increasing heterogeneity? You lost me, since homogeneity has been the social shift since the 80s at least. As someone who had allergies as a child, and recognized that it was all chance and accident, I intend to revel in some schadenfreude at your social darwinism's karmic revenge.
It would be my pleasure to attempt a clarification: I grant you the reality of homogeneity at a certain level of conceptualization/experience. It's undeniable, especially if you're looking at economic trends, corporate consolidation, concentration of wealth, integration of economic/governing structures, and, if you look at things like loss of biodiversity, extinction rates, loss of cultural diversity on a macro scale, ie loss of languages, and, you can see it if you look at certain design or composition trends in interior design, architecture, music, literature. BUT, at the same time, and this is for me the more crucial dimension, there is differentiation operating more decisively within larger superficially homogenized groups, maybe increasing divergence would be more precise; the trouble is that the macro or habitually perceived layers of the homo obscure clear perception of the hetero; this is an underreported aspect of the social and cognitive crisis I allude to.
For instance, you can say things like "A large percentage of people are in this same basic economic situation, and depend on the same small number of these consolidated economic suppliers and cultural producers" and there's truth to that. But once you examine the homogeneous group from a closer perspective, you see many more divisions, atomistic, isolating processes at work, sub of sub of sub cultural divergences; people with hardly anything concretely in common because of the specifics of their occupation and consumption habits.
One example would be digital technology, phone use, social media; it's an obvious one, but it's salient; on one level we can observe of a household, five people, they're all on their phones all the time, scrolling, consuming, interacting with remote individuals, pseudo communities, etc, and then we can bring in tech industry consolidation, as well as design structures, market capture, flattening, gamification, etc, all well and good; but what I intend by heterogeneity in this context is that all these consolidated or flattened individuals are at the same time increasingly incapable of modeling other minds, of entering into proper relations of exchange and intuition with each other; heterogeneity in this sense isn't a neutral differentiation that is obvious and affirmed; it is concomitant with atomization, and one of its effects is that it dulls the perception of its own workings.
Another example that's surely relevant to much tripe you encounter on online or even in print: the perception of homogeneity in publishing, that everything is just, say, self absorbed autofiction, or narrated in first person, because there's no imagination, and everyone sounds the same and says the same thing, because the publishing industry has undergone extreme consolidation, and there only five big publishers, etc. Even though, on some level we know there's a dizzying assortment of authors, with radically divergent voices, styles, working across multiple genres, mixing up craft standards, eschewing or reworking traditions, doing all the things that a certain repetitious mode of discourse always claims isn't being done.
When I worked for the post office, I delivered to different routes day by day, and it was so stark, just how different were the streets, the neighborhoods, the houses, and then the kinds of mail and packages I delivered depending on the exact kind of neighborhood. And these were often in places right next to or right on top of each other, but it was strikingly clear that these people of different classes, ethnicities, races, though they were all affected in a sense by homogenizing forces, probably couldn't begin to understand how the other lived, how they felt and thought, what they believed and valued.
I have to confess that I didn't really understand your explanation of death in terms of sociological complexity - surely if anything is pre- and asocial it's the apperception of death that comes with a physical awareness of one's physical weakness and mortality.
Would love to chat with you re Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on that, or even that great satire White Noise where fear of death becomes a central (social/asocial ?) preoccupation.
Alright, first grant me a little leeway as this argument is more speculative, not intended as dogmatic even if the tone is a little stern. I'll try to break it down further: Let's assume a primordial survival instinct or will to live in pretty much all plants and animals, all living beings at least. The beginning assumption of my argument is that for most of these living beings, the will to survive is automatic, and the fear of death is situational/immediate ie there's really no such thing as brooding on death. I would go as far as to say that awareness of one's physical weakness and mortality is also assumed too quickly, and that's why I'm bringing in the dimension of social complexity. Physical weakness and mortality are not givens of awareness, even in relation to life and death struggles, fights to the death (hegel is wrong here, the struggle to the death does not create social divisions, master and slave, or awareness of frailty, it's the other way around, the social bonds come first, keep in mind we're talking about the register of meaning, not just the fact of the matter, my point is always related to this; for death to be meaningful there must be people whose passing matters, for there to be people who matter, etc); survival instincts do not necessarily come with any component of consciousness. Now, what I observe is that for the most part, with maybe an exception here or there (octopuses are extremely intelligent but mostly asocial and short lived) intelligence and individuation correlate strongly with certain kinds of social organization, and individuation and socialization imply each other; we become individuals through our relations to others, the more depth/complexity in the relation, the stronger the sense of self as bound, embedded, etc;
Now, death enters as not just immediate threat but as horizon of meaning through the experience of the death of the other, and we can only experience that death as meaningful if the bond is sufficiently strong ie the socialization is sufficiently advanced/stable; finally the loss of the other is translated into the thought of the loss of the self, ie not just fear of impending destruction ie fight or flight response ie nervous system automation but rather thematic structure of existing as this particular being, existing as a possible non being, like the others.
Think of the elephants, whom I didn't mention incidentally, but intended as crucial examples; their memory is tied to their awareness of death, which is tied to their social behavior; and their memorializing death conscious habits give them a stronger resemblance to humanity than is often appreciated. "they never forget!" is anthropomorphically trivialized, obscuring what I think are the underlying links between memory, death and socialization in the specific sense of meditatively aware, consciously swaying back and forth in time, mourning what is lost and anticipating loss to come.
And, if you're still along for this ride, try to appreciate the anti heideggarian thrust of this argument. In his being toward death, death is individualizing; death is my ownmost possibility, and only I can die as the being that I am, no one can die for me. For Heidegger, the fact that others die, that "one" dies is a trifling reduction, or a dodge of the death that is mine; on the other hand, I claim pretty much the opposite, that apart from strongly felt threats, attacks, diagnoses of terminal illness, advanced old age, in which we do experience mortal terror, the idea of my own death is a nonstarter, it's totally abstract, it's given lip service but mostly does nothing, while the death of others is devastating, so long as we're bonded to them, but for that to be the case there must be the right social context, and so on
Thanks so much for that very complete explanation, Caleb. I'm much too brain fogged at present but I'll get stuck into it tomorrow AM, looks fascinating.
Just got back to this after several days stewing in heat funk. Forgot completely that we still had this chat open.
So thanks for developing these ideas, which indeed are as you say very speculative. I'm getting the anti-Heidegger tenor of your argument and it's certainly true that I couldn't argue against it and maybe it would be pointless to do so.
I could only point out what you know already, that our own notions of mortality in good health and youth have quite a different feel to our sense of the same when we're suffering illness and above all when in a terminal decline. I know from personal experience that those on their death bed experience their imminent death based not so much on beliefs in the abstract rather than their lived experience, so an atheist with a sense of an authentically-lived life is more serene than a believer with unquiet conscience. This tends to uphold Heidegger more than anything - I wonder how that old guy went out himself?
My other experiences are a fairly large number of deaths of young mentally disabled people over the past twenty years - people without much interiority, you might say preconscious, and in those cases (if they are relieved of physical pain) they experience death as an animal would, very much without anxiety and struggle.
I think quite a lot about people like this when imagining human life without social baggage or attachment, and it may seem odd to say but I've learned a lot from them philosophically, tending in my mind to prove Heidegger/Husserl/Merleau-Ponty right, at least as far as I understand them (my mind is very poor on abstract reasoning which is why I go for phenomenology etc).
In the end I've ended up in a place where in metaphysics I'm a Parmemides-Spinoza monist, in sociopolitical areas a dialectical materialist and in everything else a zen phenomenologist, which is to say a pretty messy combo.
From birth, we are on the path to death. All that matters is the journey.
Thanks for another great piece! I’ll be reading again as your ability to compress multiple ideas into one sentence leaves me dizzy at times.
It's my pleasure. Indeed, the journey is what counts, and yet it's so difficult to properly appreciate
Here I was about to write something about beer. Bravo forever.
Thanks, Daisy. Ain’t nothing with writing about beer either
Georges bataille type shit
You know I’ve got that accursed share
increasing heterogeneity? You lost me, since homogeneity has been the social shift since the 80s at least. As someone who had allergies as a child, and recognized that it was all chance and accident, I intend to revel in some schadenfreude at your social darwinism's karmic revenge.
It would be my pleasure to attempt a clarification: I grant you the reality of homogeneity at a certain level of conceptualization/experience. It's undeniable, especially if you're looking at economic trends, corporate consolidation, concentration of wealth, integration of economic/governing structures, and, if you look at things like loss of biodiversity, extinction rates, loss of cultural diversity on a macro scale, ie loss of languages, and, you can see it if you look at certain design or composition trends in interior design, architecture, music, literature. BUT, at the same time, and this is for me the more crucial dimension, there is differentiation operating more decisively within larger superficially homogenized groups, maybe increasing divergence would be more precise; the trouble is that the macro or habitually perceived layers of the homo obscure clear perception of the hetero; this is an underreported aspect of the social and cognitive crisis I allude to.
For instance, you can say things like "A large percentage of people are in this same basic economic situation, and depend on the same small number of these consolidated economic suppliers and cultural producers" and there's truth to that. But once you examine the homogeneous group from a closer perspective, you see many more divisions, atomistic, isolating processes at work, sub of sub of sub cultural divergences; people with hardly anything concretely in common because of the specifics of their occupation and consumption habits.
One example would be digital technology, phone use, social media; it's an obvious one, but it's salient; on one level we can observe of a household, five people, they're all on their phones all the time, scrolling, consuming, interacting with remote individuals, pseudo communities, etc, and then we can bring in tech industry consolidation, as well as design structures, market capture, flattening, gamification, etc, all well and good; but what I intend by heterogeneity in this context is that all these consolidated or flattened individuals are at the same time increasingly incapable of modeling other minds, of entering into proper relations of exchange and intuition with each other; heterogeneity in this sense isn't a neutral differentiation that is obvious and affirmed; it is concomitant with atomization, and one of its effects is that it dulls the perception of its own workings.
Another example that's surely relevant to much tripe you encounter on online or even in print: the perception of homogeneity in publishing, that everything is just, say, self absorbed autofiction, or narrated in first person, because there's no imagination, and everyone sounds the same and says the same thing, because the publishing industry has undergone extreme consolidation, and there only five big publishers, etc. Even though, on some level we know there's a dizzying assortment of authors, with radically divergent voices, styles, working across multiple genres, mixing up craft standards, eschewing or reworking traditions, doing all the things that a certain repetitious mode of discourse always claims isn't being done.
When I worked for the post office, I delivered to different routes day by day, and it was so stark, just how different were the streets, the neighborhoods, the houses, and then the kinds of mail and packages I delivered depending on the exact kind of neighborhood. And these were often in places right next to or right on top of each other, but it was strikingly clear that these people of different classes, ethnicities, races, though they were all affected in a sense by homogenizing forces, probably couldn't begin to understand how the other lived, how they felt and thought, what they believed and valued.
I have to confess that I didn't really understand your explanation of death in terms of sociological complexity - surely if anything is pre- and asocial it's the apperception of death that comes with a physical awareness of one's physical weakness and mortality.
Would love to chat with you re Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on that, or even that great satire White Noise where fear of death becomes a central (social/asocial ?) preoccupation.
Alright, first grant me a little leeway as this argument is more speculative, not intended as dogmatic even if the tone is a little stern. I'll try to break it down further: Let's assume a primordial survival instinct or will to live in pretty much all plants and animals, all living beings at least. The beginning assumption of my argument is that for most of these living beings, the will to survive is automatic, and the fear of death is situational/immediate ie there's really no such thing as brooding on death. I would go as far as to say that awareness of one's physical weakness and mortality is also assumed too quickly, and that's why I'm bringing in the dimension of social complexity. Physical weakness and mortality are not givens of awareness, even in relation to life and death struggles, fights to the death (hegel is wrong here, the struggle to the death does not create social divisions, master and slave, or awareness of frailty, it's the other way around, the social bonds come first, keep in mind we're talking about the register of meaning, not just the fact of the matter, my point is always related to this; for death to be meaningful there must be people whose passing matters, for there to be people who matter, etc); survival instincts do not necessarily come with any component of consciousness. Now, what I observe is that for the most part, with maybe an exception here or there (octopuses are extremely intelligent but mostly asocial and short lived) intelligence and individuation correlate strongly with certain kinds of social organization, and individuation and socialization imply each other; we become individuals through our relations to others, the more depth/complexity in the relation, the stronger the sense of self as bound, embedded, etc;
Now, death enters as not just immediate threat but as horizon of meaning through the experience of the death of the other, and we can only experience that death as meaningful if the bond is sufficiently strong ie the socialization is sufficiently advanced/stable; finally the loss of the other is translated into the thought of the loss of the self, ie not just fear of impending destruction ie fight or flight response ie nervous system automation but rather thematic structure of existing as this particular being, existing as a possible non being, like the others.
Think of the elephants, whom I didn't mention incidentally, but intended as crucial examples; their memory is tied to their awareness of death, which is tied to their social behavior; and their memorializing death conscious habits give them a stronger resemblance to humanity than is often appreciated. "they never forget!" is anthropomorphically trivialized, obscuring what I think are the underlying links between memory, death and socialization in the specific sense of meditatively aware, consciously swaying back and forth in time, mourning what is lost and anticipating loss to come.
And, if you're still along for this ride, try to appreciate the anti heideggarian thrust of this argument. In his being toward death, death is individualizing; death is my ownmost possibility, and only I can die as the being that I am, no one can die for me. For Heidegger, the fact that others die, that "one" dies is a trifling reduction, or a dodge of the death that is mine; on the other hand, I claim pretty much the opposite, that apart from strongly felt threats, attacks, diagnoses of terminal illness, advanced old age, in which we do experience mortal terror, the idea of my own death is a nonstarter, it's totally abstract, it's given lip service but mostly does nothing, while the death of others is devastating, so long as we're bonded to them, but for that to be the case there must be the right social context, and so on
Thanks so much for that very complete explanation, Caleb. I'm much too brain fogged at present but I'll get stuck into it tomorrow AM, looks fascinating.
Just got back to this after several days stewing in heat funk. Forgot completely that we still had this chat open.
So thanks for developing these ideas, which indeed are as you say very speculative. I'm getting the anti-Heidegger tenor of your argument and it's certainly true that I couldn't argue against it and maybe it would be pointless to do so.
I could only point out what you know already, that our own notions of mortality in good health and youth have quite a different feel to our sense of the same when we're suffering illness and above all when in a terminal decline. I know from personal experience that those on their death bed experience their imminent death based not so much on beliefs in the abstract rather than their lived experience, so an atheist with a sense of an authentically-lived life is more serene than a believer with unquiet conscience. This tends to uphold Heidegger more than anything - I wonder how that old guy went out himself?
My other experiences are a fairly large number of deaths of young mentally disabled people over the past twenty years - people without much interiority, you might say preconscious, and in those cases (if they are relieved of physical pain) they experience death as an animal would, very much without anxiety and struggle.
I think quite a lot about people like this when imagining human life without social baggage or attachment, and it may seem odd to say but I've learned a lot from them philosophically, tending in my mind to prove Heidegger/Husserl/Merleau-Ponty right, at least as far as I understand them (my mind is very poor on abstract reasoning which is why I go for phenomenology etc).
In the end I've ended up in a place where in metaphysics I'm a Parmemides-Spinoza monist, in sociopolitical areas a dialectical materialist and in everything else a zen phenomenologist, which is to say a pretty messy combo.