Sunday, June 29, 2014

Leviathan

Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a commonwealth, or state, (in Latin civitas) which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The magistrates, and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members, are the strength; salus populi (the peoples safety) its business; counselors, by whom all things needful for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the “let us make man,” pronounced by God in the creation.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Chapter 1
If Leviathan, the giant machinery of society, is to continue its great strides of progress, the individual sentient being can be no more than a gear in its mechanisms. If the individual sentient being has a dignity too great to be a means to an end, then it makes no sense for it to play its role in Leviathan, nor ask adjacent gears to play theirs. Leviathan has now succeeded in creating an artificial cell. “There’s not a single aspect of human life,” Craig Venter tells us, “that doesn’t have the potential to be totally transformed” by the technologies of the future. Leviathan has succeeded in completely absorbing the flesh and minds of mankind, and all other parts of nature, into its gears, leaving nothing outside. To fight against Leviathan is hopeless. To try to accomplish something outside of its massive spinning gears is hopeless. And to work within them is to treat sentient beings as a means to an end. What choice does that leave?

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Everyone has heard those fables and legends from the formative years of all civilizations which ascribe to music powers far greater than those of any mere art: the capacity to control men and nations. These accounts make of music a kind of secret regent, or a lawbook for men and their governments, From the most ancient days of China to the myths of the Greeks we find the concept of an ideal, heavenly life for men under the hegemony of music.
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943), R. and C. Winston, trans. (1969), p. 17
Now that music, in keeping with the ideals of democracy, is under control of the marketplace, and seeks to entertain rather than to educate, to be ruled rather than to rule, it has, like all the arts that once claimed aristocratic status for themselves, forsaken its role as leader of men and nations and adopted a meek, subservient role. Now, instead of men leading a heavenly life under the hegemony of beautiful music, music leads a stunted, crippled existence under the hegemony of men.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

The intellectual immune system

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon then from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins the journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of the crowd, and by choosing knowledge over veils of ignorance.
Henri Bergson, On Intuition vs. Intellect (1907)
Fast food peddlers are parasites who use the instinctual human love of greasy food to leech our money, indifferent to the fate of their hosts. In my view, all forms of pop culture are like this. They use our instinctual desire to be entertained to leech precious attention, the life-blood of intellectual life, making the host intellectually anemic in the process. Books are better at educating us because they are worse at entertaining us. They are more difficult, so we have to put more into them, and therefore get more out of them. Should it be any surprise that the intellect degenerates when the immune system that keeps parasites at bay has become senescent?

Monday, June 9, 2014

The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations … often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the situation.
Georg Simmel, “Domination,” On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), p. 110
I don't mind being ruled by a man, if he is a good man. I don't mind being ruled by a principle, if it is a true principle. But at present we are ruled by spineless men who bow to markets and majorities. At present we are ruled by a principle which is the negation of principles—the principle that makes the unprincipled whims of unprincipled men, as expressed in polls and markets, the foremost arbiter of the goodness of our thoughts and actions.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Technology seems like a pristine manifestation of scientific rationality, until we look at it more closely. Then we see that it depends not only on the pristine pursuit of scientific truth, but also on the still rationally unjustified institution of private property. The discrepancy becomes more readily apparent when we look at real life engineers, who, despite our pristine rationality at work, use the resources we obtain from our enterprises no more rationally than any other professionals, squandering them on monuments to our egos while other human beings suffer from lack of food, shelter and education.

Friday, June 6, 2014

Is it moral to live in luxury while other human beings suffer?

The question, “Is it moral to live in luxury while other human beings suffer?” must already have been answered in the affirmative. It is, after all, inconceivable, that the leaders of my society could be immoral. In case I begin to have doubts, a panoply of advertising for luxury goods and services reminds me hundreds of times each day that the question is already settled. The tiny voice in the back of my mind reminding me that repeated assertion does not amount to proof is easily drowned out in the cacophony of repeated assertion, so that repeated assertion, in effect, amounts to proof.