Dogged by Dogma

February 10, 2008 — xanthippa

One thing that we humans do is ‘form communities’.  Extended families, neighbourhoods, professional associations, sports leagues, interest groups, church socials, nations, virtual debating site memberships – these are all communities formed by people through sharing common experiences.  It validates our sense of ourselves to be connected to other individuals and we feel most connected to those who have similar experiences and opinions as we do.  We even define our ‘self’ by the communities to which we belong.

 Each of these communities is unique in space, time and experience.  The ways their people interpret these common experiences affect the ‘facts’ of their ‘reality’:  the general assumptions about the world.  This is reflected in the way they use language, imbuing it with nuances and shades of meaning. 

 For example, the phrase ‘Three Kings’ may evoke a different image  in a Christian Bible study group than it might during a friendly card game.  Over time, some phrases which reflect certain key ‘common experiences’ turn into ‘presumptions’ which become more and more entrenched as they are repeated. 

 On and on, these become ‘unspoken truths’.  All new experiences are seen through this ‘truth’s’ perceptual prism.  And since the brain’s input has been filtered through this prism, the brain processes it that way – and concludes that the ‘truth’ is confirmed as ‘real’.  It is a circular cycle, a self-reinforcing process:  presumed ‘truth’ affects the way we perceive things, and our perceptions confirm this ‘truth’. 

 The ‘truths’ become so ‘common sense’, they are never questioned:  eventually, they become unquestionable.  Not because one would not dare to question them, at least, not at first.  Rather, it simply does not occur to anyone to question them. 

 They have now become dogma.

 And some people are happy to live in this way.  They are satisfied to be a member of their community, they are secure in their opinions and experiences, validated by their peers.  No problem there.

 What happens when, as is the nature of some of us, there comes along an individual who questions?  Who does not find anything to be ‘self-evident’?  Who is not able to believe – and more and more people today are daring to admit that they simply lack the ability to believe – and who dares to question the dogma and arrives at different conclusions?  Or even worse, what if this community encounters another community, one whose dogma is at odds with their own? 

 Human reactions have, in this regard, been very consistent.  We usually:
 
1. Silence the individual. 

2. Ridicule/denigrate or destroy the other community’s dogma. 

3. Find self definition and ‘specialness’ in our own community’s dogma. 

I plan to ‘jump around’ in my blog topics a little – having the attention span of a 2-year-old, I get distracted a little.  Yet, over the next little while, I will examine each of these very human reactions and post my musings on them.

Posted in human nature, philosophy, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , . 10 Comments »

What is ‘Fascism’?

February 6, 2008 — xanthippa

Thank you for indulging me in a purely fun philosophical musing on the nature of thought and existence…which, if I am not mistaken, established a consensus that my own existence is defined by ‘being annoying’ rather than by ‘thinking’ … implied feedback loop, and all – and don’t go saying that it’s an infinite loop…   :0)      

So, please, let me move now to other topics:  less abstract, but hopefully no less thought provoking….  I promise to stay as annoying as ever! 

Children say the ‘darndest’ things…and ask the toughest questions.  Except that I didn’t realize this one would be a ‘tough question’.   

After all, ‘everyone’ knows what ‘fascism’ is, right?  Jackboots and swastikas and Italian right wing dictators – images of WWII appear before our eyes and we know EXACTLY what ‘fascism’ is.  Except…when I got asked this question, I found verbalizing the answer was nowhere as easy as my mental picture made me think it would be. 

Italian fascism (under Mussolini) was a ‘right wing’ dictatorship.  So were the ‘fascist’ dictatorships that plagued South America.  So, many people think that ‘fascism’ is a synonym for a right-wing dictatorship.  Except that it isn’t…  Yes, we also think of Hitler’s Nazi Germany as being a ‘right wing dictatorship’ – except that … it wasn’t.   

Not exactly, anyway.  The word ‘Nazism’ is a short form of ‘national socialism’ – and that is decidedly a ‘left wing’ terminology.  And even a cursory look at the policies instituted in Nazi Germany will demonstrate that Hitler’s dictatorship was ‘left wing’ in practice, as well as in name.  He nationalized many industries, and established more of a ‘nanny state’ than constitute most of today’s western socialist’s wet dreams.  He even said his two idols were Lenin and Stalin…  So, how could Nacism also be ‘fascist’? 

Some reading and thinking shows that the definitions and descriptions vary, based on the time and social climate and political views of the commentator…yet there are always a few features that are common across the definitions/descriptions.  Now, here are my own little observations: 

1.         In its deepest core, fascism is the ‘dictatorship of the majority/privileged minorities’.   

It does not matter if the government is left-wing, right-wing, or whatever.  It invariably ‘clips the wings’ of its citizens, and makes them feel special for it!  How?  By either turning ‘wing-clipping’ into a matter of ‘national identity and pride’, and justifying it in the most reasonably-sounding terms, at first… and the ‘moral majority’ is either ‘impassioned’ or ‘guilted’ into supporting them…and tramples down anyone who does not ‘run with the flock’….  After all, if your wings have been clipped, you can either ‘run with the flock’ or ‘be trampled’ – because soaring high in the skies is no longer an option and the very desire for it will be vilified. 

As such, fascism elevates the rights of groups over the rights of individuals who make up these groups.  This feature is the unmistakable mark of ‘fascism’. 

2.         Fascism often gains control gradually and insidiously. 

Remember, even Hitler was voted into power…  So how can fascism gain control ‘gradually and insidiously’?  By becoming indispensable to the individual, to force its citizens to ‘go along’ with things…  It does this by appealing to a call for unity (be it racial, social, religious or ‘under attack by an outside enemy’) and by forcing the citizens to ‘buy-in’ into government sponsored social programs to such an invasive degree, the citizens will no longer be able to exist independently (either because these services become government monopolies, or because the citizens no longer know HOW to take care of themselves).   

Anybody see the ghost of a ‘nanny state’? 

These are my ever-humble (or is that ‘never-humble’?) opinions….though this ‘sketch’ seems rather ‘rough’, in need of refinement. 

So, please, how would YOU define fascism?

Posted in freedoms, philosophy, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

I am therefore I think….I think

February 3, 2008 — xanthippa

I think therefore I am…yeah, right! Go ahead and pull the other one!

For the life of me (please, excuse the expression), I cannot understand why people consider ‘I think therefore I am’ to be somehow ‘profound’, or ‘remarkable’, or – frankly – anything other than ludicrous and demonstrably unsupportable.

Since so many really smart people think it a ‘valid’ statement, I must be missing some salient point – not understanding something ‘deep’. Please, let me walk through my reasoning: perhaps someone will post an insightful comment which points out my error and just lead me to ‘reason’.

To begin with, there appear to me to be two interpretations of the meaning of this phrase. So, let us consider the literal one first:

I think therefore I am.

First, what is ‘I’? If one cannot define ‘I’, then how can it be determined what ‘I’ may, or may not, be doing?

‘Ah, but there ‘must’ be some ‘self-aware entity’ to be doing the thinking!’ says conventional thought. And I ask ‘Why?‘

What if our brain is akin to some sort of a weird ‘antenna’, which is picking up some background EM radiation….which then generates the biochemical reactions in the brain…which then generate other EM radiation we call ‘thinking’? How do we know this is not so? After all, the differences in the biological makeup of different brains might cause them to generate differing ‘thoughts’ in response to the same outside stimulus. What we consider ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ and ‘reacting’ might just be weird co-incidences, natural phenomena interacting in a random way….why should we assume anything different?

So, I have managed to convince myself that ‘thinking’ may not be a deliberate expression in and of itself, it might be a weird natural resonance of some kind….so there may not be any ‘independent I’… that self-awareness really may be an illusion, a ‘trick of light and shadows’.

What about ‘I am’ – generally understood to express one’s ‘existence’. What a nebulous concept! Some people say we are an indestructible energy, which animates our physical shell. Other people say we are our physical shell, which then generates an energy which animates it. Either way, without ‘thinking about it’, we cannot even ‘conceive of’ our physical shell, regardless of any ‘animation’!

So, we don’t really know even what ‘am’ is…without doing the ‘thinking’. In other words, the ‘thinking’ defines the ‘existing’ – they are both different ways of expressing one and the same concept.

So why stick a ‘therefore’ between them? It should be an equal sign… Saying one ‘implies’ the other is flawed logic…a circular argument at best.

So what about the ‘pragmatic’ interpretation? What if ‘I think therefore I am’ is a statement designed to prove the futility of what I had just attempted to do with the literal interpretation above? And then take it one step further, by saying ‘stop your navel-gazing and react to what you might, perhaps, be perceiving as life’?

Well, that is rather silly.

If we were to follow this chain of thought, we would find it impossible to define the ‘I’ in any meaningful way. A rock does not ‘think’, yet we react to one which appears to be hurled at us as if it truly existed. Even without thought. (I mean, the rock’s…)

But, some might say, it does not really exist in any way other than in your thoughts! It is your perception of the rock, the thought generated by your perception of it, which makes the rock ‘real’ enough to impact you (i.e. defines its existence). But, of course, that would not work for the original premise: it is not the rock’s ‘thoughts’ which make it ‘exist’, it is the ‘observer’s thought’ which ‘perceives’ the rock that makes it ‘exist’. ‘The rock only exists in your mind/thought.’ In other words, in order to prove its existence, the rock needs a reference point outside of itself.

This is congruent with mathematical logic: any self-consistent system, to be ‘proven’ real, requires a reference point outside of ‘itself’. Similarly, (and since we are going through the ‘pragmatic’ interpretation of the phrase) the ‘thinker’ would require a reference point outside of the ‘thinker’ in order to be proven to ‘be’. Yet, the statement hinges on the assertion that since we are only aware of our own ‘thoughts’, the ‘thinker’ cannot actually have a reference point outside of itself – without violating its own rules. (In other words, thinking defines the ‘thinkee’, not the thinker.)

I’m not sure if I am being clear, so let me go back to the ‘rock’: it is the act of being perceived by something separate from itself (like the observer’s mind) which ‘proves’ the rock’s existence. Similarly, the ‘thinker’ needs to be perceived by something separate from the ‘thinker’ to prove the ‘thinker’s’ existence….and ‘thinking’ is a property of the ‘thinker’, it is not separate from the ‘thinker’….which makes this a circular argument at best.

I think this is were I am supposed to say QED…..except that I am hoping I have committed some glaring error or oversight, and that someone will point it out to me. Soon!

Posted in philosophy. Tags: , , . 54 Comments »
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