Objects for Property Developers

Mooncarrot Maybe?

  If we're bold enough to question Dewey's assumptions about how we think, an agile yet less aggressively ambitious mind will enter the meanings contained within the word Teleological. Here we encounter the nightmare of teleological ethics and that brotherhood of ass-holes defined by utilitarianism. This so called common sense of backwardness, which when confronted quickly reverts to wishing on the star of deontological ethics......

  "What!"

  The Ancient Greeks, comrade! Happiness is Duty over Outcomes which bled into the Kantian supposition of pretty little rules that turn angels into pedants because, you know, categorical imperative just felt right. And then of course we have to look at the incessant dribble from the crotches of the evolutionary biologists, those owners of a second home in Colorado about whom not much good can be said........

 "Stop! What's wrong with you?"

 First of all Dewey had a depressing enthusiasm for the world Europeans were building north of Mexico and South of Canada. It was the sort of enthusiastic rah-rah that makes the mistake of assuming The Impossible It is on our side. Prelude to New Jerusalem. Golden City on a Hill. Breakfast with Bozo, or whichever one was the monkey. In short we people became objects for Property Developers, there was only one way to be, either a winner or a loser, nothing else mattered because nothing else needed to matter...... 

 "What's the second of all?"

  Call it the Black Prince, The Edward of Woodstock, either a chivalrous knight and brilliant leader of men or a brutal fanatic, depending on whether you share a narrative with Spain, France or England. Edward died in 1376 of what could have been battle fatigue but which was diagnosed as An Inflammation of the Bowels, a dysentery that afflicted him while he was battling The Spaniards and followed him to his deathbed.

The errors in Dewey's end purpose.

There

  More likely, I could well be wrong, yet I'll continue to suggested that in one way or another, John Dewey's approach to the distinctions between work and play figure large in current theories of education. In his How We Think he does rather lay down the law when he touches on the idea that work and play have a connection. The difference is play has no definite order, the thinking wanders, it chases squirrels. Work directs thinking toward particular goals, a teleology is explained by its end purpose.

  Kafka was bored reckless by his work, his nights were spent in a rented room with his pens and paper, looking for moments of ultimate release. He wrote to a friend about the joy he felt when the words became sentences that made him feel. Dylan Thomas was the same. His Black Cat Night spoke, it connected. 

  The trouble with work, is the draw between the difference between what Arendt call work and labor. Like Dewey, work "was thinking toward a goal." As for labor, Arendt saw it as the means to insure the necessities, a task generations of slaves had provided for generations of property owners.

 When a person pins their destiny to a futures market funded by venture capitalists time to reappraise Dewey's  assumptions about "how we think?"

The R Word

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923)

  The few may disagree with my contented roll into the phrase "impossible It" as a substitute for the little diddums idea of a ruling singularity where everything makes sense under the watchful eye of a creator. This adoption of an  all knowing unknown is an aspect of mental surrender to supply and demand curves as substitutes for peer review is so heinous in my view it genuinely deserves an "R" word. 

 Here, I think it worth exploring a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as a 'euphemism treadmill.'  To do that I'll paraphrase the Special Education Guide: 

  The word - Retard - originates with the Latin retardare, meaning to slow down or hinder, as in "Retardare that Train!" In the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, bushy tailed psychologists introduced the concept of mental retardation as a neutral, clinical diagnostic term. It was actually created to replace older and perfectly respectable terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile. These words had originally been serious medical classifications but thanks to our beloved euphemism treadmill the word "retard" quickly warped into a childish, both puerile and cretinous, taunt. Over the decades, the word "retard" suffered the exact same fate reserved for idiot, moron and imbecile as cheerfully the unwashed adopted this refreshing medical term "retard" as a newly rehearsed, well designed and legitimized explanation of stupid or foolish or useless jackass.

 The Good Soldier Švejk, a character from Jaroslav Hašek's collection of satirical stories, had been categorized by the Austro-Hungarian  Empire's conscription service as a Congenital Idiot. Švejk, especially when he ran foul of a non-commissioned office or an officer took every opportunity to introduce himself as a Congenital Idiot. Coming as it did from high authority, Švejk, surrounded as he was by the incomprehensible world of a private soldier in Hašek's First World War, had no issue with the category Congenital Idiot. It was a title that suited him, he was proud of it, it was one of the few things that made sense to him.

 

 

  

Domestication, taint tanning and the so called "farmers."

Tick Trefoil

  Once upon a time, and this might be hard to believe, The  Impossible It, became math, adding, subtracting, the square on the hippopotamus cankle and on into a set of symbolic interactions which were the polar opposite to the symbolic interactions of language.

 The two faiths have clashed, number has retreated to the home of the white coats, and language has been dressed up, given a dead rat authenticity by Grammarians as theater went to die in what are loosely referred to as musicals, usually with dancing before dance became a glorified version of death by violence with plenty of blood as a simplistic visual alternative to the spilling of passion.

 Give me a surrey with a fringe on top just so long as the sheepdog dies in slow motion so we can all have a good cry  As for Civilization it all went wrong in the very late Stone Ages, early Bronze Ages when the materialists of agriculture successfully turned people, animals and plants into soulless objects.

  Go ahead, blame the boys, I will, thick as frogs on the new girl, it was their time to shine, as the ultimate chick magnet became twenty acres, a winter's worth of wheat, barley, maybe a goat to milk and a something dashing in metal that cut meat and killed other boys who tried to take your sourdough starter.

  For those interested this current homoerotic fashion for communal taint tanning found in the less attractive corners of what in the USA is still referred to as the GOP, may harken back to the Neolithic collapse of diversity in the human Y chromosome roughly six thousand years ago. 

  So what might the moral be?

  Don't blame the several million years of Paleolithic Nomadic Excellence for the decline of our species, blame the damage done to the sense of place granted us by the endless creaking of farmers.