RE: Ignorance is Bliss

So Nate, at first your comment wasn’t showing and now it is, but I’m reblogging it here with some thoughts.

Wow. Just wrote a whole screed and then hit publish and then the computer timed out. I'll try again, but it sure won't be as good. Anyway, I seem to be at the point in this little dialectic where I repeat myself over and over again. Maybe another angle will emerge from this, but in the meantime, bear with me as I repeat my arguments again because it's fun!
So I'm not saying that people consciously bandy about ideas or invent languages and that's a big problem for our mental, spiritual, and societal health. And I'm not saying that Big Data analytics or computer modeling are by definition such terrible things.
But suppose I had just watched families turn into clans, tribes, nations and empires on the strength of violence, ambition, and networks--and that I wanted to write an Origins story that ran counter to the prevailing myths that glorified progress. I would think about what distinguished People from other animals. What is this thing that propels and sickens us? It's not intellect exactly. It's not disobedience. It's not pride. It's something to do with our capacity for abstraction (consciously or unconsciously). But it's hard to articulate, so the only way to get at it is to juxtapose it against something else (Tree of Life) and as a rhetorical devise to urge people to eschew this poisonous thing (Tree of Knowledge) in favor of it. The Genesis writers take the theme ever further. In the next chapter, God declares a preference for pastoralists (Abel) to the more civilized agriculteralists (Cain). Unsurprisingly, Cain kills Abel because civilization is associated with violence. Then there's the tower of Babel which speaks for itself. In a world like ours with communal, sectarian, and political fault lines (abstractions all); in a world where my own identity is an infinite regression of telescoping categories; God says STOP. Let go. Just be.
The story so deep though, because it's more than just about society and the history of civilization. It's also about intimacy, fear, and dislocation. So it becomes a very personal story as much as it is an allegory about history.
Do you see that I'm not saying that intellectuals are worse off than non-intellectuals? Non-intellectuals can be just as poisoned by abstraction (nationalism, pornography, etc.) as anyone else.

OK, so I’ve been writing this for a few days, typing out a few sentence here and there between a thousand other things.  My thoughts are very disjointed and I wanted to work on this to help it flow and relate better to itself, but I might never get around to posting this.  So think of this kind of like a collage of thoughts…

Great stuff, Nate.  I’ve tried to say similar things.  I think I’m also finding the nuances that I differ with.  But first I want to revisit exactly what abstraction is, which I think you are exactly right in distinguishing it from intellect primarily because it can be conscious or unconscious.  I think I was hitting on this theme in my posts Idol Making and Integrity.  Analytical idolatry was one phrase I used.  Persig calls analysis a knife, and while it can hack something like poetry to pieces, it also removes us, or cuts us off from life.  Let me throw out some more quotes…

                "While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality.  When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify.  This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it."  Lewis

This seems to be addressing a more conscious, intellectual abstraction.

I wrote an essay years ago about the dangers within the evangelical community that is in reaction to an immediate gratification society.  This reaction makes the Christian’s default position one of suspicion towards pleasure.  Couple that with the tendency to constantly ascertain whether one is living “Biblically”, or as some put it, the self-examined life, and you render an entire community very susceptible to affectation.  Needless to say, just about everyone I showed it to didn’t understand what I was getting at, and the few that sort of got the drift of what I was saying took offense. 

Affectation, opposed to integrity, is dependent on abstracting an ideal one wishes to embody without having the ability to pursue and enjoy that ideal for its own sake.   Let me requote Lewis from an earlier post:

                If we encourage others, or ourselves, to hear, see, or read great art on the ground that it is a cultured thing to do, we call into play precisely those elements in us which must be in abeyance before we can enjoy art at all.  We are calling up the desire for self-improvement, the desire for distinction, the desire to revolt (from one group) and to agree (with another), and a dozen busy passions which, whether good or bad in themselves, are, in relation to the arts, simply a blinding and paralysing distraction…Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry.  For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.  [my emphasis]  The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience.  The desirable habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as a by-product, unsought.

My essay essentially tweeked Lewis quote to say If we encourage others, or ourselves, to act, talk or live a “good” life on the ground that it is a Biblical or Godly thing to do…  Somehow, we need to learn to pursue good things for their own reward.

I think this the kind of abstraction that cuts us off from ‘Life’ while more often than not remains unconscious, or perhaps subconscious.  Maybe because such a habit has become one’s mode of ‘living’.  Following that train of thought, we would now see the value of a psychologist trying to analyze someone to help them.  In order to break a bad pattern or habit, you have to remove or abstract oneself in order to be aware of the problem.  Then one can consciously try and change.  Here’s another Lewis quote: 

                "The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust [is] to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself.  The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction."

            So now, back to your comment, Nate.  What hit me was when you said that civilization is associated with violence and the implication of its opposite.  When I associate ‘Life’ with Dynamic quality, I see it as the driving force; a force with so much power that it could drive an evolution of species into complex beings, in total defiance of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics.  But to me that doesn’t equate with nice or pleasant.  I grew up being told everyone could have a general knowledge of God’s glory by looking at Nature.  That’s a bit scary really.  When we look at the whole, we can be in awe of the complexity and interconnectedness.  There are even moments of inspiring visual beauty.  But the nitty gritty of everyday life within Nature is downright brutal.  There is a very dark side to God.  Animals are not humane.  Cat’s toy with mice for a long while before finally giving the death blow.  Turkeys peck the weak ones in a flock.  Once there’s blood, there’s usually not much hope left for the poor critter.  Not only do they peck it to death they hump it as it is dying.  Even once it’s dead, the toms make a show of humping the dead body as they fluff up their feathers and snoods.  Survival of the fittest, in the long run, is a very effective in keeping the whole healthy, but it is not a pleasant reality.  To just BE, without abstraction, would be to reenter this reality.  Gone would be the infinite regression of telescoping categories, but so would love.  Particularly love for the marginalized and the ‘least of these’. 

Another way of saying this is to take issue with the statement that what sickens us is abstraction.  We are already as sick and self-consumed as any other animal.  Abstraction is simply a powerful tool we use that is unavailable to the less intelligent animals.  I like to think in terms of addiction.  We are gluttons in many ways, including abstraction.  And civilization could be characterized as an addiction to abstraction as much as a society that lives much closer to nature and plain old survival could be considered brutal, heartless and hard because of its lack of abstraction.  I hear you when you say that even if both Life and Knowledge are important, but living in such an abstract culture, we need to hear the message to just be.  I think you’re right that even when we just try to be we will still abstract far too much.  But I still think it’s important to keep in mind that Life can be just as violent as Knowledge.

One day, though, I would hope we wouldn't be just playing a balancing game of stressing one because we are constantly bombarded by the other.  That strikes me as Lewis' pursuit of being cultured.  I think the way out is in pursuing things for their own reward and their own sake.  Again integrity would have to guide us on that razor thin edge of a path.  I want to be able to completely lose myself in both Life and Knowledge.