. The more structured an object is the more mass it will have, as this allows for a higher ratio of the contracting force (gravity) in any spatial area.

[daybrown]

Chomsky: There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass….

Vicdan: Anyway, whatever else you can accuse Chomsky of, lacking intellectual horsepower is not it. If Chomsky doesn't get it, chances are there's nothing to get.

Chomsky shows a lack of understanding of reality. If neutrinos have an internal structure, as they do if we can observe their action with modern tools of science, then they have mass - end of story. If they are only observed through maths, then they may not exist.

Anti-neutrinos, are probably not separate to the structure of the known types of neutrino, but rather it is the nucleus of the neutrino - the part of the structure of a neutrino where the contracting force is stronger than the expansionary force. The mass is the net value of all such ratios of force within the whole neutrino. The more structured an object is the more mass it will have, as this allows for a higher ratio of the contracting force (gravity) in any spatial area.

Chomsky idealizes his partisans, and demonizes those who see differently; he has an unrealistic denial of ambiguity.