But we are not satisfied with this mortal kind of knowing. We want to know as God knows: definitely, perfectly. Which is why we keep raising up these systems of knowledge…So I wrote yesterday, but today I’m not so sure. True, there is a longing for superhuman certainty; and the progressivist pleasure in overcoming the past, in marching forward into the future, what Milan Kundera called the Kitsch of the Great March; and beneath all this an innate human greed, a wyrmish longing to sit on a hoard treasure.
But, on the other hand, there is something viscerally unpleasant in the feeling that we have the world all figured out. It is a crushing thought, and not from any elevated intellectual standpoint but from a very simple human one. It drains the very color out of life. So the question is not answered and must be asked more plainly: why do we put up with these systems of knowledge with their pretenses of absoluteness—and not only put up with them but swallow them greedily down and beg for more? When the decree comes down from on high that there’s no such thing as God or magic, that art and emotion are only chemical processes, that nothing matters, we do not merely groan and sadly accept our doom. No, we gleefully repeat it to everyone we meet. We heroically devote ourselves to it, we laugh at anyone dreamy-eyed enough to doubt it and revile their ignorance and delusion. Yes, we lash ourselves and one another for all the world like people who like to be whipped.
Until an honest observer must begin to doubt that there ever really was a decree from on high. Until an honest observer begins to think that the decrees are really generated down here below, and the monolith up on the hill (the cathedral, the university) is only a sort of show-tyrant, a figure onto which we project our collective compulsion to tyrannize and flagellate ourselves.
3 comments:
I have a poetry anthology titled Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics. Even though the poems in it are, I find, mostly pretty good, it's hard to get over the epigraph that reads, in part: "As electronic data-processing and coding pervade more and more of the economics and social order of our lives, the mathematical illiterate will find himself cut off. A new hierarchy of menial service and stunted opportunity may develop among those whose resources continue to be purely verbal. There may be 'word-helots.'"
So: what a bizarrely threatening statement to have in the front of a book of poetry, of all things! Technocracy seems like the obvious culprit here — as in, if it weren't for technocracy, the editor would never countenance anything like this — but, I'm wondering whether the quote itself can point to another reason why technocracy's so appealing: elitism. I don't see it so much as self-flagellation, I mean to say, as the opportunity to push oneself out of the class of "menial service and stunted opportunity", which is to be accomplished by pushing others into it. It's the old "I'm smarter than you because I can detect the world is awful" rag, I'm saying, which, being that I sometimes try to translate every lifestyle preference into a code of music, I also associate with Pink Floyd.
I mean: I also think that this other-flagellation eventually does come back to bite the technocrat, because it's not like any triumph of technocracy would keep away for good the urge to select a subset of society to push down; but, I guess I'm at least skeptical of the idea that it's a direct self-flagellatory impulse that's responsible. Although — maybe this is just the explanation that accords the best with my own psychology...?
- LD
That is a crazy thing to have as an epigraph on a book of poetry! Is it meant ironically? What gives?
I'll respond to the rest with a post.
I don’t think it’s meant ironically, even. This is the second of two epigraphs to the book. Here’s the first: “Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world; and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.” While of course I disagree with this, I’d say that at least it’s an appropriate epigraph. Then the gloves come off....
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