I’ve been stretching my sore brain wide, W . . .I . . .D . . .E! — in continued attempts to surrender my current point of view to vistas beyond my current limits . . . and this effort, as usual, tends to result in an ever larger, thicker, conceptual helmet!
Here is an example of one “contradictory” set of world-views I’ve managed to begin to absorb in the past few days. First, check this out, a short excerpt from what I found myself listening to late last night, Donald J Trump and the End of America: Richard Wolff, someone completely new to me, and fascinating in his own right, making fun of my hero, historian Victor Davis Hanson.
In fact, I had just purchased VDH’s latest book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, and, two days later, find myself already gripped by his detailed tale of subtle and not so subtle historical factors that eventually triggered the sudden destruction of Thebes.
I consider historian Victor Davis Hanson a truly wise elder, very much appreciating that, as a more and more prominent public intellectual, he is also a fifth generation farmer. In other words, his very point of view embraces a living contradiction.
I think I’ve already told the story of what happened in the spring of 1966, when I naively asked a question of my logic professor in graduate school, Boston University, first year on way to PhD. Suddenly, during his seemingly straight-forward lecture, I found myself puzzled. Raised my hand.
“Yes?”
“But what’s wrong with contradiction?” I asked, hoping he would clear up my confusion.
Instead, he turned from the blackboard to look at me closely, as his face turned beet red: “BECAUSE FROM A CONTRADICTION, ANYTHING FOLLOWS, ANYTHING!”
His fervid response shocked me to the core (probably shocked both of us!). Instinctively, I knew I was on to something. But I had no idea how to mentally process it. The point is: whenever there is an emotional reaction to something that seems merely mental, take note!
Our endless mental quest for certainty in knowledge masks our real need, for emotional security in the body. Given the still-prevailing Cartesian body/mind split, in this 3D materialistic world we tend to view the body as a machine; but in fact, it’s the part of us that knows. (In fact, one could say that the body itself is coterminous with the mass unconcious mind.)
Then there was the moment when I raised my hand in first grade, to blurt out, “But what’s a number?” My first grade teacher, Sister Bernita, turned from the blackboard, to stare at me. My question had stopped time. What now?
Finally, she said to me, in no uncertain terms: “THAT IS NOT A QUESTION, DEAR.”
That is not a question, dear. What I asked had just blown in from outer space and did not penetrate our cultural conceptual helmet that she was busy, as an obedient teacher, attempting to instill in our still feral minds. Not that she knew what she was doing. Not that she meant ill. Of course not! She too had been indoctrinated, unknowingly passing along what had been done to her.
I consider it of great value to consciously notice that the circumference of every circle, its edge, or boundary, separates inside from outside; and that, as in permaculture: “the edge is where the action is.” Think of human knowledge as enclosed in a circle, however expanded one wants to make it. That becomes obvious now, when AI is being constructed to absorbek the entire, ever expanding, linguistic corpus of what humans map as “knowledge”; all in order to respond to questions we ask of it.
(Hmmm . . . Hey, AI! What IS a number? What’s WRONG with contradiction?)
Yet, the circle of knowledge, no matter how large, always has this edge. Some questions fly in from nowhere, and cannot be “answered” from what’s inside the circle. Indeed, they break the circle, turn it into a spiral, stretching both ways, up into the heavens, down into the soil: toroidal.
So now, back to contradictions.
Richard Wolff vs. Victor Davis Hanson.
Note: Economist Wolff has been doing youtube videos since 2011; Historian Hanson, only since 2019. That meshes with my discovery of Hanson, relatively recent. Wolff however, despite his apparently greater popularity, has been completely out of range of my own siloed conceptual helmet. No wonder. This old ’60s radical has detested my former socialist/Marxist point of view for decades.
But hell! What’s foundational, in a world informed by Godel’s incompleteness theorems, where the bottom always falls out of any so-called foundation our all-too-human brains can mathematically conceive.
Hermes Trismegistus: “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”
This mysterious ancient Hermes quote was updated by Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, to read:
“Nature is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”
Both carry the same utterly mysterious significance. GOD AND NATURE ARE ONE AND THE SAME.
It helps to consciously dwell within this vast, open space of mystery when attempting to embrace contradictory points of view.
All this, in an effort to turn back the clock on myself, to erase 82 years of mental conditioning, to begin anew. So that I might be ready for anything. Because, remember, Ann: “Anything is possible, ANYTHING!”
Check this out. An insightful view of what destroying the federal Department of Education might make possible: real learning!
https://eko.substack.com/p/breaking-school
