Starting from Thales, 2600 years ago, rationalists have maintained religious certainty that all existence is bound by mathematical laws, despite for the first 2200 worth there being zero evidence for that, and overwhelming evidence against it.
The extraordinary triumph of the Copernican Revolution, culminating in Newton: rationalists FINALLY discovered *something*, one thing, that fit their religious preconception. Glory Be!
And if one thing, surely also every thing. And thus: modernity! NEWTONIZE ALL THE THINGS!
Discovering that Newton’s absolute truth was not, after all, true was a cosmic shock now underestimated. The collapse of modernity had many causes; for the intellectual elite this discrediting of the foundation of rationalism was central I think.
In the mid-20th century, the disaster was papered over with the rhetoric of approximation and “successively more accurate theories.”
🇺🇸 In the run-up to the last election, I wrote several pieces about politics from a meta-rational point of view. I’m going to tweet links to some of them as a thread over the next few days.
🇺🇸 Our current political divide is rooted in the culture war that began with the New Left & hippie counterculture in the 1960s-70s, versus the Evangelical counter-counterculture of the 70s-80s.
🇺🇸 The two countercultures, though apparently opposed, were strikingly similar attempts at solving the same fundamental problems of meaning—which are still unresolved.
My history of that attempt and its failure is long, so I will tweet only selections…
@angelvsnovvs Diane di Prima’s _Seminary Poems_ were written during a 3-month Tibetan Buddhist study/meditation retreat at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center.
They communicate the essence of Vajrayana. Many are also wryly funny (which is not separate from the essence of Vajrayana…)
@angelvsnovvs I did a similar one-month retreat program (dathün) at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center a few years after her. It was one of the most significant events in my life. Diane di Prima’s descriptions of the place and time and life are highly evocative for me.
Fascinating in the podcast were thoughts on how to move forward, and what comes after—whereas discussions of postmodernity usually rehash "how did everything fall apart," which we now thoroughly understand.
@palladiummag asks a key prior question: "if we accept the postmodern critique, why did modernity work as well as it did for as long as it did?"
Three obstacles to explaining why representationalism is wrong:
1️⃣ It’s the culmination of the whole 2600+ year rationalist tradition on which our culture mainly rests. Everything points toward it. It’s inexorably deducible from a millennia-enduring zeitgeist. It can’t be considered because it’s implied by too much.
2️⃣ It’s the final reductio ad absurdum of rationalism. Representations inescapably must be physical things that interact with non-physical things. That cannot be accommodated in rationalist metaphysics. Representationalism can’t be doubted because everything else might fall apart
@micahtredding@meditationstuff@nosilverv@Morphenius@JakeOrthwein I haven’t read any of this except the white-on-gray quoted text block, and not sure you were asking me, but, fwiw, from my (imperfect) understanding of Dzogchen (spelled rDzogs Chen) in that text block—that’s the transliteration, “Dzogchen” is the pronunciation)…
Heying argues for the value of rationality and functional systems against what I've called "pseudo-pomo": pre-rational tribal politics, driven by incoherent emotions and real or fictitious kinship, dressed up in the jargon of postmodern critical theory. meaningness.com/metablog/stem-…
Fighting on behalf of rational systems is critically important now as major institutions we depend on, constructed original on rational foundations, appear to be disintegrating.