Church In Muncie - Ignorance - Frankenstein - Jimmy Carter Died

I started the morning proper with three pieces from Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Studies. Examining modern journalism is at the heart of What Happened to People Magazine? and "The Kids Are Too Soft": Generational Bullshit Thinking about Work Ethic. The last, This is How Much America Still Hates Women, is about the last election, but has the most hopeful thing I have read about Trump's win.

They feed on our exhaustion. They expect our capitulation. They rely on us behaving like them: willing to ignore or cause others’ suffering to preserve our own power. They hate us, and they think we will learn to hate ourselves, too. But they also underestimate us. We are stubborn and unruly, annoying and persistent, bitter and terrified. And unlike them, we are not animated by fear or cruelty. We are audacious in our faith that a better world is possible. That faith is not rational, and the last eight years has consistently rattled it. But it endures, as it has endured for hundreds of years. We must not be the ones to lose it.

I attended St. Barnabas of Indiana in Muncie for today's liturgy. Much smaller than St. George's in Fishers, but it feels that there is a chance for a community to grow. If you are in the Muncie/Anderson area, check out the Schedule and visit, please. For those wondering what is Orthodox Christianity, the website provides a neat explanation:

Our mission is to bring the ancient Christian Faith to the Muncie/Andreson area, and to serve the local community. We accomplish this firstly through prayer, blessings, and bringing Holiness to the lives of all. We are here to communicate the Faith that Jesus Christ taught, the Apostles preach, and that the Church Fathers kept. Therefore, we are bringing the beliefs and practices that Christians have followed from the beginning. And so, we see the Head and Leader of this Church, and all our lives, is the Lord Jesus Christ.

A few photos of the Church's alter, sanctuary, bookstore, and meeting areas 

It is located at 4102 N. Rosewood, Muncie.

I had a coughing jag today just after the church services, and I was kind of tired when I got home. So, I am behind again on getting stuff done! Like this post.

Deciding against cooking, I ordered a sandwich from Domino's.

Different takes on two novels I have read are worth passing along. 

While it has been many years now since I read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, my recollection is a positive one of a horrific story, but I am foggy on the characters. I disagreed with the verdict passed in Ramlal Agarwal's Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: The story and the storytelling, but I think the argument worth reading.

The MIT Reader is not the obvious choice forum to find an essay equating science with magic. Yet, that is the danger warned of (or, so I read it as a warning) in Alfred Nordmann's Victor Frankenstein’s Technoscientific Dream of Reason.

So the creature is not a product of modern science, and yet we fancy Victor as a mad scientist in a laboratory filled with fumes and sparks from modern apparatus. How is it that this premodern mystical alchemist appears so contemporary today?

***

Mary’s tale is not one of modern science. On the contrary, it tells the limits of science and dreams the dream of technoscience, a dream that gains power in the plastic world of Frankenmaterials.

Science is the theoretical knowledge produced by those who seek to describe or represent the world and are aided in this quest by technology. The person who pursues this science is Homo depictor, the Representer; technoscience is technological knowledge produced by those who seek to control how things work together and are aided by theory in this effort; the person who pursues technoscience is Homo faber, the Maker.

Science seeks to understand the world to the extent and in the ways that humans can comprehend it. Because the human mind is limited, science is essentially modest — the transmutation of matter and the making of gold from base metals are not on its agenda.

Getting around to reading Frankenstein took decades for me. Prison gave me time and opportunity. Until now, I never thought to equate Frankenstein with Doctor Faustus. Not Faust, Mary Shelley gives her protagonist the redemption Goethe gave to Faust. No, Frankenstein is destroyed by his monster, just as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is dragged to hell by his demons.

The MIT Reader also takes on ignorance with Daniel R. DeNicola's Plato’s Cave and the Stubborn Persistence of Ignorance.

...To think this through, I want to reverse Plato’s approach: Rather than describing how we may know the truth, let us consider how we recognize ignorance.

Among several things the law taught me, one was of presumptions. They are always rebuttable. Yes, we can assume certain things, but just as easily we know there are exceptions to our assumptions. Ignorance exists. Assumptions need probing for evidence of their inapplicability. I notice this difference in thinking when dealing with my PO. He has tripped over his presumptions several times when dealing with me. He spoke with one of my neighbors, who did not know whether I was living in this apartment; the PO then declared that I was living elsewhere. That my laptop was here, did not matter. Also not mattering, was that my manuscripts were all here, and so was my CPAP machine. (If I recall correctly, he did not even look in the bedroom, where the CPAP is located, before declaring that I was pulling some trick on him, but the boxes with my manuscripts were directly in his field of vision.) He thinks that CC is living with me on the basis I stored some of her stuff here without examining the bathroom to see if there was more than one toothbrush, or the bedroom to see if she was keeping any clothes here. If I were to presume as he does, then I would think he must know only green-toothed, shaggy women with only one set of clothes. (He does not read this blog, so he would not have seen my entry where CC brought her stuff over.)

So, let us pause to amend a fundamental point: ignorance may be recognized and ascribed only from the perspective of knowledge, and the knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we recognize and serves to characterize the ignorance and its importance. This is why we readers of Plato can recognize that cavern as a place of profound ignorance, lacking in truth and sustained by deception.

Utter ignorance, however, for which the dictionary offers the term ignoration, is yet more profound: The prisoners in Plato’s Cave do not know what they do not know; they do not even know that they do not know. They dwell in ignorance, but cannot recognize it. Ignoration is thus a predicament, a trap — one that is not comprehended by those who are caught in it and dwell there. In a sense, they are not in a place at all: Theirs is rather a placelessness in which one doesn’t even know one is lost.

Fortunately, this trap, like a Chinese finger puzzle, has a simple solution: learning. And yet, it is remarkable that an escape occurs — how does one come to learn what one does not know one does not know? After all, the prisoners have no ability to free themselves; more to the point, they have no motivation to escape, since even that desire would presuppose a sense of possibility they lack. Their bondage seems natural to them; it is their form of life; nothing better calls to them. They cannot see their ignorance as ignorance. As the influential Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazzali put it: “Heedlessness is an illness which the afflicted person cannot cure himself.”

This is as good as any explanation for this blog:

But that explains only why the prisoner would not seek to escape. What explains his resistance to freedom and the need for coercion? One factor is that, in general, human beings tend to prefer cognitive comfort, the reinforcement of the familiar, to an encounter with the unknown. Learning may disrupt our cognitive comfort; it displaces us. Education requires us to revise or abandon our routines, recipes, and rituals — life as we know it — and to do so we must overcome a kind of natural cognitive inertia. A place of ignorance can be a sturdy nest of cognitive comfort for those who dwell within.

Plato’s benighted cave dwellers believe they already know the important truths — “Then the prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.” We know, of course, that their “knowledge” is not worthy of the name; it is no more than pointless familiarity with contrived images. And when forced to widen their experience and confront their illusory situation, they are nonplussed, irritated, and even pained. We understand. It is painful for any of us to accept the revelation that our precious “knowledge” is false, that we have been deluded, and to confront the radical implications: assumptions discarded, insights misguided, principles betrayed, relationships undone, lives altered, and worlds shattered. False knowledge can be sticky; it is difficult to remove it and all it implies from our worldview — even when we acknowledge its falsity. Belief can be a bulwark against learning. The ignorance that hides in false knowledge is disguised as the very learning it defies. 

 Being alive for me means learning. The dead are truly ignorant - or so we should hope. Once upon a time, suicide appealed to me for that reason - the complete ignorance that would be ever so peaceful when separated from the pain and tribulations and responsibilities of life. I am healthier in body and mind now, so I no longer desire the ignorance of oblivion. Nor am I feeling trapped by the tawdriness I felt in those days. Learning something new keeps me interested in living. Embrace the weirdness of existence! Which also means encouraging humility (not a virtue really known to the Greeks) and keeping one's sense of humor.

To ascribe ignorance as a mental state is to imply a capacity for learning, which in turn implies a capacity for knowing. A potential for knowledge is embedded in ignorance. Moreover, the ascription of ignorance is relational; it is made from the vantage point of someone’s knowledge about the lack of knowledge in an otherwise knowing creature. Ignorance and knowledge are concepts that cannot stand alone: They presuppose each other. It seems as convoluted to describe absolute and complete ignorance as is to describe absolute and complete knowledge. Ignoration and omniscience are comprehendible only as limiting concepts.

 I was about to knock for the night, when I checked the feed on Google News, and saw: Former President Jimmy Carter dies at 100. I cast my first presidential vote for Jimmy Carter. He is one of two such votes I still am proud of.

I finished The Sandman last night. I start tonight on Tokyo Swindler. Since it is in subtitles, I will have to watch it instead of just listening to it.

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