Ed Yong, on his book, An Immense World:

There really are a lot of scientists who have sensory divergence, who have things like colorblindness or prosopagnosia, the kinds of things that some people might bill as disorders and that I’m choosing to bill as perceptual differences. These kinds of differences make people a little bit more attuned to the ways in which animals might be different. If you know that the way you perceive the world is atypical, you’re more likely to cue into atypicality in the creatures you are studying.

And a lot of them have arts backgrounds. There are a lot of painters and musicians among people who study vibrations and sounds. And I think that’s valuable too because the problem with thinking about the sensors— which folks like Thomas Nagel and others wrote about—is that it’s an inherently impossible task. We can get some way towards understanding how a bat or a whale or a dog experiences the world, but we’ll never get that entirely. There’s always going to be this chasm where it can only be leapt over through imagination rather than through empiricism. Empiricism can guide our imagination, but we still have to make that final leap on our own. To really get at this, you need to fuse the sciences and the arts. You need to think more broadly than just the products of research papers. And people who are artists have an edge in thinking in this way. They are people who are paid to let their imaginations run riot.

I recently referenced Jonathan Lear from his book Radical Hope:

Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life—whatever it is—is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem. …

We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It [is] as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.

It’s not quite what Lear has in mind, I don’t think, but a name for that vulnerability (though there are certainly many) could be “globalization.” Or at least that’s what Thomas Hylland Eriksen says:

Consumer researchers have often pointed out that consumers are creative and independent, and that apparent standardisation may conceal considerable variation. This is not an irrelevant objection, but it is difficult to deny that the new diversity is qualitatively different from the old. Language death may be an indicator. In the early 2020s, we have about 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Linguists estimate that 90 per cent of them may be gone in just a few decades. If there is some truth to the assumption that every language produces a unique vision of the world (‘certain ideas can be expressed only in German’, as I was once taught), there is a case for suggesting that the cultural diversity of the world is facing a mass extinction on a par with the reduced complexity of the global biosphere. The world is becoming semiotically poorer. With every extinct language, a unique way of perceiving the world disappears. […]

A major challenge today consists in finding ways of halting this movement away from a world of many differences towards a world of just a few, and defences of biodiversity and cultural diversity are two sides of the same coin. Until now, critics of the negative effects of globalisation have typically focused on inequality, climate change and environmental damage, or the marginalisation of vulnerable groups such as migrants, refugees and Indigenous peoples. It is time now to view the global situation through a lens enabling us to see all the destructive effects of globalisation as threads in the same tapestry. Contemporary globalisation is a bulldozer on speed, razing rainforests, turning tribal peoples into urban slumdwellers, simplifying ecosystems and obliterating traditional livelihoods. The loss of semiotic freedom is creating a poorer world of reduced beauty but, more seriously, it leads to ecological disaster and diminishing options for humanity.

Robert Nozick (somewhat ironically out of context—he’s differentiating between “design” and “filter” devices of construction —but I love the thought):

It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”

James C. Scott (emphasis added):

[T]he legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build. …

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.

Alan Jacobs:

I have said that Auden was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, but he gradually came to understand that there were some valuable things, necessary things, that Kierkegaard didn’t understand. Late in his life, Auden would write of Kierkegaard that, “like all heretics, conscious or unconscious, he is a monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament — in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice — but is deaf to its rich polyphony…. The Passion of Christ was to Kierkegaard’s taste, the Nativity and Epiphany were not.” Auden contends that, while Kierkegaard’s consciously held beliefs were scrupulously orthodox, he was “in his sensibility” a Manichee, who felt strongly the evil and degradation of matter, of our bodies. Indeed, Auden wrote in another essay, with pardonable exaggeration, “A planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.” And to have bodies of flesh and blood is to live in the world of nature’s necessity as well as in the world of history, of existential choice.

We are therefore, Auden came more and more to reflect, compound beings: subject always to natural laws and yet called upon to “assume responsibility for time” by making decisions — decisions whose inevitable consequences are yet another form of necessity. For Auden, this peculiar situation is above all comic: there is something intrinsically funny about our mixed identity, as we try to exercise Divine powers of decision and yet always find our bodies getting in the way. “A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws.” And this sense of humor about one’s condition is for Auden absolutely necessary to spiritual health: he may have dreamed in his youth of redeeming the world through his poetic power, or being destroyed in the effort, but as an older man he found himself, as he often remarked, just a “martyr to corns,” which afflicted his feet and made him comfortable only in carpet slippers.

Ted Goia, on the pervasiveness of practitioners of sophistry, “a group that thrives on not calling things by their true names” (a group also known as Pretty Much Everybody Everywhere All the Time):

We need to go back to the ancient Greeks to come up with a working definition of sophistry. And as soon as I start describing it, you will nod your head in agreement. You will realize that sophistry reallymust be word of the year—because it’s even more popular than binge-watching and selfie sticks put together.

And it’s not surprising that sophists should be so active nowadays. The history of sophistry reveals that it is closely aligned with the rise of democracy, especially unruly and disordered democracy. Thus the Sophists exerted enormous influence in ancient Greece during the late fifth century BC, when they played decisive roles in many settings, especially legal proceedings and political gatherings.

Below is a definition of the sophist, drawn mostly from Plato and Aristotle—who feared the tremendous influence of these public figures.

• The sophists, unlike philosophers, do not pursue the truth, but only master the art of persuasion.
• In a very real sense, talking is their vocation, although you might guess otherwise from their rhetoric, which invariably promises more than any sophist will ever deliver.
• Despite the shallowness of their thinking, sophists have far more influence than honest and serious thinkers, especially in matters of politics and policy. This is because the sophist’s rhetoric is always shaped by what their audience wants to hear.
• For that same reason, sophists will avoid painful truths that run counter to popular demand. Addressing hard truths is bad for their business.
• Sophists are frequently deceivers and sometimes outright charlatans, whose goal is to make people believe whatever they want—and thus, according to Plato and Aristotle, they are responsible for a large portion of the public holding false beliefs.
• If necessary, a sophist can actually argue both sides of any issue—and thus has the skill to make the bad seem good, or evil look like justice.
• They are often aligned with the rich and powerful, and have a knack for making money from their abilities.
• In the words of one classicist, the end result is a powerful group of influencers (as we would call them today) who are “crudely self-serving” and “frivolously manipulative.”
• Yet the sophists remain popular despite all these obvious warning signs. That’s no coincidence, because the sophists practice a vocation that deliberately aims at enriching and empowering the possessor of sophistical skills. […]

I remember someone advising me on social media to avoid engaging a certain person in dialogue. My friend told me: “Beware of [name omitted], because once he gets started he will insist that water isn’t wet.”

I laughed at that description. Can you really do that? Hey, once you learn a few sophistic rules, it’s easy.

Stop acting like a dimwit, Ted. You certainly know that at certain temperatures, water achieves a solidity in which all moisture is absent. So when you claim that water is wet, you’re the one who’s all wet. Conversely, at higher temperatures, the water enters a gaseous state. So if you persist in denying that, Ted, you’re full of gas yourself. Etc. etc. etc.

Voilá—water isn’t wet.

You’re nodding your heads again. So you’ve met people like that too?

Of course you have. They’re everywhere. They take showers in the morning and don’t even need to towel off, because their water isn’t wet.

In all fairness to my critics, I don’t think they were deliberately trying to mislead. The fact that they were practicing these rhetorical tricks—which we call sophistry—was simply due to the fact that this is how all disagreements are handled nowadays.

I fear it’s so pervasive that no sphere of society is unaffected. Even married couples probably practice sophistry in their household arguments.

And this is sad, because this style of discourse makes everyone angrier and angrier. No one likes criticism, but how much worse when the attacks aren’t even focused on reality, but rely on the most blatant manipulation of words?

At that juncture, genuine communication becomes impossible. I’m not even referring to finding agreement or reaching a compromise—which don’t even figure as goals anymore. Just having an honest dialogue has disappeared, because both parties prefer a sophistic monologue.

Jonathan Lear:

Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life—whatever it is—is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem. …

We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It [is] as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.

ODE TO THE URGE

Urination is the major accomplishment of engineering
at least insofar as drainage is concerned.
Furthermore, to urinate is a pleasure.
What’s there to say? One takes a leak
saluting love and friends,
one spills himself long into the throat of the world
to remind himself we’re warm inside, and to stay tuned up.
All this is important
now that the world’s emitting disaster signals,
intoxicated hiccups.
Because it’s necessary, for pure love of life, to urinate
on the silver service,
on the seats of sports cars,
in swimming pools with underwater lights
worth easily 15 or 16 times more than their owners.
To urinate until our throats ache,
right down to the last drops of blood.
To urinate on those who see life as a waltz,
to scream at them, Long live the Cumbia, señores,
Everybody up to shake his ass,
until we shake off this mystery we are
and the fucked-up love of suffering it.
And long live the Jarabe Zapateado too,
because reality is in the back and to the right,
where you don’t go wearing a tux.
(Nobody’s yet gotten rid of TB by beating his chest.)
I’m pissing down from the manger of life:
I just want to be the greatest pisser in history,
Oh Mama, for the love of God, the greatest pisser in history.

Ricardo Castillo
(Translated from Spanish by Robert L. Jones)

Christian Wiman:

GOOD LORD THE LIGHT

Good morning misery,
goodbye belief,
good Lord the light
cutting across the lake
so long gone
to ice—

There is an under, always,
through which things still move, breathe,
and have their being,
quick coals and crimsons
no one need see
to see.

Good night knowledge,
goodbye beyond,
good God the winter
one must wander
one’s own soul
to be.