Doing as you’ve been done by

golden rule

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“… ardent feminists … seem so bent on treating men the way they have taken exception to being treated by men.” (klewso, 11 March 2013, commenting on Destroy the Point by Helen Razer)  

Jesus made no copyright claim in respect of the Golden Rule (see Matthew 7:12). In his view, it succinctly sums up the teachings of the Torah and the Prophets. We also have Socrates on the subject: “Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.” And his words carry the imprint of the Vedic tradition: “This is the sum of duty. Do not unto others that which would cause you pain if done to you.” And although there are those who – for a range of reasons, semiotic and otherwise – take issue with the Golden Rule, it is nevertheless widely accepted as valuable and worthwhile.

Monsieur Klewso’s comment actually begins: “What I find most intriguing about ardent feminists …” Perhaps ‘intriguing’ is not, in fact, the most accurate description of his response to being bad-mouthed; it certainly doesn’t describe my response.

Razer herself pulls no punches: “Women are not nicer. Women are not a civilising influence. Women are just as capable of avarice and stupidity as anyone. … Women are not gifted, either socially or biologically, of anything special. If we believe that they are, then we must also accept the possibility that the gender could be marked with unpleasant characteristics.” (Destroy the Point)

In a more recent post, Razer asks: “Why should we think masculinity is all bad? It is a simple question but WHY are we still trying to privilege ‘feminine’ qualities over masculine ones when so many feminine qualities are shit?” (Paglia, Pugilism and Pants-less Threat, 08 January 2014)

There seems to be a growing public taste for rudeness, vulgarity, profanity, and other forms of verbal abuse – atheists and ‘fag-hating’ fundamentalists, ardent feminists and so-called ‘everyday people’ alike. And it seems to have arisen from the the same source from which we dug up “zero tolerance”, “war on terror”, “rape culture” …

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Helen Razer’s post, Destroy the Point, first appeared on her own blog, Bad Hostess, on 09 March 2013. It was republished two days later by Crikey. 

The Socratic and Vedic versions of the Golden Rule (together with an interesting and wide-ranging selection from other sources) are to be found on GoodReads. 

The “golden rule” image appears in an article titled, Hurting Others Causes You Pain: Golden Rule Validated, under the banner, “NLP Discoveries with Mike Budrant”, on Psych Central.  

The truth lies elsewhere

In philosophy and logic, the liar paradox or liar’s paradox … is the statement “this sentence is false.” Trying to assign to this statement a classical binary truth value leads to a contradiction … (Wikipedia)

The Epimenides paradox (circa 600 BC) has been suggested as an example of the liar paradox, but they are not logically equivalent. The semi-mythical seer Epimenides, a Cretan, reportedly stated that “The Cretans are always liars.” (ibid)

St Paul, writing to Titus in Crete, reminds him: “One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.” (Titus 1:12, KJV)

St Jerome, in a Homily on Psalm 115 (in protestant versions, Psalm 116), further compounds the issue:

I said in my alarm, “Every man is a liar!” [Psalm 116:11] The Hebrew text varies a little: I said in my alarm, “Every man is a lie!” for the meaning of the word ZECAM is lie. … There is no truth in our substance; there is only shadow and in a certain sense a lie – | I mean in our corporeal being, not in the soul. (The Homilies of Saint Jerome, Volume 1, pp293-4)

It is one thing to devise sentences that illustrate mathematical or logical principles. But “classical binary truth values” do not provide a complete understanding of the way things work – and that’s something a writer needs to learn.

Our lives are based on what is reasonable and common sense; truth is apt to be neither. (Christmas Humphreys)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there. (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)

Nothing but lies comes out of my mouth. There I’ve done it again. (I keep saying it’s a Zen saying, but I’ve not managed to find it anywhere since I first found it, many years ago.)

Nothing more than useful nonsense

Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ben Richards (1947)

Thus, even the philosophical achievements of the Tractatus itself are nothing more than useful nonsense; once appreciated, they are themselves to be discarded. The book concludes with the lone statement: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Tractatus 7) This is a stark message indeed, for it renders literally unspeakable so much of human life. As Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague Frank Ramsey put it, “What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.” It was this carefully-delineated sense of what a logical language can properly express that influenced members of the Vienna Circle in their formulation of the principles of logical positivism. Wittgenstein himself supposed that there was nothing left for philosophers to do. True to this conviction, he abandoned the discipline for nearly a decade. (Garth Kemerling) 

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The “spam queue” for this blog usually contains a high percentage of nonsense – including insincere and irrelevant compliments (often couched in broken English), or handfuls of disjunct excerpts nefariously grabbed from unrelated and unacknowledged sources – and including links to sites offering goods and services of no interest or value to me. 

Once in a while, I find the material interesting – such as this excerpt from what turned out to be (thank-you, Google) an essay by Garth Kemerling dealing with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on a site calling itself Philosophy Pages. 

These meaningless surfaces

Pieter Jansz Saenredam: Interior of the Buurkerk, Utrecht (1645)

In the Dutch still life, according to Roland Barthes, “There are objects wherever you look, on the tables, the walls, the floor:  pitchers overturned, a clutter of baskets, a bunch of vegetables, a brace of game, milk pans, oyster shells, glasses, cradles. … Still-life painters like Van de Velde or Heda always render matter’s most superficial quality: sheen.”

Pieter Jansz Saenredam, “a minor master who may be as deserving of literary renown as Vermeer …, painted neither faces nor objects, but chiefly vacant church interiors … [which] calmly reject the Italian overpopulation of statues … [and] the horror vacui professed by other Dutch painters. Saenredam is in effect a painter of the absurd … To paint so lovingly these meaningless surfaces, and to paint nothing else – that is already a modern aesthetic of silence.”

A paradox according to Barthes, “Saenredam articulates by antithesis the nature of classical Dutch painting.” Barthes’ point is that, in the work of Capelle, Van de Venne, Ruysdael, et al, we see that “men inscribe themselves upon space, immediately covering it with familiar gestures, memories, customs, and intentions.”

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Barthes, Roland. 1982. A Barthes Reader : Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. [Comprises 29 selections from the writings of Barthes, preceded by Sontag’s Introduction.]

The citations given in this post come from ‘The World as Object’, which is the fourth of Sontag’s selections from the writings of Barthes.

‘The World as Object’ (1953), from Critical Essays. Translated by Richard Howard; copyright © 1972 by Northwestern University Press. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Translated from the French Essais critiques, copyright © 1964 by Éditions du Seuil.

For a larger image of this painting, and of other works by Saenredam, see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Jansz._Saenredam

According to Wikipedia Commons, Interior of the Buurkerk at Utrecht (oil on panel, 58.1 × 50.8 cm) was painted in 1645, and is now to be found at Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

The fundamental tendency of matter

Legion (cover)

The human brain, three pounds of tissue, held more than a hundred billion brain cells and five hundred trillion synaptic connections. It dreamed and wrote music and Einstein’s equations, it created the language and the geometry and engines that probed the stars, and it cradled a mother asleep through a storm while it woke her at the faintest cry from her child. A computer that could handle all of its functions would cover the surface of the earth.

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The hundreds of millions of years of evolution from paramecium to man didn’t solve the mystery, thought Kinderman. The mystery was evolution itself. The fundamental tendency of matter was toward a total disorganization, toward a final state of utter randomness from which the universe would never recover. Each moment its connections were becoming unthreaded as it flung itself headlong into the void in a reckless scattering of itself, impatient for the death of its cooling suns. And yet here was evolution, Kinderman marvelled, a hurricane piling up straw into haystacks, bundles of ever-increasing complexity that denied the very nature of their stuff. Evolution was a theorem written on a leaf that was floating against the direction of the river. A Designer was at work. So what else? It’s as plain as can be. When a man hears hoofbeats in Central Park, he shouldn’t be looking around for zebras. (William Peter Blatty, in Legion [pp104-5]) 

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Originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1983, and subsequently turned into what Rinker calls “a more than satisfactory sequel … Exorcist III (which, mercifully, has nothing to do with Exorcist II: The Heretic).” Legion appeared in a Tor paperback edition in 2011 (Tom Doherty Associates, New York).

Striding resolutely into catastrophe

Noam Chomsky, photgraphed in Vancouver, Canada (2004) by Duncan Rawlinson

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We need not stride resolutely into catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders. (Noam Chomsky) 

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion. (Noam Chomsky)

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival. (Noam Chomsky)

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See also:

The Wit and Wisdom of Noam Chomsky

Chomsky.Info – The Chomsky Website

Tolerance

other (15 Dec 2011)

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To the ordinary being, others often require tolerance. To the highly evolved being, there is no such thing as tolerance, because there is no such thing as other. (from Hua hu Ching, Chapter 15)

Set aside all involvements

Dōgen watching the moon. Hōkyōji monastery, Fukui prefecture, circa 1250

Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavour. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire. (Dōgen)

This morning I got up at around 6.40am, said my prayers, fed the birds, ate my breakfast … all very much as usual. Then, after listening to the 8 o’clock news on the radio, I slipped my shoes off, climbed back into bed (fully clothed) and fell asleep.

The sound of a voice awakened me. It was the midday news bulletin.

That’s one way to set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest, I suppose.

Give up waiting

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Give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting … snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be and enjoy being.

(Eckhart Tolle, in Practicing The Power of Now, page 53)

The image appears in Wikipedia’s article about John Lennon, who was in the habit of saying such things as “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

What matters most in life?

This one comes (via Facebook) from C’mere D Cat