Ramble On

 

Republic of China (1912–1949) / Lin Fengmian/ Seated Lady

Today’s post was written yesterday while I was waiting for the second round of laundry to come out of the dryer.  It has kind of an odd genesis, because Sunday morning chores are a great time to think while still keeping occupied.  So this post has two fathers Willy and Ugo (Damn those Europeans and making me think!!!)

The first bit of background is from an NYT article about Wilhelm Reich that was written back in 2011 (BTW...fuck the NYT and their sneering, self-important posturing and oh-so-subtle character assasinations, what is really sad is that they now seem to even lack subtlety..  On top of that, they want to charge you to read articles from nine years ago..so much for the “newspaper of record”)

 "He was a nineteenth-century scientist; he wasn't a twentieth-century scientist. He didn't practice science the way scientists do today. He was a nineteenth-century mind who came crashing into twentieth-century America. And boom!"

The second was over at Ugo’s new place (Ugo, I still say you should have moved to a small-time provider.  Google is going to do the same for you on your new blog as you were afraid of them doing on your old blog).  Now, for some of you who choose read this piece of Ugo’s mind, the title itself will drive you into incandescent rage.  But Ugo hits on what I have been trying to say for a long time.  Just because someone disagrees with you, for the most part, what you see is a disagreement, not an embodiment of evil.  

The two go hand in hand.  You might not like the idea, those of you who have spent your life in the pursuit of the rational and scientific.  Because folks tend to use science as the same kind of club as the folks in religion use their faith.  I can see no difference.  Sorry if you get offended, but there it sits.  

Most human endeavors are not amenable to the tools of science.  They can be studied, but they aren’t really available to things like positive and negative controls and reproducibility.   We are a creature of judgement though.  We neatly categorize things into good and bad and once we make that decision, we choose to dehumanize those whose judgement has been found wanting. 

We are in a strange place, where we have been taught that the fulfillment of our desires is the main goal of life and that others should only think good thoughts about us.  We live in a world of make-believe equality and all of these things taken together require that we lash out at those whose views from their outsider perspective seem to oppose ours.  

We are in a strange place here in America.  I think that how we treated a German Psychiatrist in the 1940’s might offer us a view as to who we have become.  From a quick browsing of Doktor Reich’s corpus of work.  I think that, aside from his still unproven theories, he made a great deal of sense on a philosophical level. 

But views outside of the tainted flavor of science being currently practiced are not welcome. It appears that they weren’t then either.  What we have is an attempt to rigidly define orthodoxy and a concurrent effort to silence heretics. I can’t imagine Democracy surviving if either of these become fact.