"Ray E. Harrell" wrote:
>
> It is because I admire Brad that I continue this and he
> may answer what I say but I can speak only from my own
> perceptions in my work and life and the experience of
> those perceptions. So here goes but I cannot continue
> the discussion beyond this post.
>
> Ray
>
> "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote:
>
> > (snip) If Ray is disturbed by my denigration of
> > unreflected life in all its forms (what I
> > intentionally provocatively call: "ethnic formations"), (snip)
>
> Actually I am disturbed by what you expressed.
> As the poet Jerome Rothenberg has said on many
> occasions, "there is no culture or people that has
> survived by twiddling their thumbs and speaking
> in half-formed thoughts." A good case can be made
> for that belief as a left over piece of 19th century
> Utilitarian thought that was used to justify aggression.
I at first misread you and saw: "Unitarian". What a
relief to see that is not the word you wrote!
>
> Edward T. Hall had to train that attitude out of the American
> Diplomats and businessmen because they were in
> danger of failure in both areas. The multi-linguistic
> future on the internet puts us all in danger if we see
> ourselves "above" ethnicity rather than a part of it.
Maybe there are two Edward Halls, or one Edward Hall with MPD?
Hall's _The Silent Language_ is one of my favorite sources
for anti-ethnicity argument/rhetoric (the other being
Allan Resinous' film "Moon Once d'Amerique").
>
>
> > I can only say that I hope I made it clear that my
>
> > critique is not aimed at "primitive peoples"
>
> > but at everything which is *primitive* (i.e.,
> > not radically grounded in self-accountable
> > reflective reconstruction of all that which
> > merely is given) -- wherever it occurs. (snip)
>
> Nothing is primitive in that sense. Just relative to
> its place in time/space and its growth structure.
> Primitive more accurately means Primal but to
> me it is a fake issue. I never met a primitive but
> I have met provincials and ignorance.
I have no problem with the hypothesis that there
are persons in solaced "primitive" cultures who
are more ethnological advanced than many
First World MBAs and PhDs, etc. -- not to
mention such "Europeans" as my own parents and
grandparents (my paternal grandfather may have been
a Neanderthal and nobody recognized his zoological value --
but to say that would be to denigrate the Neanderthal
species without good evidence. Fortunate the child who
grows up in a civil[ized] and culture*d* family!).
>
>
> > Neither will it do to reply to this that: "Everyone makes
> > mistakes." Galilean natural science, Hegelian dialectic
> > and Husserlian phenomenological reflection are all
> > self-grounding projects for [albeit iteratively and
> > asymptotically] overcoming error in every aspect
> > of life.
>
> The books of C. Castenada caused a stir a while back
> because no one wanted to admit that the people, he
> claimed taught him, existed.
I believe there are serious questions as to Castanedas'
authenticity. My college roommate because an expert
in Mexican Indian culture, and he told me Casanedas was
a fake -- I have no more hard evidence for this
than for Americans having landed on the
moon 30 years ago, however....
> Don Juan was compared
> to Husserl and as one scientist said to me, "If these
> people exist then we have committed a monstrous
> three hundred years." Well I believe the books are
> fake but the beginning of any young Shaman's instruction
> is "be observant!" and "put your feet where no one else
> has stepped." My teachers were far more reflective,
> artistic and outrageous than Castenada's stories. They
> also dealt with some of the nation's greatest scientists
> both Newtonian and Quantum from a place of equals.
> They were neither afraid of science nor worshiped it.
> They also had a healthy believe in the evolution of
> consciousness but in much too complicated a way to
> consider one cultural universe more important than
> another.
I can only say that I would welcome an opportunity to
talk about these issues with one or more of these
persons. I assert that I am ready to abandon due to
new evidence
any belief except the continually re-interrogated
belief in the necessity of questioning everything -->
especially the idols of *my own* tribe (I am not
in favor of "Imperialism" and "colonization", etc.).
[snip]
> Jerome Rothenberg spent several years with the Iroquois
> studying the poetry contained within their everyday life and
> the ceremonials. From that point on he concluded that most
> of the Indigenous people's he worked with were "Technicians
> of the Sacred" and far more subtle and complicated than the
> Jesuits whose rigidity made science seem both universal and
> profound.
According to Needham, the Jesuits "screwed it up". They
argued that the accomplishments of Galilean science
were a fringe benefit of accepting Jesus Christ
as your personal Lord an Savior. The Chinese saw thru this.
They also presented the Tychonic as opposed to the Copernican
cosmology. The Chinese apparently did not see that this
was not the best available theory, and, according to Needham,
distortions in the representation of science such as this
hindered Chinese scientific progress. Let me repeat:
I believe that Universal Culture arose in Europe, but
Europe probably did not deserve it and has at the best done
a poor to middling job of conservating this great gift.
> How could you compare the Chinese language
> with its tones and subtleties as well as the calligraphy to such
> "limited" forms as most Western languages and science?
> Europe has its genius and science is just another adolescent
> in its history. Its genius is in its art. More about that later.
I agree that science is "adolescent". Husserl (if not
already Kant) inaugurated its maturity -- or at least the
next step in "the ascent of man".
>
> > Finally, there is Margaret Mead's _New Lives for Old_,
> > and a recent report in the NYT of one traditional culture
> > in Africa, where the elders have undertaken a
> > thoroughgoing inventory of their traditional culture,
> > to see what parts of it are still viable and which
> > are not worth preserving (e.g., ritual genital
> > mutilation of children).
>
> Another shamanic rule is that one must always know
> the past while living in the present and manifesting the
> future. It's in the language. (check out Benjamin Lee
> Whorf and his exploration of the Pueblo verbs). Of
> course we are not all the same. Cherokees were
> wonderful at language, science and business in the
> 19th century. It was our success that created the
> envy that destroyed what writers at the time were
> calling an "American Athens." I don't know much
> about Africa, they have little problem speaking for
> themselves these days.
"They" did not teach me about this in school (so
what else is new?). I would be interested to
learn more about this "American Athens of the
Cherokees".
[snip]
> > *Western*
> > culture is symbolized by such semiotic specimens as
>
> > Superbowls, "commercial paper", and "Keep America ,
> > beautiful, get a haircut!" --> Yes Prof. Latour, "We
> > have never yet really been modern." But I say
> > it's time to get on with it!
>
> Interesting, I'm reading a book by Michael Kammen called
> "American Culture, American Tastes, Social Change and the
> 20th Century" (Knopf) where he makes some of these types of
> judgments but my experience runs more practical and
> professional.
Maybe you were neither "scalped" nor circumcised. I cannot
look upon American [white] middle class ethnicity with equanimity,
because it has harmed me ("Never again!").
>
> In culture, like in science, you have 1.) theoretical R&D work
> that is an exploration of values (for its own sake) in the medium. The
> pursuit of knowledge with no appreciable practical end except
> truth and excellence. You also have 2.) the commercial which is
> the theoretical that has been generally simplified for the sake
> of personal enjoyment. You might call this "scale or productive
> art" that can be endlessly repeated in new situations at very
> low costs in skill, technology and creativity. Where the
> Theoretical is expensive and one of a kind, commercial is not
> and has the possibility of high productivity and thus high
> profits.
I am rather less sanguine here. As Jacob Bronowski said of Leonardo
da Vinci: Leonardo wanted to fly *like a bird flies*, not
as a tourist class passenger on a commercial airplane. I
see your #1 as largely a "treason of the clerks", and #2 as
the outward and visible signs of the #1 inward and spiritual
grace.
>
> Some people break this down into Art and Craft with the
> Commercial being Craft, which is the way I was taught it
> in the 1950s.
This position unfairly demeans craftspersons, from
the Japanese Living National Treasures to our own American
fine craftspersons. *However*, I would not be surprised
if the denigration of craft vis-a-vis "art" was taught
in some schools which had art in their curriculum
at all.
[snip]
> What this all means Brad is that Art, the study of values in perceptual
> modalities has often been considered Universal in the past. But the
> problem was in assigning non universal status to all of the Arts that didn't
> fit
> the structures of that which is assigned Universality. It became and
> IMHO is still untenable. Nothing is Universal.
[snip]
Nothing is universal? Perhaps. But, perhaps, to paraphrase Emmanual
Levinas:
To be universal is to act as if one was universal.
[I have substituted: "universal" for Levinas's: "free".] Of
course there are no guarantees, and, just as the Savior may be
the passerby now crossing the street in front of us (--Hermann
Broch, _The Sleepwalkers_), so too may the Leader of the Free World
be a secularized avatar of the Antichrist. Obviously, to
curtail others' freedom [universality] in the name of one's
own, is not good, and what is good and what is not good do not come
with [incontestable] labels affixed telling us which is
which (how could they, if one aspect of the good is to
doubt everything?). But I believe the distinction between
straightforward *belief*, and asking the question of all
beliefs: What is this an instance of? [which is a less
off-putting way to refer to Husserl's "transcendental
reduction"], is decisive for the issue of "universality".
>
> Often the person that is an idiot in one situation is a leader in another.
> The only universal rule is, like Gunther Schuller pointed out, rules must
> have a structural integrity within the universe they inhabit. If you assign
> Universality to a small segment of Western thought then you create the
> perfect atmosphere for conflict since only force can make the small
> push the large aside and inhabit the whole.
As Hermann Broch wrote, a crucial problem of the West in the
20th Century has been the totalization of partial
value systems. If one considers (as I do) ethnicities
to be *irrationalities* (because they exist
prior to and especially in the "hope" of never
having to provide their justification, but live by
infecting each newborn as a semiotic virus!), then Broch's dictum follows:
Our task is to search for "a fordable passage between
the evil of the irrational and the evil of the superrational".
>
> Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
> The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble. Inc.
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
"Yours in discourse [in which there is
no *last word*...]...."
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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