1995
original indoctrination module subdivided 2001 04 29
original indoctrination module subdivided 2001 04 29
I obeyed my parents sending me to Sunday School willingly enough. Hell, it was once a week, for an hour. But there's something monstrous about being wrenched from your comfortable norm, your mother's bosom, at age four or so, and forced, leaving her on the sidewalk, to enter the most imposing building you've ever seen. You don't have to know that you'll go to jail if you refuse. You don't have to know what a jail is. You don't have to know that actually, it's your parents who would go to jail. You don't have to be aware of the jail, and the police, and their guns, and the army ... or the bombs ... to know ... Son, meet the State.
(Your parents in jail, the state would take you full-time via foster parents.)
The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy
frightens people, while the word state does not.
Joseph Sobran
frightens people, while the word state does not.
Joseph Sobran
And what were we told inside that institution? We were told that we were free. At school age you don't know to say, "Excuse me? When did the meaning change? How come the dictionaries have it wrong?" Freedom means doing what the state tells you or go to jail? The police, the guns, the bombs are to make you and keep you free. Be grateful you get to go home at night.
I remember ages five and six, standing on the front lawn at the end of summer, looking at the sidewalk and the road, thinking of the school reopening shortly, and wishing it would all go away: wishing I could be a caveman where I wouldn't have to be so free; wishing it despite knowing that I wouldn't have lasted five days as a caveman: puny, sickly me, with my bad sinuses.
Sally has complained to Chuck that she can't talk to the principal:"At least the school building listens," she says.
The building's speech balloon reads:
Unfortunately, kid, I've heard it all before.
pk reconstruction of a Charles Shultz cartoon
At home I didn't have to be "free" and do what the teacher said; I had to do what my parents said. They bore me, they fed me. I was helpless without them. It made sense.
(Are we helpless without the State? On the contrary: we are all but helpless with the state.)
But of course I went into the school. And returned. Again and again. Till I was thirty-something.
A reason religion is taught early is so that nearly no one will be
able to think analytically about their "beliefs" as an adult:
same reason we pledge the legions of the flag with bandaids on our knee
able to think analytically about their "beliefs" as an adult:
same reason we pledge the legions of the flag with bandaids on our knee
I took the school's measure by what I already knew and found it short. Nevertheless, some of its claims got absorbed and took the literalist and sectarian character of my Christianity. I took the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as given. I absorbed the basic assumptions: religious tolerance, separation of church and state, liberty, democracy ... As with my will to be a good Christian, a while passed before I noticed how few others followed suit. Hypocrisy is not confined among the religious.
"I mean that literally" really means
Please take my metaphor seriously.
Please take my metaphor seriously.
Religion is easy. They give it to you early. They offer it, with conviction, as the truth. My Sunday School teacher introduced me before puberty to epistemology (not that he used that word): a subject that thence became central to my life and to the material of this site.
In contrast, there's nothing Messianic about public school. They don't have to convert you. They don't have to convince you. They own your ass.
Are there really more than a handful of adults who believe as an adult what they were taught as a child? How could you tell? Is there any way to know rationally that the Pope (or Billy Graham. or the Dalai Lama.) is "sincere?" Can you really be sure they're not merely careerists with good acting ability?
There isn't any sure way with an individual. But there is with populations. Take demographic samples at the relevant rituals. If the "alpha males" are scrupulous in attending, the myth is believed by the culture. If attendance is relegated to women and children, it isn't.
The highest Druid priests would have once danced the May pole. Children couldn't have gotten near it. No one today would dream of wasting a little boy's time with such folderol. If we bother at all, the lessons are imposed on little girls. Oh, aren't they cute?
The Druids would have found such attitudes suicidal. The May Dance was serious magic [qv]. Why, without correct dancing around the pole by magicians of the highest qualifications, there would be no rain, there would be no summer, the sun would stay thralled in its winter weakness, there would be no crops, there would be no game ...
If Congress dressed as elves, the most senior senator leaving his hospital bed to attend, if sacrifices to Santa Claus were filched from the military budget, then our belief, as a culture, in Santa Claus would be genuine.
It's simple. Walk into a church. Look around. Disregard those you can tell are paid to be there. Need I say more?
(Of course, the president of the country or of the bank may be present. Though there may be no direct compensation, no salary, it does pay them to be there.)
Now consider the attributes of those who are directly compensated. Are any of them alphas? How many could be advantageously employed elsewhere who yet remain?
Now try it with a school. Who's there voluntarily?
Really? None? Who's paid to be there?
Still no alphas? Not even a Margaret Thatcher?
Try MIT. Ah, now we've found something the culture does take at least half seriously. You won't find a Napoleon, but you might find an Einstein: on either side of the lectern. Technology is the one area of education where the true nature of things is expected to be represented in the material. Otherwise, our bombs might not explode.
1999 06 02
An older version of this file proposed class action suits against church and school for their false teachings and against the state for its flagrant lack of correspondence between word and deed, theory and fact, map and territory. When I can get to it, I'll add a teaching module recommending that any honest pursuit of justice should require that all suits be examined for their potential as class action suits. What we have instead I characterize in a note on class action.My schooling stories over the decades got spread all over a few domains: Knatz.com, InfoAll.org. Had I not been arrested and censored, they'd now be gathering in a new domain on de-professionalizing as well as de-schooling. But as it is, unable to publish normally, or even as formerly, I'll move them all here, to my InfoAll blog.
Realize please, translation to a blog is translation downward: my domain hypertext was dynamic, with a zillion cross-references.
The State:
The state of course currently seems to be victorious in its famous but on-going conflict with the Church.
It hasn't always been so.
Thus far I've published only tiny installments on this important subject: Family vs. State, History of Magic ...
The state's promise of secular salvation is no truer nor more rationally based than the church's promise of spiritual salvation. I wouldn't bet two cents on our chance of seeing many more centuries unless we fire both of them.
Foster Parents:
My section on the Family has not yet gotten very far off the ground, but of course I think about this dilemma constantly. Sir David Attenborough now informs the literary and PBS viewing public that ostrich pairs bully other pairs to steal their chicks, sometimes winding up with a tribe of hundreds. He speculates that the pair's own chicks may be better protected in the crowd, like fish schooling. I'd like to see bird specialist Jared Diamond's speculations on the phenomenon. I wish I could confer with both those great scholars on the multiplicity of things the state might be up to in its behavior. For the moment, I hope more than one person agrees with me that kleptocracies should draw the line at theft from the family. I don't care if the parents are murdering their children: arrest them outside the home; not in it.
2001 04 29
It looks like I've changed my mind still further. Now I don't believe that crimes within the family should be any but the family's business wherever they're committed. Shooting a stranger while aiming at your wife in the mall is a different matter.Sectarian:
Voltaire said, These English: all those religions and only one sauce.
Christian Epistemology:
I give major treatment to the subject of epistemology throughout this site: it even has its own directory. Here I briefly expand the above reference:
What basis do we have for being Christians? Because of the Witness of others before us, passing on the story. Because Thomas doubted but was then able to put his finger in the hole through which Jesus had been nailed to the cross.
It's not very good epistemology, but it is epistemology.
"Alpha Males":
My reference is made not as much to biological gender as to social gender. In human culture some alpha males may be biologically female. Others, such as an underage king, may be chronologically immature: the ministers nevertheless kowtow to them. (Of course it's their royal personhood that's being honored; it's some regent whose judgment will be kowtowed to.)
Among hyenas all the alpha males are female. They have an enlarged clitoris which they use like a phallus: not for procreation, but for dominance. (See Synecdoche.) Don't look under Judge Judy's robe. Just notice that she's wearing the black costume of the kleptocratic sorcerer: she's "male." The jails are behind her, not above her.
Class action: Class vs. Individual Action:
Half a century ago the French made a comedy called The Seven Deadly Sins. A decade later they did it again. Seven short scenes by seven European directors, plus a framing scene. The Greed section of the original was a priceless bit of bawdy humor: a farmer's wife and the traveler story. Go out of your way to find it. The sequel also had a Greed which stays with me: this latter for the significance of its joke.
So. It's their last night of life. There they are in the filthy trench. Demoralized, diseased, doomed. They dream out loud about the spectacular whore in the town only a kilometer or so behind them. Alas, she charges 200 francs for the night. None of the hundred soldiers has much more than a fiftieth that amount.
Ah, but each of them has a few francs! They put up two a man and draw lots. Pierre wins. Lucky Pierre. He'll be killed in the morning but only after a good, human night of love.
The officers grant him a pass. He goes to town. The whore is as wonderful as promised. She likes him. They're talking on the pillow. She asks his story. He tells it.
"Oh, you poor sweetie," she says. She goes to her purse. A whore with a heart of gold. She gives him back his two francs!
The tobacco companies kill millions. One family collects $800,000. And that family is American, with US courts. Meantime, the tobacco companies kill tens of millions overseas. How can the Japanese or the Chinese sue a corporation in Virginia?
1999 02 13
I was just recalling Lumet's movie, The Verdict, to my friend Catherine. The Catholic hospital has falsified records after inappropriately serving a meal to a patient about to receive anesthesia: whoops, brain death. Milo O'Shea, Irish Catholic if there ever was one, and James Mason's Lucifer Lawyer, tell Paul Newman's drunk Irish Catholic lawyer-character to settle: "Take the money and run like a thief." But Newman's drunkenness is related to his once having had a shred of integrity.
He takes it to trial. He produces the nurse that silver-templed Dr. Welby had ordered to falsify the records. (What? or suffer eternal hell fire? I reproduce a fraction of Lumet's iteration of Catholicism to admit the presence of the film's (appropriately) heavy irony.) The jury awards crushing punitive damages. We all cheer.
Great. But they all go right back to what they were doing. All except the ruined nurse. The doctor isn't ruined: his hair was mussed. The hospital isn't ruined. The insurance company pays. The bills for the next brain-dead go up. The Church remains the Church. Boston is still incorporated, still taking taxes, and telling Bostonians what to do. What in hell are we cheering about?
Easier Said Than Done: Beasts in Cages
The Sunday School chapter of this section went up months ago and has changed little since my original draft. The rest has been increasingly bollixed as I try to juggle all the themes. Dissatisfied, I take it down in hope that a little revision will better coordinate my juggling. Unimproved, I'm then aghast that the material is merely absent.
Why don't children do what they're told? Why, given a choice, do they choose the wrong friends? the wrong wife? the wrong career? Because they're alive.
Why don't rivers flow the way the Army Corps of Engineers would like them to? Why does an aerial photograph of a city, even of a building, taken in 1998 not look like the models of the planners and architects of 1968? Because the river is something analogous to life; the city even more so; the building occupied and surrounded by life.
Why does my writing here refuse to fit the nice design that made sense to me a year ago? I repeat what George Bernard Shaw wrote of his characters: I have no more control over them than I have over my wife.
Yesterday I added a note to my Shakespeare thesis on new strides in ordering the authenticity of old manuscripts: Chaucer wrote something, a scribe copied it, another scribe copied the copy. Errors propagate, breeding new species of error.
Don't panic. It's life. Life is messy. You've got to change diapers. After all: human beings, self-described as sapiens, resplendent in reason (also self-described), looked at another way, are nothing but a stack of "mistakes" bacteria made billions of years ago. You could also say that the bacteria were a stack of mistakes non-life made billions of years before that.
It seemed so simple, such an elegant solution to the problem of how do I relate my work, especially my writing, to my life: to how I came by my themes. Talk about Church, then school, weave in how I came to see what was wrong with both—perceiving both to be symptomatic of the pathologies of our culture as a whole—relate what I learned that transfigured me into a post-Christian, post-democrat, one who believes that those of us who would survive on an intact planet must get rid of both church and state, and cap it off by discussing why I still drive myself, despite my poverty of external resources, to save from itself a public that I hold in contempt while it despises, when not ignoring, me.
But when I go to beard some of the core grit in its den, it growls and I back off. I rope it and it slips the noose. I think I've finally got it caged. But the cage doesn't fit, so I store it in the cellar. Meantime, escapees burble up elsewhere: on the site, but not in the cage I'd prepared. My "Teaching" essays
have taken over much of this part of the biography; my "conversion" to modern reason, or at least part of it, got sucked over into R. Buckminster Fuller notes to my writing as well as into a dozen other newer files.
2011 11 09 I've duplicated this module at pKnatz blog, K.'s target reincarnation. I'll delete here when complete there.
No comments:
Post a Comment