Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Another FB Post -- on God, Nature, and the Universe

I prefer to believe in God rather than not, and I am careful to keep up with science and what careful and rigorous research has to tell us about nature and the universe. There is no incompatibility between the intuitive belief and faith in God and the expression of freedom in it -- the freedom to choose this way -- and attention also to the little bit that we as representatives each of our species can observe and know about our world. God is greater than ourselves. We should be humble but not without consciousness and as much perception and conscience as we may be able to experience.

As God and nature and the universe intended.

I shouldn't be so lazy with my blog (even with leukemia, a warm apartment, or a recent bottle of beer for an excuse)!

However, I find the Great Facebook Conversation stimulating, and it leads to the kind of articulation, a bit grandiose but not more or less so than many writers before me (and many to come) that i do.  I hate to lose  in the magnetic slipstreams of online chat threads what I type into compressed packets of thought.

The Facebook group venue: the Rationalist Society of Pakistan.

See me there (if they keep me around: I hope they will).

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About That "Action" in Dearborn, Michigan

This is a Facebook excerpt . . . my own post in response to videos depicting, seemingly, Muslim on Christian violence at an Arab community festival held recently in Dearborn, Michigan:

"ABC News and assorted blogs seem to suggest the Christians involved showed up to rumble, i.e., to disrupt the festival, to provoke violence, and they got it.

I'm accustomed to this with, literally, fire starters and stone throwers (and rocket launchers) who provoke Israelis, if not others, in order to create a mosaic of propaganda designed to inspire the escalation of their conflict.

I'm not buying it.

We don't burn books.

We don't set fires.

We don't show up at festivals armed with cameras and epithets (and pig's heads).

If the conservative right now wishes to turn stupid, it will leave me behind, and I hope a majority of others of more moderate and temperate mein that it has courted heavily and counted on heavily since the last election."

Reference

Dolak, Kevin.  "Christian Taunts and Violence Mar Arab Festival in Michigan".  ABC News, June 18, 2012.

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Answering Pamela Geller? Not Here. Calling.

Source on Atlas Shrugs: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/06/video-the-speech-the-la-jewish-federation-feared-you-would-hear-pamela-geller-at-zoa-western-divisio.html

A few posts down, I've posted a similarly great and progressive talk by Irshad Manji, a talk so similar in its underlying ambitions, ideals, and sentiments as to suggest we may have a flag problem, not a problem between humans in possession of the better inclinations of humans.

Somewhere in the above -- next viewing I'll do with a notebook -- Geller suggests the Islamic reformists (you know who you are) are the real revolutionaries in this fight.  With that, one may expect the possibility of a Muslim identity better anchored in the original monotheism -- if not so conscious of it or self-conscious about it -- and in secular modernity.  Some with whom I correspond know my sticking-point question: "Got a transition plan?" 

Attention -- popular, scholarly -- to human consciousness, self-consciousness, and good conscience may form the basis for that plan, for we mere creatures of God and nature may call ourselves anything we wish, but being good -- that includes enjoying the God-given gift of our human lives, not beating it up or, as "homicide bombers" do, stealing it from others, is where we should want to go. 

Together.

Realign.

Everyone.

As many as may be ready to move.

Now.

You don't even have to move your feet.

This is something heads and hearts were built to do.

With her speech before the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles cancelled this past Sunday, Geller has been having great fun with those who are genuinely Islamophobic and shutting their mouths -- and trying to keep ears from hers -- becuase they have been intimidated or twisted in that New Old Now Old Far Out Left way and, along the way, have come to try to pass their fear and maladapted ideation around their community. 

Again, Geller has posted the above to Atlas Shrugs as the speech the JFLA "feared you would hear".  

As talk goes, it's rich in direction and key points and way too much for me to highlight or amplify in this fast post.

So enjoy it as it is.  Let it resonate and do its work within and without.

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Facebook Excerpt -- A Brief, Private Q & A About Attitudes

Q: "I'm out to understand what exactly it is that drives people's preconceived notions of hate and prejudice. But I can't even get people to get started on explaining why?"

A: I'm starting to use the term "binary cascade" to suggest how children may acquire language (so: X is not Y but may be related to Z -- the guessing and reasoning eventually find the socially right response associated with the stability of each word / symbol acquired) and with core beliefs -- e.g., if Hutu, within a certain social period, it's okay to hate those Tutsi cockroaches, eh? -- and related behaviors that deeply embedded and essentially forgotten survive to generate a more elaborate rule structure, i.e., a social grammar.

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Imho, language acquisition involves a great deal more than the accretion of the grammatical or sense-making parts and rules of a culture's verbal technology.  It involves picking up signals and appropriately playing them back to surrounding others in a creative process that however wild produces normative effects.

I'm not familiar today with the literature on infant-to-early-childhood language acquisition, but we know a lot about in-group and teen language invention and customs and we have come to know a great deal about computer programming and heuristics.  It's not too far a stretch to suggest (in English) that the audio channeled "bru" has no first-encounter meaning but a few immediate possibilities -- brew, blew, blue -- that the learner will sort quickly guessing or pairing in context and discovering, perhaps in proximity to a suspended guess, approval.

None in our species can remember how they acquired speech in their first language.

How should any remember how they acquired their earliest beliefs and rules about others?

Those who find themselves reasoning with the seemingly unreasoning may be encountering the presence of "habits of mind" predicated on "binary cascades" of discerned, integrated, and then forgotten language rules than may then persist in guiding the formulation of new rules.

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Facebook and other social media provide both a platform for social speech as well as a laboratory for the observation of the same.

While there's much fun to be had across, say, the arts and entertainment spectrum of chatyping, the conflict arenas may inspire a good look into not only "What could they have been thinking?" but perhaps more important, "How are they thinking or expressing themselves, and how did that come about?"

What are the origins of the social rules in cognition, expression, and perception?

All subjects are fair for inquiry; not all subjects may fare as well from scrutiny, some strategies perhaps proving more thoughtless than others.

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Book Excerpt - Isak Dinesen on Islam and Feminine Beauty

When, on the farm, I was called upon to give judgment in matters between my Mohammedan people, I looked up rules and regulations in the manual of Mohammedan law, Minhaj et Taliban.  It is a thick and heavy, highly imposing book to have carried about with you, a surprising work as well to a North European mind in its taboos and recommendations, enlightening as to the Mohammadan view of life, infinitely detailed in its regulations on legal purity, prayer, fasting and distribution of alms and particularly upon woman and her position in the community of the Orthodox.  "The law," the classic states, "forbids a man to clothe himself in silk.  But a woman may wear clothes of silk and should do so whenever this be in all decency possible to her."  The Somali whom I knew did, however, wear silk, but Farah explained to me that they would do so only when outside their own country and in the service of other people--and surely my old valued friend Ali bin Salim of Mombassa, or the old Indian high priest who came to see me on the farm, wore but the finest and most delicate wools.  The book also lays down as law that a husband shall supply his wife not only with the necessary nourishment, lodgings and clothes, but that he shall also give her such and such luxuries, within his means, which are truly worthy of her and will make her truly value her husbaqnd.  "In the case, however," it adds, "of a woman of remarkable beauty, jurists may find themselves not entirely in accordance and will have to weigh the matter between them."  The very grave and somewhat pedantic book thus registers woman's beauty as an indisputable, juridical asset in existence.

Dinesen, Isak.  Shadows on the Grass.  30-31.  New York: Random House, 1961.

I've carried my library forward from childhood -- indeed, I have all of my Hardy Boys books around here -- and have most, possibly all, of the high school to college to graduate school complement plus the inheritance from father's smaller and perhaps ego-revealing collection with its small blue volumes of Shakespeare's plays and the cumbersome brown hardcovers of Durant's mighty strivings. 

With such an asset, something like a 19th Century gentleman's library, books may call to me from my own shelves, ensuring, as is the way of books, that they will be read when the time is right.

For mise en scene:the mansion (with a garden) inside a cabin inside an apartment in the countryside -- in fully voiced snoot, call it the northwest province of the Capital -- provides me my theater in the head.

As spring warms to summer, the cabin simile seems in force, and I am camped out in my own space: 'tis the season for sandals, light jeans, and Madras shirts.  For one or another of the many motives attending indulgence in books -- but trust me, with me, atmosphere counts! -- I managed to pull from the shelves Dinesen's book, Shadows on the Grass, an unread volume -- probably from my father's library as it has no penciled in price on the unadorned tan recto inside cover.

I thought I'd escape the Jihad, anti-Jihad, peace, and hate-peace crowds online.

Enough with religion!

I meant only to lay my leukemic fatigue-oscillating self on my bunk and travel a while in the tracks of an accomplished writer's memoir.

Hmm.

New Arrivals

It's not like I hadn't had other and perhaps more immediately enticing choices around the place.

From the perspective of my shelved books with their always visible spines and titles showing off (something else Kindle can't do), the odds of being chosen are a little better than 1:2,000 (because you know I'm not going to pick up, say, 501 French Verbs on a whim . . . but you never know), and down to brass tacks, I've new arrivals!

While Dinesen has me with her in Kenya, which seems to have a whole different relationship with Somalia today, Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie waits to the side.  Also: the final pages of On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks (I borrowed a copy from the county library, and then purchased one for my own) and, for starting fresh, Spacks' annotated edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (no need to guess at the effects of reading On Rereading on that purchase). 

What awaits?

Among still recent arrivals:

Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History.

Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness -- this is another library-starter and owner-ender.

Marvin Harris's The Rise of Anthropological Theory.

James Carroll's Constantine's Sword.

Hrederick Smith's The Russians.

Maziar Bahari's Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival.

From the last days of Borders: Dominic Tierney's How We Fight; Shannon D. Beebe and Mary Kaloor's The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace; and Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time.

That's not a complete list of unread volumes acquired within the past year or so, but from it, and the bit of extra data transmitted, on might see the many collisions involved in career focus, cyber-realspace relationships, intellectual motives, and so on.  Given the conditions of my constraints -- or I would not be typing from an apartment -- and the so many things to do (there will be whole sets of prints from my Antietam photography series and I'm still singing Tuesday nights down at the Georgia Boy Cafe on the south side of town), to read, and accomplish, one might also understand the irrestable urge (proven) to pull an old volume from a shelf, have the windows open to the rain, a Casablanca fan spinning slowly in the dining room, and to cast away into Kenya on Dinesen's prose and there encounter, first thing, the pleasant surprise of her comment on Islam in Somalia.

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FB Excerpt - A Note on Remapping Normative Values

Google Translator renders the third line of the YouTube description as: "Saudi man insults the dignity of the expatriate Bangladeshis and ask him to kiss his hands and feet to turn the force but in God."

Tarek Fatah posted the above to his Facebook wall.  I had two responses to it, one noting the DSM IV description associated with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  As mentioned elsewhere in my related section, "Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy", one should not transpose work developed to serve and study the life of the mind of the individual and many related disorders to political or social science contexts without many disclaimers, modifications, and questions.  Nonetheless, from the western context, the display of self-aggrandizement in a context involving a demonstration of dominance and submission in human behavior carries with it evidence of a today out-of-bounds narcissism, something most, worldwide, irrespective of location, race, and religion, not only don't admire but more actively reject and revile.

Here is the text of my second post on that same thread:

Just to chime: 1) I agree the example of one or a few should not be made emblemmatic of a larger culture without greater cognizance of the whole of that culture.  2) Cultures, which may be delineated by language x customs x attitudes (and other social norms) may be viewed only at this junction in time as having evolved in comparative isolation in respose to the many exigencies posed by biology (not race -- species wide), geophysical environmental demands, and mind, which may include many accidents involving the invention of language and language concepts.  That may included a preferred psychology transmitted culturally -- not biologically -- through language from one generation to the next.

For grounding, I may recommend two books out of left field -- actually: linguistics: Dan Everett's _Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes_ and _Language: The Cutlural Tool_.

My view of the topic-starting video is that it may be representative of cultural ends once more isolated from a wide and varied audience.  Why not exercise power in service to one's own greatness, grandeur, potency, etc.?  Who's judging?  What consequence is there to come of hurting someone else, apart from the experience of greater obedience to one's own self? 

The natural universality of any cultural ethos -- I'll gladly include mine -- may be questionable but given some choice between compassion, empathy, and self-containment (!) as cultural values and the want of power over others (whether they like it or not) and the uncontained expression of related impulses, the good in humanity may drift toward the better choice.

Today, that's a global choice.  Your choice.  Our choice.  Most here seem to have found the behavior illustrated by the video repugant.  A good sign, I'd say.

It is a mixed fortune for me that the Greater Conversation to which I contribute via Facebook provides both inspiration and material for my blog.  For the entertainment and its distraction, I no longer know how or when I will get around to more primary reporting, if ever, and a commentary closer to "breaking news."

Then again, perhaps those journalistic ideals are not so important in light of whatever signal I might be able to send and sustain in the world at this time.

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Excerpt on the Nature of Judgment- from Spack's _On Rereading_

"If we laugh at Miss Bates, we of course have done nothing wrong.  We are not on the scene; we do not insult anybody.  But we have briefly let amusement trump judgment, failing to make the kind of discrimination that Austen advocates and by subtle plot intricacies inculcates.  Rereading, we are more likely to realize that even a smile involves us imaginatively in Emma's error.  A crucial episode in Emma's moral education thus becomes an element in ours--and our education will continue through many rereadings.  It is an education, one might say, in the substance of civilization: the feelings and attitudes necessary to support the behavior of civilized human beings, who avoid the barbarity of willfully hurting others."

Spacks, Patricia Meyer.  On Rereading.  P. 62.  Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

The multiple dimensions encountered in literary educations and experiences include the detection, definition, and internalization of social norms and manners.  Such now strikes me as a thing dearly obtained.

Start off the web, for one thing, with leisured time, a peaceful room, a body content with its health and neutral state, and then the book, whichever one whose author, cover, and cachet have from the library shelf spoken to the reader.

Calls may be returned.

E-mail can wait.

Turn a page.

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