meaning is not profitable
Sep. 12th, 2006 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaLast week, the British Association for the Advancement of Science opened the floor to Rupert Sheldrake, a controversial researcher who two decades ago proposed the theory of morphic fields (essentially an entirely new scientific paradigm). Recently he's been investigating "the sense of being stared at" and other odd "coincidences."
In front of this prestigious gathering, Sheldrake presented evidence on the phenomenon of thinking about someone, and then getting a call from that person:
This is not the first time scientists have attempted to explore meaningful coincidence. Carl Jung worked with physicist Wolfgang Pauli to design ways to test Jung's notion of 'synchronicity,' an "acausal connective principle."
This is not, though, a topic which researchers will ever make much inroads into by way of the scientific method, because meaning is not inherently repeatable from one researcher to the next.
Meaning cannot be quantified, and, more than that, meaning cannot be commodified. We have a culture industry which produces entertainment product, and a religion industry which produces a mass-marketable form of religion. Like bread made from "enriched bleached flour," this is bland consumable stuff which is as devoid of meaning as it is possible -- because meaning is threatening to the status quo. The formulaic entertainment and doctrine favored by the seekers of profit is almost utterly devoid of nuance. In the commodified version of the world there are 'good guys' who wear white hats and 'bad guys' with facial scars who sneer, and at the end the good guy defeats the bad guy and the world is saved.
A world without "good guys vs. bad guys" is not too difficult to imagine, because all we have to do is think about the conflicts we see in our own lives. In some cases, you have people who are clearly wrong; but in most cases, each person involved with a conflict is right in some ways and wrong in others. And our habit of looking for a side to take means that someone's rightness gets trampled on in the process.
So long as this is the accepted way of handling disputes there can be no justice.
Science is a microcosm of the pattern in our society whereby the difficult voices are marginalized for the "better good." And in the shadow of science's great successes -- feats of engineering which have proven very profitable -- lie questions about meaning which have been cast aside.
Seekers of profit encourage a kind of myopia regarding the connections between things. They want us to focus on the details instead of looking at the big picture, at the ways in which all aspects of human society are interconnected. These are meaningful; they are not profitable. It is no mistake that scientific advance has led to the march of global warming and the nuclear arms race. Science has not been merely a hapless tool of dictators; it has been poisoned by profit, and is thereby a willing participant in the quest to drive meaning out of human discourse.
ETA: Lest this itself be an "us vs. them" i will add a reminder that as an employee in a capitalist society i am one of the "seekers of profit" and so any awareness i have of this "meaning myopia" occurs in spite of my life and my culture, and even my own tendencies to want to see things without nuance, to seek the easy solution to every dilemma. Evidence that i do not always succeed can be readily found in my journal.
In front of this prestigious gathering, Sheldrake presented evidence on the phenomenon of thinking about someone, and then getting a call from that person:
Over the past few years, with the help of my research associate, Pam Smart, I have investigated telephone telepathy experimentally in hundreds of controlled trials. Volunteers were asked to give us the names and telephone numbers of four people they knew well. During the test session, the subject was videotaped continuously sitting by a landline telephone. We selected one of the callers at random by the throw of a die. We then asked that person to call the subject. When the telephone rang, the participant guessed who was calling before lifting the receiver. The guess was either right or wrong.
By chance, participants would have been right about one time in four. In fact, 45 per cent of the guesses were correct. This research has been replicated at the University of Amsterdam, again with positive results.
from Gosh, I was just thinking about you
This is not the first time scientists have attempted to explore meaningful coincidence. Carl Jung worked with physicist Wolfgang Pauli to design ways to test Jung's notion of 'synchronicity,' an "acausal connective principle."
This is not, though, a topic which researchers will ever make much inroads into by way of the scientific method, because meaning is not inherently repeatable from one researcher to the next.
Meaning cannot be quantified, and, more than that, meaning cannot be commodified. We have a culture industry which produces entertainment product, and a religion industry which produces a mass-marketable form of religion. Like bread made from "enriched bleached flour," this is bland consumable stuff which is as devoid of meaning as it is possible -- because meaning is threatening to the status quo. The formulaic entertainment and doctrine favored by the seekers of profit is almost utterly devoid of nuance. In the commodified version of the world there are 'good guys' who wear white hats and 'bad guys' with facial scars who sneer, and at the end the good guy defeats the bad guy and the world is saved.
A world without "good guys vs. bad guys" is not too difficult to imagine, because all we have to do is think about the conflicts we see in our own lives. In some cases, you have people who are clearly wrong; but in most cases, each person involved with a conflict is right in some ways and wrong in others. And our habit of looking for a side to take means that someone's rightness gets trampled on in the process.
So long as this is the accepted way of handling disputes there can be no justice.
Science is a microcosm of the pattern in our society whereby the difficult voices are marginalized for the "better good." And in the shadow of science's great successes -- feats of engineering which have proven very profitable -- lie questions about meaning which have been cast aside.
Seekers of profit encourage a kind of myopia regarding the connections between things. They want us to focus on the details instead of looking at the big picture, at the ways in which all aspects of human society are interconnected. These are meaningful; they are not profitable. It is no mistake that scientific advance has led to the march of global warming and the nuclear arms race. Science has not been merely a hapless tool of dictators; it has been poisoned by profit, and is thereby a willing participant in the quest to drive meaning out of human discourse.
ETA: Lest this itself be an "us vs. them" i will add a reminder that as an employee in a capitalist society i am one of the "seekers of profit" and so any awareness i have of this "meaning myopia" occurs in spite of my life and my culture, and even my own tendencies to want to see things without nuance, to seek the easy solution to every dilemma. Evidence that i do not always succeed can be readily found in my journal.
