Bowers Chapter 6
I like a lot of the points that he makes about the current state of culture and wisdom in the modern world, and how technology and science (scientism) have made an impact on that. I do still think he is selling short abstract thinking (especially philosophy), print and the West in general. I agree that data is over emphasized and the limitations of it are something most people are blissfully ignorant of. (We are at the same time ignoring all of the negatives that can come about along with the positives of convenience that we enjoy.) And I agree that it will come back to bite us. I agree that profits and convenience have taken over as the dominant values that influence how we (and especially businesses) make decisions. And I agree that it will come back to bite us. Culture is not much more than entertainment these days, and wisdom is outsourced to computers that run algorithms and sift data. These are things that need to be corrected, and he offers some good ideas in that respect.
However, I think he misses a whole host of elements that are in western culture that could be taken up and emphasized to help rehabilitate it and instead he goes to non-western cultures for solutions. Yes, analytic philosophy is abstract and tries to neatly categorize and explain things, and in doing so it misses a lot that it doesn’t even realize it is missing: unknown unknowns. But that is not all analytic philosophy. Even more so, there is the continental tradition as well which in many ways tries to keep the whole and the emergent in our minds as it inquires into the particulars. Nietzsche and Heidegger are two of my favorites, and they have elements of the whole and even a kind of mysticism to them, especially Heidegger’s later works after the ‘turn.’ Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy talks about the irreconcilable tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian, a relationship that constantly needs to be re-negotiated to provide a ground for thought and society. He talks about the fact that everything things is absolutely individual and unique and that language is a lie that makes us think that things are able to be put into categories with labels in his essay Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. It is almost the total opposite of Bowers whole, but it can have basically the same affect: make all categorization and labeling provisional and in constant need of revision and updating. Derrida definitely undermines the ridged framework that Bowers is against, and even thinkers like Kant and Hegel can be read to go against it to certain degrees. (With Kant we can never know things in themselves; we can only know them as humans know them. With Hegel things are essentially historically relative and we can really only be expected to know things according to our time in history. Both leave space for continual revision and re-evaluation of how we categorize, label and even see the world.) Given possibilities like these, I think it is not necessary and even more risky to try to import non-Western systems into the contemporary Western context to try to fix what are very Western problems. (I can’t find the source or a quote now, but I remember reading about Heidegger’s correspondence with at least one Japanese philosopher and how he found Easter thought interesting but was insistent that the way forward for the West had to come out of the Western tradition and not from an outside source. I very much agree with that.)
It is possible that he is avoiding giants of the Western tradition because there is so much involved in reading, interpreting and understanding them. The ideas I offered above are by no means uncontroversial takes on the writers I mentioned. The Western tradition (as far as I know it compared to the East) has a much more complex and even ridged way or dealing with thought traditions and texts. (But maybe the east has a tradition and it is not a print one, so those of us on the outside simply miss it.) It is not easy to get into the discussion that makes up Western philosophy, or to get into some of the texts; Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger are not always accessible to the everyday reader. Maybe that is why he jumps to the Eastern and indigenous traditions which tend to be more poetic and (at least to those of us that are not part of the Eastern tradition) less burdened with a complex (printed?) history or interpretation and discussion. But are they really less debated and interpreted? Or is he simplifying them to present them as such, and we just don’t realize it because we are ignorant of the tradition and culture they come from? I am not sure, but I am suspicious.
posted by Zophorian at 9:56 AM
2 Comments:
I completely agree with your critique of this chapter. While I have an affinity for the wisdom traditions of the subcontinent and East Asia and *should* be sympathetic with his argument, I found his treatment somewhat shallow. There are many "Western" traditions that are non/anti-materialistic and ecologically-minded (e.g. Christianity and Stoicism). (And, as you indicate, there are many Animistic, Confucian, Hindu, and Buddhist practitioners who are materialistic.) The ideology of corporate capitalism, scientism, and computer futurism have vocal opponents with strong ideological roots in the West. So I am curious to read the last chapter where Bowers outlines some concrete steps for societal change.
I liked this claim: "Many of these wisdom traditions were, and continue to be for some indigenous cultures, the basis for mentoring youth in how to live a mindful existence and to take responsibility for the well-being of the environment and future generations" (p. 69). Without this type of overt instruction, "[Digital culture] can lead to the form of consciousness that reflects the adolescent stage of development promoted by corporate capitalism where everything is exciting, continually changing, free from long-term consequences, and seemingly in endless abundance" (p. 74). I share this concern with an unthinking lifestyle. But here I am reminded that the crime of unthinking is as old as our species. I suppose the difference now is the degree of impact we have on our ecosystems.
Throughout the polemic, Bowers talks about the cultural commons, and frankly I didn't know what he meant by this term. Finally, he defines it: "The cultural commons represent the face-to-face and inter-generational gift economy that cannot be digitized because of its taken for granted status in daily experience" (p. 67). Puzzling - I'm trying to wrap my head around it. I know what a gift economy is (having read Mauss). Basically, I think he's saying that we learn things from each other in face-to-face, reciprocal interactions. Then the learning becomes part of our worldview (i.e. operating assumptions about self, others, and the world). Then we act on those assumptions without necessarily being aware that we are acting on those assumptions. Zo, Didn't you mention tacit knowledge at some point? (Polanyi: "We know more than we can tell.") Is the cultural commons simply our tacit knowledge that we've embodied from our most important face-to-face relationships? It can't be. Is it the collective consciousness or collective unconscious? I'm at a loss.
I am not sure if I did write about Polanyi, but it has certainly been on my mind. I think the cultural commons is in part that, but it has to be more. I think tacit knowledge is something that gets lost as everything is made into data and we let technology take over tasks more and more. That is connected with the unthinking lifestyle, which is not bad in itself. Traditions are things we used to do without thinking about them, but they evolved and were adaptive: they helped us adapt to our surroundings. The problem is (and you get this with the impact that we have on ecosystems, and everything not as we have the power of technology behind us as we act in and change the world) that things are changing faster than an unconscious tradition can keep up with them. We are moving beyond our ability to adapt and our traditions systems of adaptation are not fast enough to keep up. We have power to change so much. Some would say that that means we have to think everything through carefully. That is kind of true, but I think to that we can never think things through enough, so we will never be able to see the full impact of our actions before hand when we have so much power via technology.
AJ, you focus on the positive pole of his system: collective commons. I am drawn to and puzzled by his negative pole: abstraction. I don't think he defines either clearly and both seem troublesome to me. I think my comments on the last chapter will start, and maybe focus, on that.
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