260730: Humus
Stony words like ornaments adorn the silent graves. We scrutinize the potsherds' broken brushstrokes, fading.
I have not been to Palestine; nor to Cathay; nor to Kievan Rus.
I have not lived the shifting pledges of the passing generations. I have not heard the private words of the men in the boardroom, the Mandarin ministers of technology.
I am not an expert in tax policy. I lack adequate theories of: morality, desire, and will. I have heard the arguments, how the unhoused might be helped; and I have heard the counterarguments; and I have found them all convincing.
I cannot tell where the politicos' performance ends; or their private pragmatism starts. Nor can I tell gossip-as-testimony, from gossip as tactical take-out, from gossip as limited hang-out.
I float in a field of plausibles, which contradict and cohere, in unpredictable ways.
I cannot tell how the discourse is swayed and steered, by so many motivated speakers—all speakers motivated, but some more covert, more coordinated, in conspiracies of face, front, and definition... The ruses of the rhetor-Magicians...
I know not whether the New Ways of the White Man, or the Old Ways of the Brown, are better. I barely know what "better" means; and not in words; nor what the Old entailed. So many claims, about the past, have circulated widely. So many claims, about the past, I've cause to doubt.
I have no answers for: culture wars, sex wars, science wars, arms races. I know only that new ways are inevitable; that we must be still and still moving; and that we are in the thick of it, a constant competition for energy, power, and persistence. So we must be always, already, growing and gaining; each civilization a shark that's swimming...
And I know, and it puts hope in me, that a great source of power, for any Whole, lies in the empowerment, the coordination, the diversity, and the consent of its many parts. That monocultures, like tyranny, are brittle; that parasites evolve toward mutualisms; that aligned, enthused participants are more invested, more productive, and more powerful than those coerced.
This is the optimistic vantage: the history of moral progress as a history of economic progress; as the progressive realization of our own perspicuous interest. As our knowledge gains, so does the good.
What nothing I know. What nothing none of us know. Having moved past the humors, we make dormitive idols of the hormones. While our economists scratch loudly at chicken entrails, we proudly proclaim ourselves Modern.
The longer I live, the more I learn, the more complicated the pattern. The endless descriptions do not reduce, reduce much less than I'd hoped in my youth. The world etches images of itself, into itself, again. Map incorporates map incorporates map irreducibly. Text proliferates with each compression. And each attempt to class produces yet another instance.
Well, I do my best—to filter field, to sort some wheat from chaff and make a decent meal. But what toxins lie in questionable provenance, I cannot tell. And I have been wrong as long the days are long my friend.
...So put my faith in superclusters, in social cognition... In-forming co-ordinated, by diverse reportage; by aligned and rigorous sources...