January 13, 2009

• The Bible, Catholics, and an A+

  I find it harder to be understood in this life. I find it more difficult to understand people as well. I have been reading up on issues of how the 'medium' of a particular culture and time is, in fact, 'the message'. That its very existence then shapes the way thought, action, and ideas of correct and incorrect. It is not a passive conduit in that it is passively allowing a substance through it but is an active conduit that shapes, eliminates, and assists particular modes of thought, which, in turn, because of their 'shape' that is most easily passed they become 'right' and elevated.
  
  I think I am an old man not just in my years but in my adherence to a medium that is, perhaps, no, not perhaps, is finally coming to an end: print. Even as you read this you have been subjected to the whims of this active conduit both in the sense of what is a proper sentence, for, if I chose, I could with proper mechanics make a sentence as long as I please; this is despite the vehement protests of your, well meaning, but incorrect grammar school teacher.
  This shrinking of the elongated sentence, argument, to fit the mode of the Modern Mind which is crafted by a pictoral media e.g. television/internet-that is the antithesis of print: whose form fits the logical, concise, but unfragmented argument which is not the form in which the media of today favors, or even can carry. Thus the shrinking of our attention span, the ability to read in the manner in which print is especially cogent e.g. exhaustive (to the modern reader) detail, rational arguments that follow a thread of argume
  
  I have been conducting experiments on another website where you can 'publish' articles. I have written articles that are very simple, the arguments glib, and under seven hundred words-then I have done the same with more in depth articles, deeper arguments, and with a more 'difficult' language-but not expressly so, it fit the format, supposedly, and the gist of the article. The first articles then were ranked in the top eighty five percent with one of them becoming the highest ranked article, the second grouping of more difficult articles were then ranked in the bottom 10% with one of them as the worst rated article. I have done this over and over again and it comes out the same-why? Well here is the trick, I thought like a person watching television in the shorter articles that did well and I wrote like a person reading in the second that did poorly. Interesting. I think.
  
  So what does this have to do with Catholics? Well I found out recently, in one of my jaunts down these dusty pages (that become dustier as the day passes by-I wonder who the heck reads anymore, or reads anything of the 'real' world e.g. History, Philosophy, or even 'difficult' novels-does anyone even know who Proust is anymore?) that Gutenberg-the inventer of the printing press in the west-was a devout Catholic. I find this ironic because of the new medium in which he had invented had a direct link to the cultural war that insued with the Lutherians: whose name sake had said that mass printing of the bible was, "God's highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward." Luther believe that there was no need of the pope, that everyone could be their own pope, priest, whatever you may call it. And in this I have hardily agreed, for some time, but now I am not so sure-especially as I watch the death of print and the subsequent death of the thought processes that go along with it.
  
  I am not an elitist, but, I now believe in the elite. When I was young I mistook equality as a bean counting equality (which is also an offshoot of my time and the conduit e.g. the scientific era we live in that regards everything in numbers, which, is odd when seen from afar as I will write about later) rather than an ontological equality. This is in error. I have my betters. I do. And in the process of being a person that can learn from masters I cultivate the ability to be in awe: this awe allows me to learn from and elevate my person in the ways that are most important to me-teleological. And the acolyte in this situation has the demand put on them to be able to not be persuaded by charlatans, to have enough mental capacity to be able to spot them. Is this possible without the print mentality and the ability to think cogently, coherently, and sift through a reasonable amount of information? I hazard not. And this is telling of the dumbing down and emotional responses in our political discourse, which, honestly, cannot even be called a discourse when we have accepted a three minute rebuttle a debate. Mr Douglas and Mr. Lincoln in their famous debates, amongst farmers, and a carnival like atmsophere, held sway for seven hours on, really, one topic.
  
  This is a bit off course, however, I wanted to illustrate strongly my point that there are betters, that there is a responsibility put upon followers, and that this responsibility, I think, is not possible without a print mind. I disagree with, now, Mr. Luther who made an error in the belief that everyone could be their own Pope; that, in fact, this is not possible, perhaps, by even the Pope nowadays. I believe as an adult that there is a heirarchy of humanity and we were meant to learn from them, that the texts that are Holy: from the Bible, Quran, Parasangika, Tripitak-needs to be taught. We, most of us, do not have the capacity to understand these forms without help-and, in our modern incarnations, and I point especially to the Christian sects, cannot touch these at all for we have, through Luther, done away with the ideas of awe and inspiration in our Human counterparts. It is silly to think that the Bible was written literally, it could not be, it touches subjects of the divine that go beyond the Subject Object manifestation, and yet, our egalitarian idealogy that was pushed by mass printing, urges us to believe it to be so. And to think only in the linear thoughts of 'what I can believe' of it, is also from this bean counting equality-That Luther was wrong is what I am trying to say. In his belief that we all should have access to the Word he was assuming that all of us would be capable of accessing the Word.
  
  I posit that this is a modern losing of the Word though, that in the time of the printing press, and the dissemination of the Word we did have greats to disseminate the words to us; then they had Jonathan Edwards and today we have Jerry Falwell, I am not joking, they were supposedly of the same cloth, George Whitfield is supposedly embodied by Billy Graham...??? In our world that has become more fractured in thought by, I believe, our Medium of media, we have become more glib, more 'photographic' in that everything cannot be argued because it is just an interpretation, which, I do not have too much of a problem with, but when everything become 'photographic' the ability even to interpret cogently, coherently, and logically dissappears. So, strangely, in our modern time when we need interpretation the most, when we need the greats to be able to disseminate the symbols for us, and we need the ability to spot shit from shinola in our Betters, we have neither of these. When it was, perhaps, not needed as much e.g. the time of Luther because of the plethora of Betters and those that were able to read (and American later-where, at times, there was nearly a 90% literacy rate excluding, of course, slaves and women) could do so and had the subsequent thinking ability that goes along with a truly literate society.
  
  In our age when everything has become literal, that the figurative has fallen onto the dustbin or history, that symbols are unknown in their popularity i.e. if anything can be everything and the conduit of the interpretation is only the ability to invent one, then, it become nothing-its symbolism dies-and, to be honest, I am highly skeptical that anyone even really tries to invent meanings for symbols because of the obscenely banal definitions they come up with. When we interpret everything in numbers for truth, or, more accurately, we believe what someone tells us if they are interpreted in numbers e.g. grading. Which, I was not aware until recently, was invented by a man named William Farrish in 1792 who thought that a "quantitative value could be placed on human thought" as Mr. Postman says of him. This would have seemed absurd to anyone born previously to this; the Hamiltons, the Lockes, etc. For, what is an A+ and what is an F, I have struggled with this my whole teaching career, and if you will excuse me I will use a numerical example: if a child comes in at a forty and another at a ninety and an A is an 85.  If forty goes to seventy but ninety stays at ninety then what does the A symbolize? If another writes a poor essay, then let us correct it until it is a good essay, it doesn't make sense, to me, to leave it at an F-for that is quantifying a stage in the process of thought e.g. a home before its roof is put on can be viewed as an F or it can be viewed as being incomplete. The very idea of quantifying this part of Humanity is absurd, as I said above, for it implies that then other aspects of our existence can be, and it has e.g. how much do you love me? how much do you believe in God? How merciful are you? When we have done this, accepted this, we have done more than enacted an impotent metaphor but changed the way we think.
  
  This is the Material Age where God is incomprehensible to the masses because of our conduit disallows anything but the material, the number, and as we progress in this modern age in a paradigm shift of epic proportions we become less able to even decipher this as anything different. When the attack is on the very Mind itself and shapes the world view into a vision that makes anything within it seem sane and normal because the Mind has no ability to grasp anything different in comparison. We can see this even in our media in the boook as Hollywood Tells It, it is noted that before 1960 the average length between shots was 8-11 seconds, and now it is between 4-6 seconds. Our very eyes have been accustomed to think in seconds, our thoughts the same, I believe I read somewhere that music videos have cuts under 3 seconds-this is what our minds have become accustomed too. The fractured psyche. The fractured intellect. The broken metaphor. I believe even our adherence to music, as I watch my students study plugged into I Pods, is a victim of this-that it ceases to become art, it is not, but because the catalyzing activity for emotion. We have become incapable of doing this ourselves and we need to be qued to when to cry, when to be mad, or to express ourselves as a character in this life that so desperately needs an active Human.
  
  What can we do? We can study hard, we can fight the creep of boredom that is the child of a person who believes amusement is a way of life, that life is silly and glib instead of a serious matter. Life must be recognized as a serious enterprise. We can support teachers and instill in us the awe necessary of them and cultivate our bullshit meters to point them out when we see them. I have, in my long life, met with teachers that I would put on the the same pedestal as the Christ (if not, in my eyes, higher)-I know in this judeo/christian society that sound blasphemous but it is not. It is the opposite. Blasphemy is making mundane that which is not, making profane that which is sacred, and finding awe in your better and learning from your master is, despite its diametrically opposed ideal to that of our modern era, a methodology to reclaim our ability to comprehend and practice the sacred. The question must remain if there are any left in America and if so is it even possible for us to be able to access them with our current frame of mind.
  
  Be well
  G

  • 1:38 pm
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