Does being descended from Mahatma Gandhi make you stupid? No. You could study STEM subjects or just go into business and make money. Sadly, if you trade on your name for an academic gig in a soft subject then your brains turn to shit.
Consider the following by Leela Gandhi-
Many of us will recognize two cognitive phenomena from the intense experience of the coronavirus lockdown.
She means 'lots of us have gone a bit loony toons coz of the lockdown'.
The first is fairly ubiquitous. It is a perception that something is as likely to happen as not.
If, by reason of the unprecedented and wholly novel nature of our situation, there is no frequentist probability distribution associated with alternative states of the world- sure. But that's always been true. No doubt, the COVID lockdown was wholly unprecedented. Nothing like it has happened in living memory. However, by the time Leela wrote this, there were prediction markets which had reduced 'Knightian uncertainty' and were ascribing probabilities to outcomes. This is what drove policy and the news trickled down to ordinary people- if they could be bothered to find out.
It is as likely as not there will be a vaccine by the summer of 2021. It is as likely as not COVID-19 is here to stay. Educational institutions are as likely as not to convene in person at some point in the coming academic year. Most countries are as likely as not in the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and so on.
Now she is just babbling.
Forebodings of this type index the disquiet of our times.
A foreboding entails disquiet. But why would disquiet want to index itself? Is it a sex thing?
They also index a condition of skepticism—in the precise philosophical sense of the term.
Nonsense! A skeptic dismisses 'forebodings' and 'disquiet'. Why does Leela, who studied Eng Lit, not know this? Philosophical skepticism means denying we have irrefragable knowledge of 'common knowledge' propositions- stuff like whether the Sun will rise tomorrow. This has nothing to do with foreboding or disquiet. A crazy person may scream 'We're all fucked! Sun aint gonna rise tomorrow! Vampires will roam the earth!' Such a person would not be termed a 'philosophical sceptic'. She would be considered mentally ill.
By contrast, there is nothing insane, as opposed to useless, about a guy who says 'the principle of induction is not a valid tool of inference and so though we know the Sun will rise tomorrow, we have no philosophical warrant for taking this as irrefragable truth.' But that's a claim about philosophical logic- not about whether the Sun will rise. Ordinary people don't greatly care about such matters. What is strange is that Leela, after speaking of the 'precise philosophical' meaning of a term, then proceeds as if firstly our ordinary skepticism has greatly increased such that we are willing to doubt that COVID might cause the Sun to fail to rise tomorrow, and then even more dishonestly to claim that this type of craziness is entailed by philosophical skepticism.
Why is Leela writing such arrant, pseudo-intellectual, nonsense? Is it because she is descended from Mahatma Gandhi and thus feels she has an obligation to tell stupid lies all the time? Or is it simply because she has wasted her life teaching a shit subject?
Such obtains from diverse intersecting traditions, as South Asian Mādhyamika Buddhism, Hellenistic Pyrrhonism, some chapters of American pragmatism and European poststructuralism, included.
This is utterly false. Nagarjuna wasn't a nutter who ran around screaming that the Sun wouldn't rise tomorrow. Neither was Pyrrho or C.S Pierce. On the other hand European poststructuralists may indeed have shat their pants for some such reason. That's coz them Continental types are insanitary and probably eat their own shit believing it to be haute cuisine. At any rate, that is the view I ascribe to great contemporary Gujarati philosophers- like Priti Patel.
Philosophical skepticism describes the equality of all antilogies.
No it doesn't. An antilogy names both a thing and its opposite. But different antilogies aren't equal to each other. The word 'cleave' is an antilogy. It isn't interchangeable with the word 'clip'. Since skepticism is not associated with any particular hermeneutic or theory of language, it simply isn't true that it can have any sort of descriptive role here. Leela is making this stuff up.
This means that cheerfulness and dejection, pleasure and pain are random points in a torque or shades of the same palette.
No it doesn't. Shortness and tallness may be related in that way. A procedure which makes you two feet taller or shorter would indeed have the effect of making you tall or making you short where, previously, you had been the opposite. By contrast, a therapy which rids you of dejection or pain would not necessarily cause you to become cheerful or to feel pleasure. That's why we thank a Doctor for making the hurt go away. We don't blame him for not thereby making us truly happy.
What does 'random points in a torque' mean? Nothing. A torque around a point has to do with the force which might cause the object to rotate. There is a torque balancing algorithm involving random points but what has it to do with skepticism? Its application is in material science. How is it equivalent to 'shades of the same palette'? I have a palette with white and black. Is white a shade of black? Perhaps so- for Leela and the precious snowflakes she teaches.
Each leads to the other and back again.
Just as cutting your head off leads to it growing back again or dying of COVID causes you to wake-up under lockdown.
As well, each holds, each fails to hold, each both holds and fails to hold, each neither holds nor fails to hold.
These are quite separate possibilities. To say 'either there is ice cream in the fridge or there is no ice cream in the fridge' does not mean that both ice-cream and the utter and complete absence of ice-cream coexist in the fridge. You can help yourself to ice-cream, coz you like ice-cream but your friend who doesn't like ice-cream won't find any in the fridge.
The Pyrrhonist and Buddhist so-called tetralemma formula of noncontradiction gets to the heart of the matter. Any position or theory or belief (indeed, any deed, act, or advantage) is no more than it is not; it both is and is not; it neither is nor is not.
Rubbish! There are 4 possibilities. The thing is true. The thing is false. The thing is both true, in some sense and false in another sense. Both the thing and its negation are false or, as we would say, not even wrong- i.e. like Leela's oeuvre the thing is meaningless shite.
Does Leela really believe that if she gets COVID she will be both very healthy and as sick as fuck? Of that if she dies, she will both be cremated as well as continue to give crap lectures? Perhaps. After all, under Biden, anything is possible.
The second cognitive phenomenon at hand is harder to pin down.
Then just tell stupid lies the way you always do.
It is a state of consciousness about something we have known for a very long time without bringing to the forefront of understanding. The experience is similar to an aha moment. Aha! The virtual face is more companionable than the telephonic voice. Aha!
Or less so. I'm as ugly as shit. That's why peeps who initially skyped me then pretended they were using their Amazon speaker or whatever so as to get out of having to look at me- more especially after I got a 4k webcam. This wasn't an AHA moment for me. It was a boo-hoo moment. Still, at least my telephonic voice isn't too horrible. Or perhaps it is. I find ladies increasingly prefer to text me. Sad.
Distraction serves concentration better than homogenous empty time. Aha!
Unless you are making money or doing STEM stuff or even writing a poem. On the other hand, distraction is fine if you're knocking off some pseudo-intellectual shite which serves to prove that brown peeps who lack a penis are as stupid as shit and thus need affirmative action.
Consumerism may be bad for the soul, but it certainly energizes the spirit.
Buying stuff online can restore a bit of zest to life- sure. But it certainly does not 'energize' the spirit. Unless Leela is talking about dildos. Fuck. That is what she is talking about isn't it? It's like 'Netflix and chill' actually means sex. Why are boomers like me always the last to get the memo? Is it coz I iz bleck?
There are more exacting examples. The disproportionate COVID-19-related death toll of African Americans in the US and of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and other black communities in the UK brings awareness to perfectly well known, longstanding racialized disparities in health and access to medical care.
How is this an 'exacting example'? The thing was entirely predictable.
The mass exodus of starving migrant workers making their way home from locked-down cities in India is arguably the worst such after Partition.
Again, entirely predictable. Kerala foresaw the problem and acted. Other States could not inspire the same confidence because their existing public health and education provision was self-evidently shit. The plain fact is that India is very very poor. Sensible economic policies can help. Leela's worthless shite can't at all.
Yet it relays no new data. It is a stark résumé of known unknowns: every single aspect of routine lifestyle in the subcontinent runs on the back of precarious informal livelihoods.
But there is a large rising middle class which, thanks to lockdown, had lower mortality than they would have done in the US. It appears that their portion of the economy has bounced back. The lesson for Political Economy is that States protect the sources of their revenue.
The two phenomena under review may seem incongruous but are closely linked.
In the mind of a cretin.
Skeptical conditions (those we cultivate and that beset us, as at the present world-historical moment) are not ends in themselves.
We don't cultivate philosophical skepticism because we are not philosophers. Some ordinary people may indeed cultivate skepticism about medical science but they tend to die because of their stupidity. There is a Darwinian weeding out of morons. I may be as skeptical as shit about Vaccinations but the cost to me of getting the thing is very low while the potential benefit is very large.
Nor are they alibi for existential defeatism and the view that the external world is just a rumor.
as opposed to a very large dildo
Made over as spiritual exercises they show the way to ataraxia, the Greek word for undisturbedness, and to sthitaprajña, the Sanskrit word for something like a standing-still mentality.
and to achieve the exalted status of a meshuggeneh- the Yiddish word for a crazy person.
Both words are from the ancient skeptical lexicon,
of which we are rightly skeptical. Mindfulness works better and there's an app for it on your phone. Anyway, all them Stoics and Buddhists and so on were kiddy-fiddlers.
and the eventual respite from uncertainty that they hint at is the opposite of insensibility. (After all, the peaceful skeptic sage is depicted as enlightened rather than asleep.)
But sleep is biologically necessary. Pretending to be enlightened just makes you a bigger asshole than you otherwise would be. Still, it probably is true that Leela's books put people to sleep.
A well-honed practice of noncontradiction is a deep epistemological cleanse
i.e. a laxative
that deflects attention from content, argument, and expectation to the quality of what is manifestly staring us in the face.
we've shat ourselves
It prompts us to trust direct interactions with the world rather than be swayed by prejudice and convention.
Leela plays with her poop. The rest of us, swayed by prejudice and convention, flush it down the toilet. Still, different strokes- right?
It intensifies what is given and makes us present and alive to such—namely, woke, to follow the AAVE, or African American Vernacular English word.
Actually the African American Vernacular English word for waking up and finding you've shat the bed is- 'mazaltov!'
In this way, skepticism is a sine qua non of consciousness.
if by consciousness you mean paranoia- sure.
Consider a literary gloss. In his 1908 play The Blue Bird, the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck (an acknowledged skeptic and mystic)
acknowledged mystic- okay- plagiarist- sure- but skeptic?
tells the story of two disaffected children who embark on a quest for knowledge. They learn nothing new. They stop searching. Once back home they notice that their pet bird, a turtledove, is much bluer than when they went away.
Leela read a different story from everybody else. This is a story about two pure and innocent kids, not 'disaffected' in any way, from a very poor family. They don't covet the luxuries of the rich. A fairy wants a blue enough bird of happiness for her sickly child. The kids are able, at the end of their fantastical adventure, to find in their own bird enough blueness to cure the child. But the bird escapes again.
This stuff may be 'symbolist', it isn't skeptic. How does it connect with 'wokeness'? Perhaps, Leela is saying African Americans should be like the poor kids in Maeterlinck's play. They mustn't covet wealth. Also, if they have a bird which gets bluer, give it to the rich kid.
Wear a Mask
There’s more to learn on the topic from the Consciousness-Raising (C-R) projects of 1960s and 1970s second-wave feminism that took hold in various postwar welfare societies.
If so, why hasn't academic feminism learnt it already? Fuck have they been doing for the last four decades?
The C-R concept was put to circulation in 1968 by Kathie Sarachild,
who is now on the politically incorrect side of the trans fight
a member of the New York based Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement and coeditor of Woman’s World newspaper. In time, the meaning of consciousness in this context became as diverse as its constituencies across civil rights venues, gay liberation, speakout and zap action groups, antiwar forums, and (within the academy) women’s studies programs, including feminist poetics, spirituality, and science. There was a consensus that consciousness does not target the unconscious, namely, any sum of mental operations to occur well below the level of conscious awareness.
So the thing was useless. The moment these guys fell asleep they would revert to the last stable configuration which was patriarchal or neoliberal or otherwise very evil. So, they had to spend every day raising up their consciousness from the gent's loo floor where it was lying in a pool of its own vomit while dripping from every orifice with the cum of a multitude of strangers.
Nor is it the rarefied presentism of mindfulness meditation with a limit on recursive and projective thinking.
Because that stuff is useful.
It is, rather, an orientation to what is already there but so much in plain view as to be unintelligible, much like Maeterlinck’s turtledove—
but the fairy said it wasn't blue enough. She told the kids to go out and find a bluer one. Later, after they returned, then it was blue enough but the fairy had turned into a woman.
and the daily housework performed by a homeless migrant laborer in Delhi
how can housework be performed by a homeless migrant? Domestic servants live in 'unauthorized' shanties on the borders of housing colonies. They can't get into the colony without a police certificate giving their ration card number etc. Leela is from India. Why does she not know this? Is it because she thinks the fairy Berylune, out of Maeterlinck, has now taken up residence in the NCR?
and the calculus of risks for women in the present conditions of compulsory domestic confinement.
There is no calculus. Either they get battered of they don't. They can't go out. Isn't that the meaning of 'compulsory domestic confinement'? Is it not also a fact that the State provides domestic abuse for women whether they want it or not?
There’s another problem. The already there is hard to grasp, tout court, because it is obscured, variously, by false consciousness, bad representations, and estrangement, to name but a few malefactors.
not to mention the big lump of shit this lady has in her brain.
C-R protocols do not pave the way to some unalloyed jewel of consciousness.
Or, indeed, to anything useful. That's why peeps who want to get rich or who want to cure cancer aren't queuing up for that shit.
The major payoff of an elevated consciousness is the end of isolation.
A modest enough aspiration. Leela is writing for smelly people next to whom nobody will sit in the cafeteria. I deeply sympathize. I'm like that myself. But the major payoff of an elevated consciousness- which is what you pay drug dealers for- is that you don't care if nobody is sitting next to you because you are actively shitting yourself.
The systems that obscure are the very same that quarantine.
they are also identical to the systems that scotomize the mise en abyme of the pistons that are Materlincke's skeptical tontine.
Once free of these—and to borrow some words from the American skeptical philosopher, George Santayana
who turned skepticism against itself to found philosophy upon 'animal faith'
—we begin (to think, to act) in medias res; that is, right into the unpartitioned middle of things.
While everybody else thought we began to think and act during the Big Bang- right?
Where there is consciousness there is connectedness, according to many flag bearers of the C-R movement.
Most are dead or nearly dead. What ever they are connected to isn't on this side of the veil.
To be conscious is to be minimally aware of the ambient world and the presence of others (no different from Thomas Nagel’s echolocation bats).
It is good that Leela has adjusted her expectations downwards. Little more can be hoped for from students, or professors, of shitty subjects.
A conscious person is not particularly brilliant or wise.
In her line of work- sure.
But they are likely to be good company in a lockdown.
No. They'd soon get on your nerves.
They are also likely to wear a mask in public, less to protect themselves as to protect others who are vulnerable to infection.
Women who think I might be 'good company' in a lockdown still insist I wear a paper bag over my head while providing that type of companionship. Sad.
Coda: Companion Species
Ancient and medieval Indic philosophers are very taken by a Ṛigveda parable of two birds, beautiful of wing, who shelter in a common tree. One eats the fruit of the tree. The other does not eat but watches its fellow. The birds are said to stand for the duality of consciousness (active/passive, finite/infinite, mundane/enlightened, and so on).
No. They stand for the jiva- individual soul- and the atman- universal soul. Leela is lying. This has nothing to do with 'Buddhi' or 'Viveka' or Consciousness of any sort. True, the Rg Vedic verse is multivalent. However the other meaning has to do with different types of worship and transmigration associated with the moon and the Sun. In other words, one part of the soul goes to a sort of ancestral paradise while the other is absorbed into the Godhead.
In the soteriological gloss on this parable, the noneating bird is perched above and measures her distance from the lower bird, somewhat smugly.
No. Both jiva and atma are spiritual realities. They are complementary not competing. There was a theological issue as to whether a jivanmukta is possible- i.e. the jiva itself could attain liberation without 'darshan gyan' gnosis of non-duality. Furthermore, the original Rg Vedic verse contains the idea that two fruit eating birds may have taken refuge under the nest of a non-fruit eating bird of great pugnacity. The notion here is that the one above protects and shows benevolence not smugness. Leela's account of the Rg Veda is as crazy as her account of Maeterlinck.
Her actual sights are on the insipid metaphysical fruit further up in the canopy.
There is no such fruit. We do need to eat to live but the Godhead does not require food or drink of any sort.
In the devotional gloss on the same story there is no arboreal hierarchy. The birds are close companions and look upon each other adoringly.
They are described as such in the Rg Veda. The word used then is still in common usage in Indic languages. How did this silly woman, who has studied in India, get so utterly deracinated?
They grasp the inextricability of testimony and witnessing, eating and not eating, breathing and not breathing. Whatever they know they know with each other.
No. That's the whole point. There has to be a separation between the portion of the soul which eats and drinks and the portion of the soul which can join with the Godhead. What is known to one- viz. thirst for transitory things- is not known to the other and vice versa. It simply is not the case that watching a guy eat will make you full. Similarly, if your friend studies Physics and you study Leela's worthless shit, it will not be the case that you will gain any useful knowledge whatsoever. Sad. But there it is.
Incidentally, the whole point to the type of Grievance Studies this cretin has specialized in is that you don't get to say 'Me and my wife are very close so I understand everything about what it feels like to be a woman'. Equally claiming some of your best friends are Black or Gay or fist themselves frequently coz they be all Feminist and shit, don't give you the right to be White or to have a penis. Fuck is wrong with you? Don't you know that penises cause COVID? Cut the thing off right now!
No comments:
Post a Comment