Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Argh -- gorgeous weather today, the most comfortable we've had here in Baltimore for a while, and I'm feeling too headachy and run-down to go take advantage of it. :-( Going to see whether I can manage a nap and feel well enough to accomplish anything this evening (dunno whether I'll get to HCB rehearsal or not; need to try to get out to nail salon as well).

Something that has irked me for ages is the human tendency to create false dichotomies, and to try to interpret the world in dichotomies in general. Many things that I consider overlapping, unrelated, or subsets of a larger spectrum, get sorted into two lists presented as "opposites" and then tied to other things that are really unrelated just to have two neat columns. So, for example, myriad traits get classified as "masculine" and "feminine" just for the sake of list-making and interpreting the world as binary, when many of those traits have nothing to do with gender.

So this quote from a comment by velvetpage on xtian_trackback (2006-10-27) caught my attention:

The mysogyny can be traced in part to medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. They brought into the church the works of certain Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who philosophized extensively about dualisms and opposites - man/woman, light/dark, good/evil, etc, etc. It was a parlour game in learned circles to come up with as many of these opposites as possible.

I can't help wondering how some of our socially-ingrained ways of thinking about classifications would be different, if that medieval parlour game had been organized in threes instead of twos, as a few similar modern (and snarky) ones are. Or in fives.

Argh -- gorgeous weather today, the most comfortable we've had here in Baltimore for a while, and I'm feeling too headachy and run-down to go take advantage of it. :-( Going to see whether I can manage a nap and feel well enough to accomplish anything this evening (dunno whether I'll get to HCB rehearsal or not; need to try to get out to nail salon as well).

Something that has irked me for ages is the human tendency to create false dichotomies, and to try to interpret the world in dichotomies in general. Many things that I consider overlapping, unrelated, or subsets of a larger spectrum, get sorted into two lists presented as "opposites" and then tied to other things that are really unrelated just to have two neat columns. So, for example, myriad traits get classified as "masculine" and "feminine" just for the sake of list-making and interpreting the world as binary, when many of those traits have nothing to do with gender.

So this quote from a comment by velvetpage on xtian_trackback (2006-10-27) caught my attention:

The mysogyny can be traced in part to medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. They brought into the church the works of certain Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who philosophized extensively about dualisms and opposites - man/woman, light/dark, good/evil, etc, etc. It was a parlour game in learned circles to come up with as many of these opposites as possible.

I can't help wondering how some of our socially-ingrained ways of thinking about classifications would be different, if that medieval parlour game had been organized in threes instead of twos, as a few similar modern (and snarky) ones are. Or in fives.

I just stumbled across a blog-meme with a very short set of instructions:

Post the first paragraph of any of your works in progress.

Okay, I'll bite, though the most-recently-started work-in-progress in my brain is still just snippets of text and melody ... so while "verse" is a better fit than "paragraph" I'm going to wimp out and give just a couple of lines.

Evil is easy, if you want to be lazy
It isn't much effort unless you make it complex...

Note that this is still in the assembling-ideas stage, not even to "first draft" yet, so those lines may or may not actually appear in the finished version. But I'll let y'all know when it's done.

"We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact." -- Jean-Paul Sartre (thanks to blueeowyn)

And a reminder: today is National Update Your Damn Profile Day, which I rather embarassingly forgot about last year and the year before. (I just updated mine last week when a friend misinterpreted the existence of stale info as a slight instead of an oversight -- don't let this happen to you -- and that event reminded me to look up when NUYDP Day was ... It's in my ~/calendar file now, so the computer will remind me if I forget again.)

From "COMBAT Team", by Murray Leinster (in Planets of Adventure, 2003, Baen Books, ISBN: 0-7434-7162-8; originally published as "Exploration Team," Astounding, March 1956):

"In a way," said Bordman, "you're talking about liberty and freedom, which most people think is politics. You say it can be more. In principle, I'll concede it. But the way you put it, it sounds like a freak religion."

"It's self-respect," corrected Huyghens.

"But the universe doesn't care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn't speak our language, so there's no reason it should 'make sense.'

"That's why science depends on evidence."

-- K.C. Cole, "Weird Science: Why editors must dare to be dumb", Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2006 (thanks to tdj for pointing it out)

"I once said to a friend that that most people seem to think that big moral issues are once-in-a-while things that crop up every now and again in a crisis, but it seemed to me that all of us, every day, are called upon to be superheros and saints, that daily life puts moral decisions before every one of us which demand our utmost effort. Every day we find ourselves confronting choices between what is easy and what is right, choices which require, for us to meet them as the people we wish we were, the moral fortitude we usually attribute to only superheros and saints. And if most people don't realize it, it's because they try to convince themselves those decisions aren't morally important. After all, moral challenges are generally ones concerning the fate of others, and convincing oneself that their outcomes aren't your business or problem isn't all that hard." -- siderea, 2006-11-30

"Evil is not, as some people think, a large, outside force toying with our hearts and minds. That concept is just a convenient out. A dodge of our responsibility. Evil is simply this: a disconnect. Evil enters when we cease to pay attention. Evil happens when we forget our divinity. When we forget that others hold divinity. We need to be polytheistic in this way, at least. We need to know that we have divine natures, and we need to remember to connect to them. And we need to remember that others have divine natures, if only they could remember." -- yezida, 2005-11-02

"Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks - those who will write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

"As myths are to humanity, so dreams are to the individual. No one knows where they come from or exactly what they mean. But we cannot live meaningful lives without them. Deprive an individual of his dreaming, and he becomes psychotic. Deprive a culture of its myths, and the people lose their identity. They begin to lose touch with the deep and old forces that created them. Without myth, society itself becomes psychotic." -- Gordon Atkinson, aka Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed), 2005-11-10

The entirety of an entry by siderea, 2005-08-29:

Observation: So often people get into confused discussions of "How are good and bad defined?" when really they mean "How are good and bad determined?"

I answered a bunch of questions for the Ethical Philosophy Selector and I'm not at all certain they've got the right result for me ...

Fortunately I'm not about to let a machine define me, but I'll take their suggestion of doing a bit of relevant reading.