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August 18, 2008
The hermit's struggle
against the flesh seems
insane.
The body must
be conquered?
Better:
The body must
be harnessed.
Still better:
The mind and body
Working against nature should be fused into
is guaranteed to fail. a unified force.
But then, how different
is my incessant railing
against stupidity?
I acknowledge that it's
difficult, but insist that
it's necessary to learn to One must be able to hold
live with uncertainty. multiple possibilities in
mind without falling in love
with any of them.
Maybe there's something
wrong with this insistance
on an impossible disciple,
and echo of Christian
mortification of the flesh.
The way is hard, therfore it
must be the right way. But if the path is hard
it will be a lonely path.
And what then the
dream of bringing
an entire people to
a destination?
Is there some easier and "This is not yet
therefore more achievable a scientific age"
way?
And how
A path to truth that can it be?
recognizes the kind
of path a human can MONKEYTRAPS
walk.
Various dreams of this
manifest in different ALL_THINGS_SHINING
places.
Striving is vanity, In "Tiger in the Smoke"
"Go with the flow." the madman philosophizes
about something he
calls "the science of
luck":
he acts on impulse
relying on whatever
he will need next
springing to hand.
A priest nods, and
claims to recognize this
as "the death wish".
(A phrase that
I don't think
is found in the
gospels.)
This leaves me in one
of my usual boggles:
Should you distrust the easy way,
or distrust the impulse to distrust it? Arguably:
science proceeds
by looking for
easy paths, by
seizing on questions
that are answerable,
however trivial
they may seem.
LAMPPOST
STRUCTURAL_FAILURES
Pushing forward into
some possible answers:
Scientific institutions can
be designed to mimic older
ones to an extent that they
will resonate in the
common mind in the same way.
Science courts.
Churches of Science.
Perhaps:
Science sports. My Anthropology teacher in
high school mentioned in
passing that he had wanted
Scientific debates set-up to organize a class field
so that people can root trip to take students out to
for their team, and cheer a dig, but he was told there
the side that won. was no money for it. He
commented that he'd noticed
that the football team
didn't seem to have any
trouble getting money for
busses, so he suggested that
perhaps he could organize a
competitive dig with some
other school-- they didn't
like the idea for some
reason.
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