Amos, Daniel and Zarathustra

Russian Olve

 Let's spend a couple of months on a critique of the difference between feeling and comprehending meaning by addressing this question : "Is Rock and Roll an example of the difference between feeling and comprehending meaning?" 

 To do this we should begin by trying to pinpoint the much abused and possibly pointless meanings in the words Subjective and Objective. Why do I say 'possibly pointless' because one of the great tragedies of the human is that if it had to objectively process every single piece of sensory data it received before acting, our ancestors would have been eaten while calculating the velocity of a predator.

 This simple and barbaric reality resulted in the highly strung instrument we developed to manage our world producing what in the 1970's became Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's understanding of what they decided to call Heuristics. This word with its origin in the Greek for "to find" or "to discover" - as in Coumbus "finding America" - is a word that shares a root with "Eureka"and it fundamentally changed how we view human rationality.

 These two aggravating personAmos and Daniel, described how people don't think like flawless, objective computers. Instead, we rely on a cluster of hardwired heuristics, short cuts, to navigate a world where there is a lion behind every blade of grass and desease carrying tic behind every tree.

  Classically, and I hate having to say this, Tversky and Kahneman were behavioural economists. They challenged Utility Theory, one of them got Nobel Prize for something, the other one died before he got his Nobel Prize, and all in all a cold chill ran down the spines of all sentient creatures until, like typical economists, they started exchanging insults and quarrelling.

 But out of their turpitude into the frontal cortex came this understanding of Heursistics, the brains capacity to engage in short cuts, an understanding that had been existent for thousands of years in the recorded history of our species, since Zarathustra proposed a single source of behavior preferences in the wisdom of Ahuru Mazda.

 

Existenialism's Return : Final Lessons from the Carmelite Hermits.

Glad

 You can see and often feel peer pressure determining what a moral act is. 

 Here's another look at Kant's understanding of Morality. It was a structure in our minds which he argued was a part of the way we experienced the world : Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. In most repects Kant's sentence avoids a list of dos and don'ts chipped into stone tablets by a grateful Moses.

 "What happens when your desires, your career, or your survival are in direct conflict with what you think is right."

 "The brainstem registers this moral tension as physical danger, a cheetah in the grass. And what does the organism do when threatened? It flees. We don't just run with our legs, we run with our minds. We use intellectual concepts to execute a psychogenic flight away from the terrifying responsibility of our own freedom."

 Psychogenic means it has an origin in the mind. Those first Carmelite Hermits used their minds to escape the trauma of battle which revealed a reality the rosy tints of society hadn't been prepared for.

 "When you look past the stained glass and medieval romance, the origin of the Carmelite hermits on Mount Carmel in the late 12th century is perhaps the most explicit, large-scale manifestation of psychogenic flight - a collective, desperate retreat to an interstitial haven - in human history. They were the original 'back row' trying to survive the catastrophic moral wreckage of the Crusades."

 The young men who took the cross in Europe - the sons of small baronies, the blacksmiths, the weavers - to Saracen controlled Palestine were fed a massive, top-down propaganda myth by the front-row bishops. They were promised an adventure of pure, chivalric light. They were told that slaughtering the infidel was a holy, non-negotiable duty that would wash away their sins. They left their green valleys with their eyelids raised high, marching to a corporate jingle about glory.

 When the fighting finally petered out or the armies dissolved, some of these men—specifically the ones who would become the first Carmelites—did not go home to their villages. They couldn't. You cannot take a brainstem that has been seared by that level of slaughterhouse reality and just drop it back into the village tavern or the manor house. The identity of the 'Chivalric Knight' or the 'Pious Soldier' was dead.

 "Are you saying they executed a total psychogenic flight. They deserted the social ledger entirely?"

 "Yes."

 "Not much has changed!"

 "We got shops with lots of stuff in them and we still got a back-row."

The Somatic and A Tick Tock of Freedom

A Suspicious Version of Kant

 Scaer and Levine two minds from the "wellness" communites of Colorado, along with a bunch of other Western Beatniks, have offered us the idea that "stillness" is a radical act of flesh refusing to be treated as a managed unit. The argument offers the proposition that the body experiences flight as a direct order. It's a conversation that falls under the subheading "Somatic Experience, real or unreal."

 "Does the body feel?"

 "Dearest Mother. Out here on the Eastern Front we are doing terrible things, but we are doing it for the fatherland."

 "A Moral Injury?"

 "PTSD."

 "A Fugue State."

 "Why don't you just run away?"

 Let's go back to Kant and look at his thoughts on Morals. Kant’s Categorical Imperative says: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Kant saw this as a structure in the brain. It demands that you stand on the rough ground, look a choice in the eye, and ask: "If everyone did this, would the world collapse?"

 Standing on that rough ground can be incredibly painful when in uniform hunting down the unwanted on the Eastern Front and killing them. To say no introduces massive, burning cognitive friction when everyone else is cheering. It's a freedom few of us relish.

 My own view goes this way. "There is a good  act and bad act. But we never know what is a good act and what is a bad act." Good and bad is something we learn, a pat on the back teaches us. We run from bad and we fight for good. When you get on a Greyhound Bus to disappear from your old world to find a new life under a bed with an octopus, that's your body taking leave of your mind because your body feels danger but your brain wants a private yacht and an apartment building on Mars so it isn't listening.