The following I wrote back in May, but didn't post right away, thinking they might want it at the Burnside Writer's Collective. If they did, they didn't tell me, so here 'tis:
First, because I keep getting these spam comments, I've switched to a login system, which only means you have to create a Blogger account to comment (I know, I know, the last thing you need is another online account).
Second, the occasion of my blogging is an article one of my professors sent me from the Chronicle of Higher Education (unfortunately, you can't read it unless you have a subscription--I can forward it to anyone who requests it). It looks at a handful of neuroscientists who are doing consciousness research that doesn't necessarily assume materialism. A quick primer: materialism is the view that everything that exists or occurs can be accounted for in terms of matter, energy, and other physics things, including the mind and anything like a soul or a will. It is not the same as empiricism, which is a method of asking questions where you only look at observable phenomenon, but the empirical sciences have been religiously committed to materialism since at least the late 19th century.
Some scientists interviewed in this piece are beginning to think that the (empirical) evidence of mind/consciousness research (much of it on Tibetan monks) suggets an immaterial aspect to the mind. Through the discipline of meditation, these monks seem to be able to change the physiological behavior of their brains. In other words, there seems to be something like a will at work, something immaterial causing material changes. Now, ancient and medieval philosophies assumed this for centuries; it was only with the Enlightenment turn to empiricism, and then materialism, that this had to be debated and rediscovered. That only a few people are willing to pursue what the writer playfully calls a "heretical" line of study has to do with the faith-nature of materialism, which by definition cannot accept immaterial causes even if apparently shown in the empirical evidence. Instead, what you get are long books by philosophers trying to argue the material causes of consciousness.
In literary studies, we oppose desire to the determinism of materialism, since some things people desire seem counterintuitive and/or are rarely accounted for in any satisfactory way by material explanations. But even this is a bit of a ruse, as many of the theorists of desire, as atheists, are basically materialists; the main difference is that they don't want to believe in the despair and emptiness that a strict materialism leads to--in other words, they have a religious desire.
Lately I've been realizing that the heresy of rejecting materialism seems closely connected with what Aristotle called the final cause. A final cause is "that-for-which" something is or is made: a chair for sitting, a leaf for exposing cells to sunlight. The problem, of course, is when you get to people. "What are people for?" Any answer, as I hope is obvious, will have something of a religious quality to it, for it suggests an ultimate purpose and thus implies certain things about how we should live. But all people, deep down, have some belief about this, about right and wrong, good and bad, for humans are religious creatures and everything we do reflects a value.
These scientists have decided that science is a human activity and therefore ought to acknowledge or select its values. They "have resolved that the pursuit of science, even basic research, must promote their own personal growth and the welfare of other people," as the writer puts it.
Again: "According to [Amherst physics professor] Mr. Zajonc, 'the knowledge-value divide is the idea that human beings can be factored out completely, that knowledge can stand on its own, decontextualized. That's not a position that can be defended.'"
And again: "According to Tibetan philosophy, [Ms. Harrington, of Harvard] says, 'the point of knowledge is to ultimately refine one's ethical stance in the world or act in the world to increase compassion and so on.'"
The last quote reminds us of the fact that this "insight" has been gleaned through study of Eastern relgion and philosophy, though, as I mentioned, there are ample roots in the history of Western civilization. This isn't really surprising, given the liberal West's identity crisis of the last forty-odd years, a crisis that began when a generation looked at its parents and decided they weren't just applying their principles poorly, but that their principles were poor to begin with and ought to be scrapped. Having gone too far by scrapping any coherent concept of principle (and hence character) altogether, it is interesting to see some of them returning to the idea that there may be something more worth pursuing.
That "something more" leads to questions of ultimate value, and in a properly pluralistic society that ought to mean that we can start talking about the relative merits of competing value systems, rather than continuing in the contemporary mode of skepticism toward value as such. This is where Christianity has always operated best--not in answering all the particular problems of how we should live together, but in pointing to the ultimate Good who should motivate our desire to live together at all.
04 November 2006
Scenes from the Simulacrum
I've been wanting to blog this for some time, so now, sans excuse, I will.
About a month or so ago my parents took us to a performance by a Johnny Cash tribute band called Train of Love. Now, I was skeptical of what this evening might entail, not least because the whole concept of a tribute band is a little strange when you think about it, but I appreciated my parents taking an interest in my interests, so we went.
The first moments of that evening did not necessarily work to allay my anxieties. The rest of the audience was largely senior citizens (my father quipping that it is rare he feels so young in a crowd), and the program showed a disturbing picture of a mulletted man in a sleeveless leather vest and had an essay about his career and his interest in Johnny Cash that put religious witness very near the heart of the whole event. Now, that last thing is not inherently negative, but, having northern city-boy notions about the South, I feared we could be in for some cheesy sentimentalizing and some form of slapdash sermon meant to convert the whole room. Oy...
The lights went down, the crowd hushed, and the opening notes of "Folsom Prison Blues" sounded from the speakers as the curtains parted on a spare stage with four older men spread out upon it. The middle man, in black, with his back to us. Suddenly turning, he stepped up to the mic and, in a familiar deep, resonant voice said, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
There was something chilling in how like this voice and the band's whole sound were to the recordings I knew. There were, naturally, subtle differences in rhythm and in some of the solo licks, differences significant to someone who appreciates Cash's instinct for the drama of timing, but otherwise there was an uncanny sense of time collapsing upon itself, the kind of thing which people attribute to "channeling" and of which they say it "was like being back in 19--."
It's not clear there's enough of a myth of Johnny Cash one might wish a tribute band to live up to, but of course we were witness to a particular version of his legacy. Between songs, "Johnny" would tell stories from his life and introduce the next song, and the band warped from the '60s to the '70s during intermission, then took a wormhole to the late '90s to perform "Hurt," before returning to the more familiar Cash repetoire. You knew it was just a version, a simulation, but there was something compelling about the thought that, "It might have been like this," some dream or fantasy of "being there" that had a unique pleasure.
This was notable toward the very end, when suddenly "Johnny" spoke in his real voice, described Cash's death, and introduced a tribute song he wrote in memoriam. There was a notable break, a shift, an adjustment of the mind as you were forced to go, "Oh yeah, we were just pretending; Cash was a real man, who lived and died. Now he is dead."
The long and short of it is, I still don't know what I think of tribute bands, but I understand better that they do offer a unique and pleasurable experience that needn't be shmaltzy or cheesy or even delusional. After all, they have a lot to live up to, performance-wise, to really give the audience what it wants, which means they have to be sufficiently talented musicians. But that doesn't mean I'm going to go get tickets to Mini K.I.S.S.
About a month or so ago my parents took us to a performance by a Johnny Cash tribute band called Train of Love. Now, I was skeptical of what this evening might entail, not least because the whole concept of a tribute band is a little strange when you think about it, but I appreciated my parents taking an interest in my interests, so we went.
The first moments of that evening did not necessarily work to allay my anxieties. The rest of the audience was largely senior citizens (my father quipping that it is rare he feels so young in a crowd), and the program showed a disturbing picture of a mulletted man in a sleeveless leather vest and had an essay about his career and his interest in Johnny Cash that put religious witness very near the heart of the whole event. Now, that last thing is not inherently negative, but, having northern city-boy notions about the South, I feared we could be in for some cheesy sentimentalizing and some form of slapdash sermon meant to convert the whole room. Oy...
The lights went down, the crowd hushed, and the opening notes of "Folsom Prison Blues" sounded from the speakers as the curtains parted on a spare stage with four older men spread out upon it. The middle man, in black, with his back to us. Suddenly turning, he stepped up to the mic and, in a familiar deep, resonant voice said, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
There was something chilling in how like this voice and the band's whole sound were to the recordings I knew. There were, naturally, subtle differences in rhythm and in some of the solo licks, differences significant to someone who appreciates Cash's instinct for the drama of timing, but otherwise there was an uncanny sense of time collapsing upon itself, the kind of thing which people attribute to "channeling" and of which they say it "was like being back in 19--."
It's not clear there's enough of a myth of Johnny Cash one might wish a tribute band to live up to, but of course we were witness to a particular version of his legacy. Between songs, "Johnny" would tell stories from his life and introduce the next song, and the band warped from the '60s to the '70s during intermission, then took a wormhole to the late '90s to perform "Hurt," before returning to the more familiar Cash repetoire. You knew it was just a version, a simulation, but there was something compelling about the thought that, "It might have been like this," some dream or fantasy of "being there" that had a unique pleasure.
This was notable toward the very end, when suddenly "Johnny" spoke in his real voice, described Cash's death, and introduced a tribute song he wrote in memoriam. There was a notable break, a shift, an adjustment of the mind as you were forced to go, "Oh yeah, we were just pretending; Cash was a real man, who lived and died. Now he is dead."
The long and short of it is, I still don't know what I think of tribute bands, but I understand better that they do offer a unique and pleasurable experience that needn't be shmaltzy or cheesy or even delusional. After all, they have a lot to live up to, performance-wise, to really give the audience what it wants, which means they have to be sufficiently talented musicians. But that doesn't mean I'm going to go get tickets to Mini K.I.S.S.
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