Postmodernity and Buddhism

[ZenMuadDib]

Ah yes, the wonders of marxism... who could forget the Labor Theory of Value, or the idiotic historicism, or the naive economics, etc?..

Excuse me for being unimpressed.

Look you can snigger in your corner, but you will always be facing the wall, away from reality, with your nose to a notebook and your eyes glued to a calculator.

[vicdan]

Hahaha. Having grown up in a marxist country, and having studied marxism in school, I think i have a rather more realistic understanding of what marxism is, kiddo.

You PoMo social studies types might as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, for all the relationship to the real world you have.

[Ataraxia]

Labor Theory of Value,

.

Hehe.My personel favourite.

I'm not a particular fan of Chomsky but his quote does sum up PoMo well in the wiki entry.


There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

– Noam Chomsky

[vicdan]

Yeah, I love Labor Theory of Value. We can use it to determine the appropriate pay for an underwater basket weaver, a rather labor-intensive work i hear. :D

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.

Labor Theory of Value BTW enjoys a distinct advantage over most of PoMo claptrap. It may be stupid and wrong, but at least it says something meaningful (though stupid and wrong).

[Imadrongo]

I guess I had a wrong idea of postmodernism if it refers to intelligent-sounding writing that means nothing. :-S

[daybrown]

"Reconstructionalsim" is what is following the modern. Which why the other social theories dont fit. Technically speaks, Native Americans are 'neopagan' in their trip returning to ancestral spiritual roots. The same thing is going on in China, where Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist practice and places are revered and being restored, and whacko cults like Falun Gong are repressed. They've seen the mass suicides and terrorist zealots in other parts, and I dont blame the government for not wanting Waco Whackos.

There's a reason Harry Potter did so well, and there are Christian clerics who understand this, and have their panties in a wad about it. If you want a religious revolution, start with the kids. It goes on with all the VR fantasy games without Jesus on the set. Buddhism isnt going to get anywhere with this generation either. Asceticism is for neurotics.

The new artforms, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs dont require the investment or cooperation of the transnational media, and are coming to compete with it. The set of The Lord of The Rings harkens back to the European Pagan past, and an artistic sensibility that has nothing to do with modernism, nor a Levantine religion.

Part of the failure of secularism is seen in the mindless consumerism and the resulting environmental destruction, but also in the tolerance of religious traditions that themselves justify violence and motivate the zealots to commit it. Since secularism cant figure out how to repress that mindset, another is emerging among young women with the intuition to understand others.

They are quietly recovering the worship of the Goddess, and some have even been willing to use their sexuality in their efforts to empower that process. They understand that sex will adjust the attitudes of the social predators, which secularism, sociology, & psychology have been in denial about. They are being helped in this effort by the fairies. But it all goes on under the radar, only making the media for mass events like Stonehenge or Burning Man. But there are webrings and email about this kind of thing going on obscurely in local areas all the time.

It aint that they are against the modern. Its just that the modern dont matter enuf to be "post of".

[Dan Rowden]

Does postmodernism resemble Buddhism in any way?

No.

Yes.

Maybe.

In what sense did you think it might?

[Philosophaster]

Yeah, I love Labor Theory of Value. We can use it to determine the appropriate pay for an underwater basket weaver, a rather labor-intensive work i hear. :D

The funny thing is that Marx himself admits (in Capital) that some work is worthless. He says more or less that this labor simply "doesn't count," and leaves the remark unexplained, if I remember correctly. :-P

I have the passage typed out somewhere, I think. I'll try to find it...

[Philosophaster]

“Lastly, nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value."

[At the end of Section 1 of Chapter 1.]

He actually recognizes that not all labor creates value, that different amounts of labor can create the same amount of value, and that not all value is created by labor. But for some reason he didn't dump the flawed labor theory of value...

[ZenMuadDib]

Hahaha. Having grown up in a marxist country, and having studied marxism in school, I think i have a rather more realistic understanding of what marxism is, kiddo.

You PoMo social studies types might as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, for all the relationship to the real world you have.

Ok what is it?

[vicdan]

“Lastly, nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value."

[At the end of Section 1 of Chapter 1.]

yeah, I know this passage. Countless soviet students used it to equivocate about labor theory of value -- Marx's writings were the holy writ, if he said it, no instructor would penalize you for it. :) it allowed for a bit of economic sanity to be expressed without insta-penalty being applied for it.

[vicdan]

Ok what is it?

Square root of negative phallus, I imagine.

(that's much better than saying 'what is what?')

[Philosophaster]

Square root of negative phallus, I imagine.

Very postmodern of you!

But I think he was asking what you thought Marxism was.

[vicdan]

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!

[Jason]

The Bedroom Philosopher - I'm So Post Modern

[daybrown]

The Bedroom Philosopher - I'm So Post Modern

The new art is not pictures, but moving pictures. Oil or acrylic just sits there.

[brokenhead]

Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a perfect example of the intellectual pond scum which Post Modern Humanities foster. Literally a ream of pages that says nothing. There is not one original thought in it, and it purports to be profound and ground-breaking. Here is a man who proudly proclaims that he has read, understands, and has mastered hundreds of papers on the Social Sciences and is here to tell us respectfully that all of these serious thinkers are correct and yet at the same time incorrect. In sum, there is such a thing as Human Nature. We need him to point this out.
Somebody gave me this book as a gift and I forced myself to read it. Pinker is in the Psychology Department at Harvard, no less. Here is what I think. I think neither he, nor any of the practitioners of the “soft” sciences has anything to say. Nor will they. They know it. We know it. They just hope that we don’t know they know it so they can go on publishing this type of wordy, well, wankerism. Because it’s publish or perish. And he doesn’t have to actually have an idea, because look at his picture. He’s adorable! Schoene punim! He has no doubt canoodled with some very influential professor’s wives with a face like that – hey, just a joke, no slander suits, though I could use a new suit.
I’m sure he’s highly intelligent and I’m just jealous. But he never says anything. Only if your head if crammed with “PoMo” pseudointellectual bullshit would you need a book that debunks all the bullshit.
When I was an undergrad at Cornell, I was majoring in Psychology. For two fucking years, I worked my ass off to learn a handful of precious things. I switched my major to Physics for my second two years and there weren’t enough hours in the day to assimilate all the ideas. It was astounding that so many people my age were in the first group I was in, the Humanities, the Arts as opposed to the Sciences, and calling it an education that same way the engineers and hard science majors of the second group did. Not that all the Humanities are the same. I suppose an English major would learn people how to write, or maybe force them to read, or at least to develop valuable cheating skills with Cliff Notes (I show my age.) But Sociology? Anthropology? Sociobiology? Philosophy? How many Stephen Jay Goulds do we need? His books,at least, I’ll read.
All those people in the “Human Ecology” school had time to go to parties and play Frisbee on the Arts Quad, while I had to find the time to pick my nose. I’m no genius and clearly not an intellectual, yet I wasn’t that slow. Some of us were using our brains, and some of us were not. I am painting with broad strokes here, I get that. The main task of a soft-science department at a university is self-propagation. Make sure enough students take your major, recycle any remotely related literature to your topic and call it “research,” and forget that they’ll forget 90% of what they “learn.” And fuck the real-world job skills as long as your job is secure because you sure as hell don't want to have to make it out there.
Only my ex-smoking habit has wasted more money than my first two years of tuition at Cornell. Not that the college experience was wasted, and I guess that’s the point, what with sex and drugs and music. But for education…
So this thread really got to me.
I noticed something else about Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. The cover is Dali’s Tête Raphaelesque Eclatée,the same work chosen for the cover of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by the physicists Barrow & Tipler (1986).
I am just writing this and I have not searched the forums for references to TACP, but it’s a juicy book I do not claim to have read all the way through although I have had it for 20 years.
The same painting on the covers of these two books says it all.

[Philosophaster]

I've never read The Blank Slate, but I did read How the Mind Works, one of his earlier books, and found it very interesting. It brings in neurology, AI, and cognitive science, not just a bunch of "soft" concepts, so maybe Pinker's thinking has grown duller with age or something. Another event seems to confirm this: Pinker came to my university last year to give a talk, and I heard that the psychology professors here were very unimpressed with it. The feeling seemed to be that it consisted of entertainment in the guise of "popularization."

The best philosophers (at least in the West) have almost all been strong admirers of the hard sciences and educated about them, if not directly involved in science and math themselves. Some good ones (like Hume and Locke) were not involved in science but had some other very evidence-based subject like history or economics in addition to philosophy.

The thing about philosophy and other humanities as university subjects is that they tend to be "second-order." What this means is that the professors are just writing about things that other people have done, not actually doing much themselves; e.g. English professors produce not novels but analyses of novels. On the other hand, the physics professors are actually doing physics. A physics class is a way of preparing you to do physics. An English class, on the other hand, is not a preparation to write a novel, but a preparation to analyze a novel -- training you to comment on the work of somebody else.

There is a reason for this, which is that it's much easier to teach people how to make passably intelligent comments about art or philosophy done by somebody else than it is to teach them how to make good art or philosophy themselves; and generally most of the professors of arts and philosophy don't know how to make good art or philosophy in the first place, so they are in no position to train anyone to do it anyway.

[Philosophaster]

The "publish or perish" mentality is silly when applied to the humanities, but this is not at all to say that humanities teachers are worthless. Good art and philosophy can be hard to grasp at first, and it can make all the difference if you have somebody there to guide you and to refer you to other books or authors that might interest you. This, not barfing up the five hundred and fifty-seventh Freudian-feminist-Marxist-poststructuralist analysis of James Joyce's Ulysses, should be the primary function of humanities professors.

[daybrown]

Pinker says some very politically incorrect things in The Blank Slate. It pisses people off, and they cant really see anything else he has to say.

Despite what the Liberals would have us believe, the blank slate is bullshit. Pinker cites Bouchard's longitudinal studies of identical twins who were adopted out at birth to different families. Who grow up like the twin anyway. He cites how the graveyards of the primitive hunting tribes show 20 times the signs of violent trauma, such as parry fractures of the upper arms, as seen in the graveyards of yeoman farmers. Thus, Keillor's Lake Wobegon is a much more peaceful place to live than any Black or Hispanic ghetto.

And since he published, 60 minutes did a piece "An almost perfect match" where the DNA sample of the main suspect to a murder rape didnt quite match. But the state had the samples from several other men in that same Y chromosome line, and when they went thru the records of the dude's male relatives, the found the real perp. Black of course. But it'd work in white or Hispanic families. Machiavelli, referring to a litigant:"He comes from a line of liars and thieves that goes back 500 years in the court records of Padua."

But yes, anthropology, sociology, & psychology, have had some serious problems. Which arise out of the cowardice to challenge Christian cosmology. It'd take a while to sort thru the DNA markers to identify who poses serious risks of harm to others, and who would commit what the church calls "sin". And it'll take a while to get thru to Christians that preaching at them has not worked, never will, and that you need to put some people on meds. They are not evil, deserving of damnation, but demented, deserving of treatment. And, lets be clear here, filtration from the gene pool.

The Nazis were not wrong about everything, and the filtration they performed resulted in a Germany today which has lower rates of some forms of pathology and retardation. Its a reason their healthcare costs are lower and they live longer. Pinker's case would have been more robust had he gotten into the effect of hormones on behavior. Obviously, its the "Alpha males" who cause the vast majority of the problems reported by the 'soft sciences'. Primate field studies have shown, thru darting and drawing blood, that alphas sire alphas, betas sire betas.

Pinker would have done well to cite "Demonic Males" by Wrangham & Peterson, who compiled primate field studies. Its the betas, who are the same size as the alphas, who place themselves between the alphas and the vulnerable females and young. they can take the impulsive abuse. Course, if no beta is handy, why then the wife and kids will do.

The soft sciences would have to also challenge the nuclear family model, which is so embedded in the culture and which the transnational rely on for profits. Were people to move back into the communal housing so many of our ancestors evolved in, the carbon footprint/capita would go down to a sustainable level. Course, with all the pheremones in the air, monogamy would not work. Cant have that, can we.

So, the soft sciences are in denial about so many facts cause they are unwilling to deal with hot buttons. Course, I dont have the problem here.

[brokenhead]

Philosophaster wrote:

There is a reason for this, which is that it's much easier to teach people how to make passably intelligent comments about art or philosophy done by somebody else than it is to teach them how to make good art or philosophy themselves; and generally most of the professors of arts and philosophy don't know how to make good art or philosophy in the first place, so they are in no position to train anyone to do it anyway.

Yes! Exactly.
And yet they do train people, and charge mightily for it. You feel so fortunate for the privilege of owing student loans for the rest of your life to these people who train others in more or less unremunerative disciplines that they know are of little value in life. You wouldn't forget so much of it if you really needed it!
Ah yes, college is terrific if it weren't so expensive.
And it's the other skills you learn there - like making the alphabet with your tongue - that are of lasting value, let's face it.
It's just that there is nothing so mind-numbing as academically defending one "expert's" theory versus another's when you know it's more political jostling than ideological debate. Like are you a neo-Freudian or a neo-Jungian? Yeah, which is better, the right eye or the left eye? If you assimilate both, you get another dimension entirely. Looking outwards, instead of cross-eyed, at each other. Yet undergraduates - and more shamefully, graduate students - live like paupers, go into debt, all for the privilege of spending the best years of their lives studying Derrida.
Of course, I am exaggerating and reducing everything.
But here's one "academic" lesson I learned as an undergrad:
I was done with all my finals and papers at the end of one semester, and my girlfriend at the time was not. She had a couple of English papers due the next day and hadn't even begun one of them. Feeling guilty that I had taken up so much of her time that semester, I made her an offer she could not afford to refuse. I told her to do the paper in the course she was getting a B in, and that I would write her paper in the other course, in which she was getting a C. Just to get it done, turned in, and hope she could nail her paper. So I proceeded to write a paper comparing two books I had not read. I had them there, but I had not read either. She ended up with that B in the course for which she wrote the paper. In the other course, she got an A.
It was her only A.
It was my only A.
And she never forgave me for it. We grew apart after that and broke up the following Spring.
That's the kind of lesson you remember.

[vicdan]

hahaha. I had done something similar a few times. it's amazing how little you can tell apart blatant bullshit from supposedly substantive critique.

I have a friend who had made a point of writing many essays with a similar idea in mind -- of simply taking a random idea, and using it to connect two unrelated works. Pure, unabashed intellectual wankery at its finest. Got good grades...

Incidentally, when i had tried that in my philosophy class, my professor gave me an 'A' but said that i should have actually read the source material. in philosophy you can still tell bullshit apart from substance, much of the time...

[brokenhead]

Vicdan, as a perfect example, witness Henry G. Frankfurt's tiny tome On Bullshit.
Also from the noted professor emeritus from Princeton is On Truth. This latter is a more substantive work, having fully 34 more little pages than the former (101 vs. 67.)

[daybrown]

It is curious, that there are psychology courses that include reports on the studies of group think, when the psychology departments themselves suffer so severely from it.

I can see how college demonstrates the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of a future career. And that alone, to personnel managers is worth something. But I'm struck by the remarkable success in recent times of all the hackers and geeks who dropped out of college and actually began to produce something useful.

Likewise, I can see how there would be young people networking trying to integrate the data on the social sciences with the received authority of philosophy and religion, and thereby come up with a more reasonable cosmology.

[Pye]

Philosophaster writes:

The thing about philosophy and other humanities as university subjects is that they tend to be "second-order." What this means is that the professors are just writing about things that other people have done, not actually doing much themselves; e.g. English professors produce not novels but analyses of novels. On the other hand, the physics professors are actually doing physics. A physics class is a way of preparing you to do physics. An English class, on the other hand, is not a preparation to write a novel, but a preparation to analyze a novel -- training you to comment on the work of somebody else.

There is a reason for this, which is that it's much easier to teach people how to make passably intelligent comments about art or philosophy done by somebody else than it is to teach them how to make good art or philosophy themselves; and generally most of the professors of arts and philosophy don't know how to make good art or philosophy in the first place, so they are in no position to train anyone to do it anyway.

This is probably mostly true, as long as you make room for the exceptions, too.

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.

Well after all, any village idiot can analyze a novel. The one who’s going to write one doesn’t need to be there in the first place; full stop. And if one does require such exercises to inspire one’s art, one can always go to any number of writers workshops and hang with the rest of the wanna-bees.

I’m pretty much a dinosaur to my local academy, what with my "quaint" explorations into ontological, existential, philosophy of mind-ish things. No one encourages philosophical activities of the wholsesale worldview type any more – another characteristic of the death-of-the-master-narrative age. It is much as you say, generally: Since Wittgenstein, the tools we use (words/physical minds) have become the subject at hand, rather than the towering (and teetering) structures we can build with them. It is awfully hard to say something when all we are saying is mostly about the saying itself. Not the most horrible turn of affairs, for indeed the structures we build are only as sound as the tools we use to build them (words/minds), so it doesn’t hurt to be alert. It does hurt, though, when what we say means less than how. Everything is form in the postmodern age. The medium, the appearance. They don’t kid themselves about absolute content anymore - just what spectacle it seeks to present.

I’ve already done my time here with the topic of PoMo, but will reiterate anyway that postmodernism is also a description of the age in which we live and the manner of human mind about it. And postmodernists are people who look at these tendencies of our age and run with them in full intentionality; that’s all. To a certain extent, every thinker/writer on this board is a member of that age, and you display – perhaps more frequently than you would care to admit – many of the pathologies of the way people think in this human era. You niggle after accurate definitions (as well we should); you reject some things based on the relativity of historical context; you practice a kind of absolutist rejectionism of any one given line of teaching and paste together (“pastische”) your own, suited to your own liking, and this is all because we can – because we can think this way now. This very thinking climate as it has evolved is why a few dudes can stitch together Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Lao Tzu and Diogenes and declare a shared philosophical sentiment from it forthwith, happily rejecting that which they reject and inserting that which they wish to insert. We do this with our thinking minds of this human age because we can; we are able.

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.