post—post

if you had a megaphone, you said, and all the people who are lost were gathered together, what would you say to them?

well, i say, stroking my imaginary beard, i understand why you ask the question but i don't believe in the usefulness of hypotheticals. if you won the lottery what would you do with the money, that kind of thing. it's a good one for a conversation after christmas dinner with your mother (my mother loves this question and she always starts with, first i would pay off the mortgage — she's 85 and a half and she still hasn't paid off her mortgage! how cruel is capitalism? — and then i would give half of the rest of the money to you x) but it's not so useful when you're talking about the human condition and the meaning of life and the suffering of the world.

for me the point about talking with people is that it needs to be a dialogue, a conversation between people who trust and respect each other, and it requires a willingness to listen. you are only going to be prepared to listen to someone you trust and respect and you are only going to be prepared to talk about things that really matter to you with someone you trust and respect.

the utter stupidity and uselessness of a 'debate' is mind boggling. nothing that i could say to people whose trust and respect i don't have would be of any use to them because they would all hear something different and interpret what i say in their own way, because that's how language works.

to have a meaningful conversation with a small group of people who are gathered together for a reason is certainly possible and what is also possible there, if you gather with that group of people on a regular basis, is for respect and trust and friendship and love/care (agape) to develop between those people.

but to go into depth you need to talk with each person one to one, on a regular basis over a number of years — which is time consuming and impractical.

but the point of your question is something like, what would you ask everyone to consider, to think about and i'm glad you asked that because i've been thinking about this for half a century.

so ok i will play your game.

you'd have to be some kind of weird megalomaniac (or malignant narcissist) to entertain this but can i change it slightly and say, if all the humans in the world were gathered together and i had a megaphone and i could speak a language that they could all understand, what i would i say?

there would two things :

first i would ask : are you a believer in, or agnostic about — or even just interested in — the possibility of there being a mystery — the mystery at the heart and soul of the universe (or of the ten to the power of five hundred universes and the eleven dimensions) what the beat poet alan ginsberg called 'the starry dynamo'.

and i ask that because it is as if the people in the world can be divided into two groups : those that say yes to that question and those that say, no definitely not. (if you say, i don't know you can join in with the yes group :)

and then of course there are the people who don't have enough to eat and/or who are sick and live in places where there are no adequate medical facilities and/or they are in pain and you might say, if you are a humanist or a person is committed to helping those people, quit all this talking and let's help these people and eradicate the injustices in the world first and you'd have a good point.

but this is hypothetical is it not?

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so all the people who say no to that, well they can all go back to what they were doing since we have nothing to say to each other which is of any use because the next question i would ask is if you think/feel/believe you are in some way connected to this mystery or whether you believe or hope that it is possible to experience a connection with this mystery.

and now it becomes interesting because the ones that have a specific religious affiliation, all of whom are still with us in this yes/maybe group, will answer yes to this question and they will have specific ideas or a narrative about this connection and they will have a name for this mystery, which may be allah or god or something else, and they are fine these people, they don't need me and they don't need to hear what i've got to say. i learned this working in a cancer hospital as a spiritual carer. they will talk to their imam or priest or rabbi and they will hear what they they want or need to hear from them, i.e. allah is great and/or god will (or will not) forgive your sins provided you do this that or the other thing.

so all those people can go over there and sit in the shade under those trees and talk together. that's great. i don't have an issue with what they do or do not believe — and if the reverse is also true, then we can all be friends, and please, if you are interested in joining in with the conversations in our group at any time, you are most welcome.

the group that remains are the people i am interested in talking with, but not through a megaphone.

these are the people who have an inkling of this mystery but who cannot name it (and perhaps do not want to name in case naming it destroys it somehow) but they are interested in the possibility of having some kind of connection with this mystery.

they are different to the people who have gone back to what they were doing before, call them the naysayers if you will,

somehow they know, and they know this is not rational or logical, it is not science, it cannot be proven, there is no evidence for it — although we might point to this grain of sand and say, well maybe the fact that there are fifty million million million atoms in this one grain of sand and that each of those atoms is like a little universe consisting of electrons and protons and subatomic particles and so on and on, maybe that's evidence — or the fact that there may well be as many galaxies and stars in the cosmos as there are atoms in this single grain of sand maybe that's evidence — but this is all highly speculative, you and i don't really know anything about this mystery other than we somehow know it's there, or that there is Something.

these of people i would like to think of as postatheists or post(a)theists.

we agree that there is some kind of mystery, something deeply mysterious about being, about existence — and that it may be possible to feel or to somehow experience a connection with this mystery and we are interested in having a conversation about this with each other.

we are not interested in a debate about whether or not god exists and which way of believing in a god or gods is the best way.

An article by Robert Griffiths from Philosophy Now about the limits of humanism and its relation to theism, which concludes :

Humanists are not much interested in the moral status of sentient non-humans (let alone the moral status of the wider natural world). Norman, for example, is the author of a document entitled ‘Being Good’, available on the website of the British Humanist Association. This document is mostly concerned with how it is possible for a human being to lead a meaningful life once they have abandoned religious belief. It is essentially a sort of therapeutic guide for disabused or disappointed theists (as are most humanist texts). Reflecting contemporary humanism as a whole, it is anthropocentric in a quite bizarre way, as if decades of discussion of the possibility that both sentient non-humans and non-sentient natural things might have moral value has never occurred. There is a curiously unbalanced concern with the apparent effects that offloading a belief in God will have on an individual human, and a need to show that one could nevertheless have a meaningful life. There is no mention at all of how being good touches on animal rights, and barely any discussion of the environment.

To this extent, humanism, which issues from, and spends a great deal of its time going over, a theist-non-theist debate that’s largely eighteenth century in character, is out of touch with the moral concerns of younger generations today. Many of the latter are entirely uninterested in spending time refuting belief in God. As apatheists, they have moved on; their concerns are now for the planet and for all sentient beings. Humanist ethics cannot really talk to these people, and it does not really try. Even as their numbers grow, one imagines that in time humanism must fall away along with the religious beliefs it is obsessed with repudiating, but with which it is too concerned to be sufficiently alert to contemporary issues of real moral importance.

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#posthuman #posttheist

William E. Connolly (The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(3) 399–412) thinks posthumanism and antihumanism most unfortunate titles for a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics.

He grasps the motivation behind those terms: exclusive humanism, secularism, omnipotent notions of divinity and scientism have often fostered cramped visions of culture, nature and the subtle imbrications between them. But many of us share such critiques of humanism and cultural internalism while seeking to emphasise care for the fragile condition of the human estate in its multiple entanglements with state politics, regional practices and nonhuman processes. Any title you pick is potentially susceptible to misrepresentation, as we have seen many times before. But those two titles almost invite it.

I agree about 'antihumanism' but I don't understand why he conflates the two. Posthumanism is not antihumanism, quite the contrary. What I like about posthumanism is exactly that it is not anti “care for the fragile condition of the human estate” and if it does invite misrepresentation, so be it. What doesn't? Connolly prefers speculative realism (which is the term Karen Barad proposes) and immanent naturalism ... but the ‘new materialism’ is acceptable, too, though I rather doubt whether it alone can dispose of the baggage many theists, dualists and traditional humanists insist upon heaping onto the terms ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’.

As if a single word, or even two, could dispose of all that baggage. But in any case 'the Fragility of Things' is a wonderful title, and there is a lot of good stuff in this article. I also love the idea of “a cosmos composed of innumerable, interacting open systems with differential capacities of self-organization set on different scales of time, agency, creativity, viscosity, and speed”(1) even if Alexander R.Galloway is not interested in it. How could you not be?!

(I agree about the uninterestingness of Jordan Wolfson though.)

(1) This is a quote from Connelly's book of the same name, not from this article.

#posthumanist

arnon grunberg (vk 19-5-20) :

Ik betoogde wederom dat secularisering vooral schijn was; allerlei ideologieën en theorieën hadden religieuze kenmerken, ook al kwamen God en de Messias er niet in voor. Wie bijvoorbeeld met anti-vaccineerders praat, stuit op onbewijsbare dogma’s, die met onverholen agressie worden verdedigd. Er zijn nog geen kerken waar dergelijke gelovigen samenkomen, wel virtuele gemeenschappen, waar men het eigen gelijk bevestigd ziet. Overigens verraadt agressie vrijwel altijd onzekerheid over het eigen standpunt.

#postatheist #nederlands

Sonny Rollins in the NYT :

When I go to the museum and I look at a piece of art, I’m transported. I don’t know how, or where, but I know that it’s not a part of the material world. It’s beyond modern culture’s political, technological soul. We’re not here to live forever. Humans and materialism die. But there’s no dying in art.

But then again, Mr.Rollins believes in reincarnation, so.

#postdeath #postart