Cello Player.
“But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed.
“Auden’s poem closes with comic (but not really) advice for humanists: Thou shalt not sit/ With statisticians nor commit / A social science … Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms … If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd; / Read The New Yorker, trust in God …”
(Ross Douthat, “Oh, the Humanities!” NYTimes, 8-8-2018)
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
Wikipediaphilia
It’s a boon to have fingertip access to all knowledge. I can quote from the Critique of Pure Reason hands down. But many times another person pivots continually to smart phone in order to referee a fact fight during just a conversation.
I’m increasingly happy to luxuriate in ignorance. A really fine strand of thought isn’t necessarily advanced by going granular on specifics.
“In Praise of Dreams” by Jan Garbarek, the Norwegian saxophonist, features a piece called “Cloud of Unknowing.”
The phrase “cloud of unknowing” has a bracing resonance. Unknowing isn’t the same as ignorance. A cloud of it contrasts with, say, a “cloud of indifference.”
Perhaps the two clouds pit fecund uncertainty against incurious certitude. Perhaps one is conciliating, the other pugilistic. Perhaps one fosters circumspection, the other opprobrium.
Perhaps I Googled “origin of universe” and the search god returned “not found” from the stomping grounds of unknowing. But perhaps it returned an Okefenokee of conviction from where doubt goes to die.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]