28.1.03

VVV Normally I like Fareed Zakaria. But his latest Newsweek column verges on the inane. It boils down to this: "You know, some people have some pretty pessimistic scenarios about the consequences of going to war. But what if we thought of all the great things that could come of it? I like thinking about it that way much better." You'd think someone who comments on politics for a living would be able to offer his expert opinion on pesky little things like, say, which outcomes are more likely.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:06 -- link --

27.1.03

VVV

Vandals Destroy, Deface Badlands Pictographs Using charcoal, someone drew over several pictographs in Dry Canyon in the Badlands east of Bend, defacing about five and destroying at least one of the irreplaceable images. "Within the canyon, the vandal or vandals built a fire pit that stretches about 4 feet across. The fire charred the sides and top of a hollowed rock that is about 6 feet tall. "Someone used charcoal to write "truth," "light," and "healing" on the walls. The Taoist yin-yang symbol representing balance was also drawn. A vandal also used the charcoal to trace the outline of one pictograph. - via WitchVox

This article focuses on the archaeological value of the pictographs, which is the value felt by both the government and the local Native American organization, which claims no cultural or spiritual connection to the art (political connection -- the use of the pictographs as an arena for contesting Native rights issues -- is not addressed and cannot be ruled out, though the apparent confluence of interests between the Natives and the government suggests that such conflict is not great at present). But Wren Walker, in her latest WitchVox column, takes a different approach -- the issue of damaging the sacred.

The question that immediately arises is, how do we know what is sacred and what is not? And how do we know what conduct is appropriate for a sacred place? As a cautionary tale, consider the role of rock art in Aboriginal Australian religion. For Aborigines it was often "painting" the verb, not "painting" the noun, that was sacred -- the significance was in the act of creating the picture, applying the paint to the rock, not in the finished form of the art. So in a sense the vandals here could have been more in the spirit of the original painters of the Dry Canyon pictographs than the government officials, stuck in their view of archaeological preservation value and "sacred means do not touch" concepts, are.

Wren's religion gives her an easy answer -- getting in touch with the spiritual power of the place. But for those of us who are not pagan, the issue is more difficult. I can't access the truth on a spiritual level, and secular methods like history and ethnography are often inconclusive, especially for older sites. More problematic, the long history of migration and cultural change experienced by humans calls into question the appropriateness of imagining that there is one eternal indigenous claim to defining a place, one culture able to define the sacredness of a place forever. (Though many native people have adopted this claim of ultimate indigenousness as a cultural and political strategy. This takes us into another discussion of situated truth-claims and feminist standpoint epistemology, which I'll leave for another day)

Finally, there is the question of where sacredness comes from. Wren treats it as an inherent property of a place or object, but my own more skeptical and existential view would say that sacredness is a quality attributed to a site. Just as archaeological value is based on what a site can do for people in teaching them about history, so sacredness is based on what a site can do for people religiously.

So does that mean that people like Wren are misguided in wanting to respect the sacred values of religions whose practicioners are long gone, and hence unable to derive benefit from their form of sacred value? Not precisely. Because Wren's belief in the importance of respecting indigenous sacrality makes her a valuer of those sacred values. This seems to be a quintessential postmodern issue, incorporating incommensurable paradigms that can be contested in the arena of power but never resolved by any objective standard.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:42 -- link --

VVV Thomas Kuhn's ideas of paradigms and scientific revolutions are among the most popular concepts in modern philosophy of science. Geographers have read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions hoping to find either an explanation of our discipline's history or a roadmap for our future. And inevitably, many -- particularly those working from secondary sources (an inexplicable phenomenon, as Kuhn is remarkably readable) -- have used those ideas in ways that differ from each other and from Kuhn's usage. This misinterpretation can be pervasive, according to some self-appointed Kuhn authorities. So far, this seems like a simple problem. One need only compare geographer's use of "paradigm" to Kuhn's, checking for the fit.

The problem is that Kuhn's ideas are not isolated. The concept of paradigm as he used it has diffused within academia (and the wider society) far beyond direct citations of his theories. And to complicate matters, the general sense of "paradigm" was in the public domain long before Kuhn appropriated the word to apply to a very specific philosophical concept. So it becomes difficult to tell where "paradigm" indicates application of Kuhn's ideas, and where it indicates the author's reworking of a more general idea -- perhaps with a bit of insiration from Kuhn's followers.

This is especially an issue in the social sciences for two reasons. First is the fact that the social sciences employ public-domain concepts and words more so than the natural sciences. The history and extra-academic usage that come with these ideas means that it's harder to pin down what a Foucauldian means by "power" than it is to determine what a chemist means by "methyl isocyanate." Connected to this is the fact that the social sciences (with the possible exception of economics) lack a clear hegemonic paradigm in the strict Kuhnian sense -- an analogue to Newtonian physics, for example. This means it's harder to police the definition of words.

This kind of thing works just fine in the humanities. Humanistic endeavours are well-equipped to deal with shifting fields of meaning, where a common vocabulary links together as many conceptions as there are works of art. In fact, this playing with semantic relationships and confounding expectations is encouraged. So maybe from some humanistic perspectives in the social sciences, it's not a problem at all.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:02 -- link --

26.1.03

VVV Hauskaa Australian Päivää!

(Yes, I'm wishing you Happy Australia Day in Finnish. Twenty minutes before Australia Day ends. Or well after it ended in Australia.)
posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:41 -- link --

VVV

Is The Universe Doomed? Cosmic pointlessness has also been argued on philosophical grounds on the basis that the very concept of a "point" or "purpose" cannot be applied to a system like the universe because it makes sense only in the context of human activity. Some years ago, I took part in a BBC television debate with Hugh Montefiore, then Bishop of Birmingham, and the atheist Oxford philosopher AJ Ayer. Montefiore declared that without God all human life would be meaningless. Ayer countered that humans alone imbue their lives with meaning. "But then life would have no ultimate meaning," objected the bishop. "I don't know what ultimate meaning means!" cried Ayer. His objection, of course, is that such concepts as meaning, purpose and having a point are human categories that make good sense in the context of human society, but are, at best, metaphors when applied to non-living systems.

I think debates over whether the universe has a meaning tend to miss the point by assuming that a meaning will necessarily be a universal or ultimate meaning, something that's an inherent property of the world. I think the beauty (and sometimes the terror) of the universe is that it doesn't come to us with its purpose preordained, so it's flexible enough to be the site of many different purposes for many different people. Which is not to say that we can simply make up any purpose we like for the universe. The universe as we know and encounter it is a partner with us in working out a purpose. I think it's consistent with the jazz improvisation theory of God to say that the only purpose the universe has is to see what kind of purposes people with different experiences of it would find in it.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:56 -- link --